...

A Miss Nameless Christmas

iss Nameless wasn't dead to begin with, but she did insist that her name appeared before everything else in our tale. Miss Nameless also wasn't supposed to play Marley, but once she saw a certain line in the book, she insisted.

Then she insisted that she play all the ghosts. The management tried to dissuade her, but she stuck her hands over her ears and went "NA NA NA NA NA NA NA BANANA PHONE" until we all gave up.

So: Miss Nameless wasn't dead to begin with, but Marley was. And Miss Nameless will appear to be Marley soon. And if you don't think this introduction sounds anything like Charles Dickens, then there's a Megalosaurus in Bleak House you just have to meet.

Nameless' target for our tale is one of those capitalists whose name is probably Elon or Donald, but since Donald is a Duck and his uncle's name is Scrooge, and everyone knows the source material even if they've never read it, we might as well just call him Scrooge.

Now this miser kept his offices so cold that should his apprentice, who did all the work really, even so much as think about throwing another bundle on the fire, Scrooge would bellow out: "Even think about turning the heating up and I'll set you out on your arse. Costs must be cut until morale improves." Said apprentice, Bob Cratchit, would then be forced to warm himself by his own candle.

Now it happens that this story begins on Christmas Eve, as Scrooge and Cratchit are finishing their work for the day. Adding numbers, subtracting numbers, scowling, pretending to know Excel. Printing out all the code on paper then realizing that's a consent decree violation and shredding the printed-out code.

Who should come waltzing in but Scrooge's nephew Freddy, who'd already had quite a few and as a result was the jovial sort of fellow whose ruddy face at least resembled the future Santa Claus co-owned by the Coca-Cola corporation.

"Merry Christmas, Uncle Scrooge," Freddy said. But remember, Freddie's dead...

Wait, not in this story. That's Superfly. Marley. Marley was dead to begin with. He will be played by Miss Nameless. Who is not dead.

Freddy asked Scrooge to come dine with him on Christmas. Scrooge said no. So Freddy was dispatched rather quickly, after an argument about whether to keep Christmas in your heart. To this, all Scrooge said simply was "Bah Humbug!" and Fred was on his way.

Two men, socialists probably, door knockers, came in as well, asking for money for those wretched of the earth who would rather die than be confined to poor and workhouses. To this, Scrooge replied, as he always does in this story, "Then let them die and relieve the earth of the surplus population."

If you have any heart inside you, you can probably deduce that the origins of such thoughts are fascism, or ecofascism at best—or at worst, to be blunt. Stability of a population does not make it unsustainable, and there are many places on earth where a re-homesteading, with respect to those that already live there, might work.

But Scrooge, like any good capitalist, bah humbug and all, would say, "Then let them be shipped to work in my factories on Mars, where they will mine for Tesla batteries..."

Elon m... Scrooge, I mean, thought his quip very funny and repeated it at length, over and over, so the socialists retreated back into the wretched streets, the refrain of "let them die" ringing in their heads. Probably, they retreated to a flat where one of them wrote letters to the other about needing more money in order to continue the work.

And those socialists grew up to be... Marx and Engels.

So there we have the beginning, and at last, long into the night, Scrooge dismissed Cratchit, giving him the whole day of Christmas off only due to the expectation, and demanding that Cratchit be there on Boxing Day all the earlier. "Be here or I'll have your box of belongings on the stoop," Scrooge said.

Now Scrooge entered his home, which he kept with gaunt old servants, three in number, terrible old people with eyeballs that would make you go crazy and bury them under the floorboards if only you were sane... but first he saw the doorknob which took the aspect of his old partner, Marley. They worked in capital, as you might have guessed, though not On Capital Volume I, which was being written by our friends Marx and Engels.

His doorknob took on the twisted and demented face of a ghastly apparition. Petals on a wet black bough. The face of a strange and terrible ghost like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. That's it, if you were wondering—that was the line that made Miss Nameless demand to play Marley in our little morality tale.

