One year my sister and I gift wrapped the garage door opener, car keys, and a heavy pipe wrench that was too greasy to tape so we bundled it with some of mom’s fancy underwear and dad’s paperback copy of Dianetics. We hid each item with the other gifts under the tree, which made finding where everything was like digging up a buried treasure in pieces—an adventure that turned out to be our gift to the whole family. And they were excited; especially our dad, who was so impressed that he threw my sister’s bike into the river.
H. A. Eugene is a Pushcart-nominated writer of strange stories about food and death. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y Lit, Short Édition, and Flash Fiction Magazine, among others. Witness him talking to himself on Bluesky @autobono.bsky.social and Threads @h_a_eugene.
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