12 Days of Misery

Day 3

On the third day of Christmas my true love sent to me

Three silver bullets

Two motel beds

And an old friend in university

"Thanks for the great day, Eric." Cassie was still picking bits of snow from out of her hair as they made their way from the parking lot to their suite.

"You're very welcome. I never thought I'd ever get in another snowball fight past the age of fifteen, but here we are anyway."

"Don't pretend you didn't enjoy it."

"Oh, I totally enjoyed it. It was a little bit weird when that kid joined, though."

"Speaking of which, Eric, you really didn't need to bash him in the face with a snowball packed so hard it was basically ice."

"And he didn't need to hit me with a snowball in the wang."

"He must have been, like, six years old! He had the coordination of an injured hippopotamus! Do you really think he did that on purpose?"

"Yeah, well, whatever. Kid's gotta learn sometime."

"It's a good thing you're too socially damaged to ever become a dad."

"That's the least of my worries. I doubt I even have the facility to become a dad now that that kid slugged me in the rocks. Oh for fuck's sake, the keyhole is frozen over again."

"What did you expect? It's well past sundown, and it wasn't exactly toasty during the day."

"Yeah, but where does the water even come from?"

"Hydrogen atoms bond with oxygen atoms."

"I meant on the keyhole, you sow."

"You're begging for another snowball to the gonads."

"Go for it. I've already lost all sensation down there."

"Why are you even trying the key? Haven't we established that the door opens anyway with the slightest bit of coercion?"

"Right you are." Eric retracted his key, shouldered the door, and predictably enough, it swung open.

"You know, I gotta say, all things considered, I'm surprised our stuff's all still here."

"Yeah, no one wanted to steal your skunk. Shocking."

Beano came out of his nest to greet them.

"Hey, little guy!" Cassie cooed to the curious hamster. "I'd like to play with you, but this has been an exhausting day, and I'm wiped, so I'm gonna crash."

"Why do you talk to that thing? You know he doesn't speak English, right?"

"Beano does too understand me," she said defensively.

"Hey, Beano, get fucked! See, he doesn't understand a thing."

"Beano just chooses not to stoop down to your level. That's why he's ignoring you."

"Hey, do you wanna watch some TV?" Eric was positioning himself on the bed, hands stretched behind his head.

"Sure, if you think you can fix the blown tube, we can watch some Guatemalan soap operas."

"Oh, yeah, right. Bed it is, then."

*

The hamster's teeth gnawing on the plastic side of his cage, doing so with a volume that seemed to defy the laws of nature, continued to keep Cassie awake. She loved little Beano, but it wasn't the first time she wished he wasn't nocturnal. It was fine in college when she was constantly staying up late to finish that paper or that textbook or poking the eyes out of photographs of unpalatable classmates, but now that she could actually use the sleep, it was more than a little bit aggravating.

Opening her eyes in frustration to see if Eric was also still awake, she was greeted by a most peculiar sight – Eric's bed was empty, the front door was slightly open, and a figure was slinking out. That sneaky bastard, Cassie thought. How the hell did he get so far without making a noise?

Vaulting out of the bed, she didn't have much standing in her way in terms of getting ready. Having decided not to soil her jim-jams with the disastrous condition that the bed was in, she had gone to sleep in her outdoor clothes. All she had to do was slip on her shoes and grab a coat, and she was ready to go.

Where is Eric going? Is he going to meet a girl? Is he really a gigolo? Impossible! Who would pay money to have sex with him in the state he's in? Hmm, maybe Minnesotan women have some weird hobo fetish play that they like to do. The thoughts kept Cassie company as she got outside and followed the tracks that Eric had left in the snow. His car was still sitting there, iced over, so clearly, he was going on foot. But where to? There was nothing around the motel but wild woods. Eric meeting ladies for coitus in the woods – somehow it just makes sense

Cassie wasn't dumb. She was staying back so as not to alert him to her presence. Fortunately, the many inches of snow made way for deep tracks that weren't at all hard to follow, so she could afford to keep a distance. Gingerly step by gingerly step, she hopped from footprint to footprint, making sure to tread only where Eric had already walked. She was nobody's fool. It was obvious that he would be coming back at some point, and a second pair of tracks would be all too noticeable.

Some sounds from the distance stopped Cassie dead in her tracks, or in Eric's tracks, as the case may be. Grunting and huffing and puffing was heard from behind some trees, and if Cassie wasn't sure that Eric was meeting someone for dogging in the woods already, she certainly was now.

She unfroze and bounced from track to track as fast as she could to see what was going on, but she was not at all prepared for what was waiting for her. Eric – or she assumed it was Eric, for all she could see was a silhouette in the dim moonlight – was wrestling with a... is that a horse? Of all the weird shit she had mentally prepared herself for, this didn't even come close to making the cut.

The consideration of making herself known and asking what was going on ran through her head, but that idea was cut short when the horse-creature pulled itself out from Eric's grasp, began to run away, and got summarily shot down by Eric. Cassie's gasp was masked by the three shots from Eric's pistol, which she didn't even know he had, and the horse-creature crumpled onto the ground like a pile of laundry.

Wasting no time – and more importantly, not wanting to be the next recipient of a flurry of bullets – Cassie began to run back toward the motel. Now wanting to be noticed by Eric even less than when she thought he was out there for lewd and lascivious acts, she was very careful to only tiptoe, albeit at great speed, into the tracks that Eric's gigantic, clown-like feet had already made.