"What do they mean by 'bad lobster'?" she asked. "Like a lobster that is bad to eat? Or is it a bad lobster that charges its Harley up and down carpeted halls?" She turned the book upside down and flipped through back to front, front to back.

"The lobster isn't in this very much," she said.

"Well, it's not about that," I tried to tell her, "it's about teaching that Christmas is a time for giving and sharing. The lobster's a reference to bioluminescence..."

"How?" she asked.

"Well, I don't really know, but something about the way the lobster rotted meant that—"

"I meant torturing the meanies," she clarified, turning bioluminescent and ghostlike herself.

"Mostly with ghosts," I said.

"Then I shall play all of them!" she said, and zooped into the book.

It was only for a moment, but the stuck-out tongue of a cat-eared weirdo dressed as a ghost version of his old partner threw Scrooge back into the street. He shook his head, but the vision had disappeared.

He headed into his bed, dismissed his servants, and checked his meager amount of coal. Then, turning on Fox News to blaring levels, he began to fall into his usual sleep, listening to the ranting and raving of the demagogues and keeping an eye on his stock ticker.

He had nearly fallen into a deep sleep when suddenly there arose such a clatter. He ran to the window to see what was the matter.

Miss Nameless, the cat-eared weirdo herself, in the very same and well-appointed clothes that Marley wore in life, was rattling the chains that bound her.

"Who are you, spirit?" Scrooge asked. "You seem familiar, and yet..."

"Fool!" said Miss Nameless, slapping Scrooge's face twice. Then a third time for good measure. "Don't you recognize your own partner, Marley?"

"Honestly, no. You look like a cat-eared weirdo wearing his clothes."

Nameless slapped him again a few times more.

"Fool!" she bellowed again. "I am here to tell you that on this very night, three spirits will appear before you in hope that you will not make my mistake, drowned and damned to hell with the weight of all the gold I accumulated in life."

"What?"

"You can't take it with you!"

"That's an entirely different story," Scrooge submitted. "One by George Kaufman, I believe."

"Be that as it march!" Miss Nameless said.

"Do you mean May?"

"Yes, I may."

"May what?"

"I may go on," Miss Nameless said. "And tell you that three spirits will appear before you: one of the past, one of the present, one of the future."

"Can the future one tell me what stocks to buy?" Scrooge asked. "I saw it in a movie once."

Nameless slapped him again.

"Nein! Vas ist das movie? Zere is no movie; this is the Victorian era." She pointed to a convenient picture of the Queen sitting next to Prince Albert on the stand next to Scrooge's bed. Albert held his Tannenbaum stuffy tightly to his chest, hugging the well-loved stuffed toy. The fierce eyes of Victoria seemed to say, "We are not amused."

"What is that accent?" Scrooge asked.

"What accent?" Miss Nameless asked.

Then she hopped back and read her previous dialogue. "Oh, dahling," she said, "don't mind that. I was a Katzenjammer Kid when I was young."

"Marley was a Katzenjammer Kid?"

"No, I was! Me, Miss Nameless. I'm playing Marley tonight."

"I'm very confused," Scrooge said, trying to check the manuscript. But as it had not been written and was a parody in general, he could not find the material.

"Three spirits! They will visit you and show you scenes of past, present, and future! And should you not change your ways tonight, then you will be doomed. Doomed. Doomed. Doomed." She whispered her own fade-out and disappeared.

Scrooge was left torn between perplexity and fear. Surely he was being haunted. But it seemed he was being haunted by a rather distractible cat-eared weirdo who'd never read the story fully and was mostly just making it up.

He sat there on his bed staring into the night when the nearby church bell tolled the hour.

Carrying a large glowing lobster, despite my request that she did not, Miss Nameless strolled into the room, candles burning in a wreath in her hair.

"You're the same person," Scrooge said.

"I'm not," said Miss Nameless.

"You are, you just changed costumes," Scrooge said.

"Well, okay, but for this just pretend I'm a different person," Nameless insisted. "I wanna play all the ghosts!"

She grabbed Scrooge's hand tight, handcuffing herself to him.

"Not so tight," Scrooge said.

