Christmas Calling

A Job

Manalis stripped her gloves off and the winter cold bit at her bare hands. "What a sweet child," she remarked. 

"Since when do you like children?" Ned asked. 

"I liked the one running around and shouting about Christmas at everyone. It was fun to watch people try not to yell at her," Manalis explained. 

Ned pulled off his fake mustache and put it hastily in his pocket. "So she reminded you of yourself." 

They turned down another suburban street. Ned, his teeth chattering, whined, "Why couldn't they just pick us up at the house? It's freezing."  

"Stupid question. You know why they can't pick us up there." Manalis pointed to the yellow light streaming through the window of a shopping center down the road. "We'll wait at the mall." 

Ned hopped from foot to foot and rubbed his hands against his arms. They were both wearing servants' clothes; Manalis in a thin sweater and knee-length skirt, Ned in a heavy coat and pants, and despite wearing twice as much clothes as she was, Ned was still finding ways to complain about the cold.  

"We'll be servants. It's the perfect disguise," Ned had told her the day before. "When they realize that the hot chocolate had cinnamon in it, the blame will go to the servants, but we're not actually servants, so there's no way to trace it back to us, even if they use our descriptions, because we'll be wearing wigs and mustaches. I mean I'll have a mustache. And the servants all wear gloves, so nothing will have our fingerprints on it." She didn't know how he had gotten the information about the uniforms, or how he had known about the party. He gathered the information and she was the one who put the fatal cinnamon in the hot chocolate. That was always how it was. 

"The - " Ned began rustling through his pockets frantically and his hand clasped on something. He took it out of his pocket and swore quietly. 

"You still have it?" Manalis grabbed the small plastic bag and ripped it open, scattering its contents into the grass beside the sidewalk. She wanted to hit Ned, but settled for throwing the empty bag as far into the woods as she could. "What's the only rule of not getting caught?" Idiot. You have to destroy the evidence. 

Ned clenched his fists. "Manalis, you can't just - empty it in the grass. You could be poisoning the next generation of rabbits - just think, tiny dead baby rabbits - " 

"It was cinnamon. I think the rabbits will be fine." Manalis kept walking towards the mall. 

"But what if it hadn't been cinnamon? What if it had been poison?" 

"Well, it wasn't poison. Since when do we use poison?" Manalis pointed out. "Poison is for amateurs." 

Ned nodded. "We're not amateurs." He laughed loudly. "We're not amateurs at all." 

Sometimes Ned was a bumbling nerd, and sometimes he was a psychopathic mastermind. His laugh scared Manalis more than anything else she'd done or seen that day, and she'd poisoned a man just ten minutes ago. At least she hadn't enjoyed poisoning him - for her, it was just work, and besides, she had used his allergies to her advantage, which wasn't the same thing as poisoning him. Ned had enjoyed planning it, and probably watching it too, and unlike Manalis, he would have done it even without the cash reward. He had never told Manalis this, but hearing his laugh, she knew it was the truth. 

They went through the automatic doors into the warm mall. Christmas music was playing, and most of the stores seemed to be holiday-related. Christmas shoppers blinked wearily at window displays and carried shopping bags as if they weighed as much as anvils. In the center of the mall, there was a stage set up with "Santa", a man dressed in a shabby red costume sitting on a large chair, with a line of children waiting to see him.