literature

Micropasta: Scratching as she Prays

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Literature Text

The box had reflective silver wrapping, with some sort of sparkly material infused into the paper, and came complete with a lovely gold ribbon binding the thing together. There were only three things off about this particular present.

For one, the tag read "From Georgia Johnstone". Georgia was a bit of a recluse within the Johnstone family, and neither Jennifer nor Adam Johnstone knew her very well at all. This was the first year she'd sent anything to the household of Jennifer and Adam at all.

For another, a curious scraping could be heard at night, coming from the location of the tree, sometimes accompanied by a stream-of-consciousness muttering. The family thought it was mice or some other small vermin causing the scratching, and that the voice must have been one of those cheesy prerecorded greeting cards going off, of which there were doubtless over a dozen under the tree by now. Those cards were cheap made-in-China pieces of garbage nowadays, and they'd sometimes seem to go off with no apparent external stimuli. Well, that was what the parents thought anyway. One of their three children insisted he had come down one night (not to secretly unwrap a present ahead of time, of course) and heard the scratching that had been attributed to the mice coming from inside the mystery gift, along with the aforementioned muttering. The idea of the "weird present", possibly with something alive inside, quickly gained traction with the other two kids.

Finally, and in a way most strangely, none in this particular Johnstone household could recall when the gold-and-silver box had appeared under the tree.

It wasn't until Christmas day that things began to snowball. One of the kids was unwrapping said gift, which had been saved for last. Mrs. Johnstone was in the kitchen, talking to one of her older cousins about Georgia's gift, and the other relative revealed to her a critical piece of information. The cousin was very surprised Mrs. Johnstone had not been informed of it already: Georgia had been found deceased in her bed four years prior, to the day. The police had ruled it an unsolved homicide, since her head and hands had been neatly severed. Curiously, she hadn't seemed to put up a struggle, even though the nature of the cause of death would have made it freakishly painful. 

"Did they...ever find them?" Mrs. Johnstone asked, dreading the possible answer.

"You mean Georgia's missing body parts?" the cousin asked. "No, they-"

"EW!" came a shriek from the living room.
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