"That's not the safe word," Miss Nameless said.

Scrooge blinked, as he didn't know what that was. Then suddenly, he found himself back in several scenes from his past. These aren't really as important as they seem and mostly pad out the time, but to outline in brief: he sees himself and his sister finally finding a home for themselves. The sister who bore Freddy before she died.

Her death is left unexplained much, but it seemed he loved her. It seemed he was a solitary child, but for a few flashes of brilliance.

Then we see him and his early master Fezziwig. Ah, Fezziwig loved to throw a party.

Forgetting she was a ghost and the interior logic did not allow her nor Scrooge to interact with the scene, Miss Nameless first stole as much chocolate as she could stuff into her mouth from Fezziwig's well-appointed buffet.

Then she broke out into an encore performance of her classic Christmas album, A Miss Nameless Christmas. You can listen for free or buy a downloadable copy at https://cyborghitparade.bandcamp.com/album/a-miss-nameless-christmas.

When Scrooge wanted to join in, however, she shook her finger at him.

"These are things that have happened," she said, "they cannot be changed."

"You weren't there!" Scrooge said.

"How would you know?" Nameless asked. "You didn't know me then, so you wouldn't have noticed."

"Humbug!" Scrooge said.

"Flim Flam!" Nameless said!

"Bah!" said Scrooge.

"P.T. Barnum!" Nameless said.

"Who?" asked Scrooge.

"No matter," said Miss Nameless, "the hour grows long. There is one more image we must see."

Using the ghost powers appointed to her by the needs of the story, Nameless led Scrooge back through a door. Back into the scene of a terrible breakup. Scrooge, in his fuckboi era, his hair in an emo swoop, a dazzling hat that's just too small for his head.

His girlfriend Bess breaks up with him because a new woman has taken his heart, by the name of Filthy Lucre.

Fuckboi Scrooge argues that he never said his heart was elsewhere. Bess says, "Yeah, but we all can see it, you're trying to get that Elon drip, fr fr," or whatever young people say.

The elder Scrooge first tries to tell the kid to get off his lawn, then realizes the memory he is rewatching, then tries to intervene, but Bess leaves, checks her apps, and swipes right on someone else.

Then, in a blink, Nameless was gone, and Scrooge was back in bed contemplating the shivering feeling hitherto known as the hour of the wolf. But it was not a wolf that came for Scrooge next. Carrying a horn of plenty, a pillow stuffed under her dress so her belly protruded, and in green and fanciful robes, Miss Nameless re-entered the room.

"You're still the same person."

Miss Nameless slapped Scrooge again. "I told you! I'm playing all the ghosts tonight!"

"Very well then," said Scrooge, "show me what you must show me..."

So, and I forgot to include this before, but it seems that Freddy had found himself a good match, a love match, and was readying to wed her. Hence throwing a Christmas party. And just as Fezziwig's party was joyful, this party was too, full of the most modern sorts of games.

They play Cards Against Humanity. One woman lays down a card that says, "And now we shall give a Christmas toast to..."

"Uncle Scrooge," reads the card that Freddy himself plays. This sends the whole party into an uproar, more than when one insists that the "Bees?" card is funny, even though it really isn't. No one listens to the one partygoer in small spectacles who said they maybe should play another game.

Said spectacled player mentioned that Cards Against Humanity the company got a writer who called out their inherent racism institutionalized against their will. No one bothered listening when thay player also maintained that "Apples to Apple is better because the comedy is left to the players, not enforced by try-hard jokes that belong on a 12990s geocities website."

After Cards Against Humanity ended, the games turn into a simple guessing game of yes and no, which becomes Freddy once again mocking with some cheer Scrooge.

But Freddy holds his hand up and says, "We must toast Scrooge after all, for he is lonely and his money does him no good as he does not spend it."

"Silas Stingy!" Miss Nameless shouted, and everyone looked at her. "The Who song," she said, as if that explained everything, and they all went back to the party.

"Besides," Freddy said, continuing, "he is family and I knew from my mother, or at least from her diaries of which I am in possession, that she dearly loved him and that she saw a goodness in him once. So each year I ask him to dine for Christmas because I should like to meet the version she knew, or perhaps she saw."

"Then," said another partygoer, "though he seems a miserly man—we may as well toast Scrooge."

"All this, then, is very well," Scrooge said to Nameless, "but this is known to me. Freddy feels that by accident of his birth and of the death of his mother that we owe something of ourselves to each other. While in my younger days, when I too could at least understand Freddy and his drunken merriment, I might have agreed. I am old, as you know, I have no attachments, Bess has long gone... no, I have no sympathy with him now."

"Then," said Miss Nameless, "allow me to show you another feast, no less the merry." She grabbed Scrooge in a headlock, threw him through a window, and soon they were inside the small and dusty apartments belonging to none other than the Cratchit family.

The family were gathered, small and meager amount on the table, a tiny goose, and as fun as it is to mention that one member of the family who found a good job pretended to be held up, it is more important now to note that Bob Cratchit and his lame son Tiny Tim entered the struggle of the family dinner.

The small goose was gathered up, passed around, an extra piece set aside for Tiny Tim. Like in those old Walt Disney cartoons, single beans were split by the family. Stories were told. And in that cold, breezy room packed with people, there seemed a spirit of cheer that lightened up even Scrooge's face.

"Something in my eyes," he said when Nameless turned to look back at him.

"Let me help you get it out," she said, and slapped him.

Scrooge managed to push her away just in time for Scrooge to see Bob Cratchit stand up and say, "Let us toast Scrooge, the benefactor of this feast."

Upon which Mrs. Cratchit went into a diatribe that even Miss Nameless felt like backing slowly away from.

"Either way," said Cratchit very calmly, "it is with his money that we are provided with this feast, and some money is better than none. After all, I cannot be seen to disagree with Scrooge or else he would remove me from his employ. And as you know, with our multiple children and family filling this space, we can still not completely survive without all our extra work. So even his little generosity starts us somewhere."

Mrs. Cratchit whispered, "Bootlicker," under her breath, but she dearly loved her husband, and her tone softened, and she said, "Then for your sake—and not his—I will toast Mr. Scrooge."

"God bless, god bless," they all said.

And Tiny Tim said, "Tiptoe through the tulips...." until I stopped Miss Nameless from changing the script when I wasn't looking. So I can properly now report, as I have distracted her with the lobster again, that Tiny Tim said, "God bless us, everyone."

Miss Nameless, abandoning the lobster, appeared again before Scrooge, with two children tugging at her dress, one on each side.

"And who are these children?" asked Scrooge, besides which he noticed that Nameless' face was growing older and older by the second. She was as a wick dying in a poorly tapered candle in a moderately good cellar. A wine cellar perhaps.

"These are Ignorance and Want," said Miss Nameless. "Don't you know them?"

"Since I made my first billion," Scrooge said, "I have never known want."

"Then Ignorance must be your own child," Nameless said, throwing the child overhand at Scrooge, who tried to duck the crying child.

"And you have also created Want."

Children began pouring out of everywhere, children without clothes, children bursting out of cages, children attached to electronic devices repeating the words of influencers that Scrooge's corporations funded so any who came of age would not critique the movements of money and power together.

And then, like a giant wave of a tsunami finally pulling back away from the shore, the children—and Miss Nameless—were gone.

Scrooge was again Alone in the Dark, waiting for that one blocky pixelated dog to burst through the window that made the video game so scary in my own childhood.

One more spirit to go. The Spirit of Christmases Yet to Come. Hours stretched into minutes, or perhaps the other way around. Fear rippled through Scrooge's body, shivering running throughout his body.

Miss Nameless, dressed in the guise of death, scythe in her hand and scroll in the other, burst into the room.

She said, "Mmmm," because she remembered, as I type this, that this role requires standing there and not speaking.

"What have you come to show me, spirit?" said Scrooge. "What more must I learn?"

Miss Nameless as Death only pointed, and Scrooge gazed into a mausoleum to see two grave diggers asking each other when someone died.

"Last night," one said, "no one will come and mourn for him."

"Shame," said the other, "the apartments he roomed in were in a posh part of town; he probably had money."

"I checked already," said the first. "If he had money, his servants already took it away from him."

"Then we smash cut to inside the apartments," Miss Nameless said, before I reminded her—again—that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come does not speak. Regardless, we do move now to the interior of Scrooge's mansion, where his servants spend a great deal of time complaining about how he ripped them off, cheating each other, and taking apart the place for spare parts.

"You can't take it with you," one said.

"George Kaufman" another said, "but I don't see how that applies here."

The servants continued to pillage Scrooge's house. At least we know it's Scrooge's house, though for some reason he does not know for sure yet.

"Whose death is this, spirit?" Scrooge asks.

"Mmmm," Nameless said again, before ripping the tape I put over her mouth off. "Look over there, dummy," she says, and pointed to a large gravestone. Embossed on it was simply his own name, "Ebeneezer Scrooge."

"No! No... show me some tenderness, show me something that... that would comfort me if this is my fate.... and tell me, spirit... is this the truth of things to come? Or are these shadows of things that may yet be changed? I hear there are two paths you can go by, that stupid overly long Led Zeppelin song said so...."

Nameless simply pointed, and the scene shifted, and Tiny Tim's body was on the table.

"No, not Tiny Tim!" said Scrooge. "I loved his song, 'Tiptoe Through the Tulips.'"

"No, this is Tiny Tim, not Tiny Tim," Nameless corrected. "I almost made the same mistake myself."

In comes the family, all in mourning. Including Cratchit, who seems to be cheery. He explains that he has seen the graveyard himself, a nice place where there are green trees where Tiny Tim can look out and see nature. Cratchit says he has promised to see Tim at the grave each Sunday. And that the memories he has of Tim are the most important thing now, and though the misery is real and true, it is the happiness Tim brought when he was alive that Cratchit will cling onto.

Scrooge is weeping openly, as is Nameless, and she lets Scrooge blow his nose on her dress, even as she wipes snot into her own sleeves.

"Tell me, tell me that this may be changed, please, spirit, I promise I will keep Christmas in my heart!"

"I think that can be arranged," said Miss Nameless, dropping her scythe and blowing back away from Scrooge, who once again found himself in his own bed.

Not knowing the hour nor the day, Scrooge peered out his window to find the first rays of dawn broaching the world. A young child was passing by.

"You there, boy!" he shouted.

A very familiar cat-eared weirdo looked up at him, now wearing the apparel of a young urchin. I don't know how she got herself this other role as well, but she said, "Yes!"

And Scrooge said, "Go fetch the big prize goose from that shop two streets over. Not the one directly two streets over, but the one where you have to jog a kitty corner and think you're almost gonna turn around. That goose. And deliver it directly to the Cratchit family. Do it fast and there's a full crown in it for you."

"I'll take money instead of a crown, but deal," said the boy, a.k.a. Miss Nameless.

Throughout that day and the next, Scrooge went from place to place making amends. He met up with Marx and Engels and suggested that they work together to create a World Communist Congress, but advised them not to deal with Bakunin. Not that they listened. He even wrote away for a copy of The Conquest of Bread.

He went and dined with Freddy and then gave Cratchit a raise. He studied Chouinard's book on becoming a successful ethical capitalist and began to dine with Warren Buffet. And from then on it was said that Scrooge kept Christmas all the year. And that he was one of the rich that would not be eaten because, like Carnegie before him, he funded social welfare and plastered his name all over it.

And as for Tiny Tim? Scrooge snuck him onto his very own private insurance plan, giving him a chance at survival.

And as Tiny Tim observed: "God bless us, everyone."

So, a capitalist is haunted by a cat-eared weirdo into repenting in his ways. He becomes a model capitalist, and does good things for the world, mostly liking Christmas and being nice while exploiting his workers less than other people exploit their workers.

A happy ending, perhaps?

But one that might have to remain here, within the twinkling Rod Serling Christmas lights.... of the Nameless Zone.