Plastic Needles in July

The thermometer read thirty-four degrees, but in the attic, it felt like an incinerator. Steve dragged the green plastic corpse across the floorboards, the season all wrong, the air too thick to breathe.

The cardboard box disintegrated in his grip, forcing Steve to shovel his forearms underneath the sagging bottom. Wet warmth instantly bloomed where his skin met the dry, rotting paper. He heaved. The sound was a harsh rasp, sandpaper on bone, as the package dragged across the unfinished floorboards of the crawlspace. Thirty-four degrees outside, according to the radio in the kitchen, which meant it was easily forty-five up here in the coffin-narrow apex of the house. Sweat didn't drip; it ran in continuous, rivulets down his temples, stinging his eyes with salt and grime.

"Make haste, Steve! The light is fleeing!" Betty’s voice drifted up through the square hatch in the floor, muffled but unmistakable. It carried that imperious, stage-trained projection she had never abandoned, not even when the audience shrank to just him and the cats.

"I am proceeding with all possible velocity, Betty," Steve gasped, the air thick with the taste of fiberglass and dead wasps. He kicked a stack of National Geographics over. They sprawled like a fan of yellow-bordered corpses. He didn't care. The objective was the tree. The artificial, three-part, flame-retardant monstrosity they had bought in nineteen-eighty-two.

He shoved the box toward the square of light. Dust—gray, gritty, and tasting of ancient attics—billowed up, coating his wet face. He coughed, a violent spasm that rattled his ribs. This was madness. It was July. The asphalt shingles inches above his head were radiating heat like a kiln. But Betty had woken up with that look, the one that glazed her eyes over with a terrifying clarity, and declared that the Solstice demanded tribute.

He maneuvered the box through the hole. It dropped with a heavy thud to the hallway carpet below.

"Careful! You treat the vessel as if it were common refuse!" came the sharp rebuke.

Steve lowered himself down the ladder, his knees popping audibly. The hallway was cooler, but only relatively. The house held onto the summer heat like a grudge. He wiped his face with the hem of his t-shirt, leaving a streak of gray sludge across the white cotton.

"The vessel," Steve wheezed, steadying himself on the doorframe, "is crumbling, sister. As are we."

Betty stood at the end of the hall. She was wearing her velvet dressing gown, the midnight blue one with the silver embroidery, despite the oppressive temperature. Her white hair was pinned up in a severe, architectural twist. She looked like a deposed queen waiting for the executioner, or perhaps the photographer.

"Do not be pedestrian, Steve. It does not suit your complexion," she said, turning on her heel. "Bring it to the parlour. The grand window. We must catch the golden hour."

---

### The Ritual of Assembly

The living room smelled of lavender and stale cat food. The curtains were drawn against the savage afternoon sun, turning the room into a amber-hued cavern. Steve dragged the box into the centre of the Persian rug, pushing aside the coffee table with his shin. He winced as the wood barked against his bone.

He slit the tape with his house key. The flaps parted to reveal the compressed, flattened limbs of the artificial pine. It looked like roadkill. Green, plastic roadkill.

Betty sat in her high-backed wing chair, hands clasped upon her knees, observing him with the scrutiny of a director watching a fumble-fingered prop master.

"Commence with the base, obviously," she intoned. "And ensure the stand is level. I shall not tolerate a leaning tower of celebration."

Steve fished out the metal stand. It was rusted at the screws. He sat on the floor, his legs splayed. He felt ridiculous. He felt old. At seventy-two, he should be drinking iced tea on a porch, not wrestling with PVC in a sauna.

"Betty," he said, fitting the bottom section of the trunk into the stand. He tightened the screws until his thumb cramped. "It is July the fourteenth. The Bastille has fallen. The Yuletide is five months away."

She waved a hand dismissively, a gesture full of wrist and drama. "Time is a construct of the merchant class, Steve. You know this. The atmosphere dictates the ritual. The air is heavy. It portends. We must prepare."

It portends. That was the word that made his stomach turn over. Betty’s premonitions were usually nonsense, born of boredom and a refusal to engage with the modern world. But lately, the ominous weight in her voice felt different. Heavier. Like she saw the edge of a cliff he was blind to.

He jammed the middle section into the bottom pole. It stuck. He grunted, twisting it back and forth. Plastic needles scratched his forearms, leaving angry red welts.

"You are struggling," Betty observed, her voice devoid of sympathy.

"It is the heat," Steve snapped, his patience fraying like the cuffs of his jeans. "The plastic has expanded. Physics, Betty. Not incompetence."

"Excuses are the refuge of the unimaginative. Force it."

He stood up, grabbed the trunk with both hands, and drove it down. It seated with a dull *thunk*. He stood back, panting. The tree looked pathetic. Mismatched, flattened branches stuck out at odd angles. It looked less like a tree and more like a torture device.

"Fluff the branches, Steve!" Betty commanded, rising from her chair. She swept toward him, the velvet gown whispering against the floor. "Give it volume! Give it life! It looks like a drowned rat!"

"It is a fake tree, Betty! It has no life!"

She stopped inches from him. She smelled of old powder and fear. "Then give it yours," she whispered. The theatricality dropped for a split second, revealing a terrified child behind the eyes. "Make it real, Steve. Please."

The plea hit him in the chest. He looked at her hands—gnarled, trembling slightly. She was terrified. Of what? The silence? The heat? The inevitable end of their long, strange cohabitation in this dying house?

He sighed, the anger draining out of him, replaced by a deep, aching exhaustion. "Very well," he said softly. "We shall fluff."

---

### Glass Ghosts

For an hour, they worked in silence. The only sounds were the *shhh-shhh* of plastic needles being bent into shape and the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall. The heat in the room was a physical weight, pressing against Steve’s temples.

Betty produced the ornament boxes. They were battered shoe boxes, labelled in her looping, calligraphy-pen script. *Spheres of Antiquity. The Avian Collection. Illuminations.*

She handed him a red glass bauble. It was tarnished, the silvering inside flaking away like old skin.

"Place this on a sturdy bough," she instructed. "Mid-level. It requires support."

Steve took it. The metal cap was loose. He remembered this one. Their mother had bought it at a Woolworths in nineteen-fifty-five. Or was it fifty-six? He looked at his reflection in the curved red glass. Distorted. bulbous nose, receding chin, eyes swallowed by shadow. Is that what he looked like? A goblin in a red room?

He hung it. The branch sagged.

"Higher!" Betty barked.

He moved it up. "It is fragile, Betty. The hook is rusted."

"Everything is fragile, Steve. That is the point. We hang beauty upon the precipice of destruction. It is the human condition."

"It is a fire hazard," he muttered, but he placed it where she wanted.

Next came the birds. Spun glass with tails of real feathers, now moth-eaten and bald. Then the wooden soldiers, their paint chipped, faces worn smooth by decades of wrapping and unwrapping.

"Where is the Angel?" Betty asked suddenly. She was rummaging through a box of tissue paper, her movements becoming frantic. "The Seraphim. The Harbinger. Where is she?"

Steve froze. The Angel. The wax-headed doll with the silk wings. He hadn't seen it in years. He thought Betty had broken it three Christmases ago and hidden the evidence.

"I do not know," he said carefully.

"She must crown the apex!" Betty’s voice rose, cracking on the high note. She began tearing the tissue paper apart, flinging white shreds onto the rug. "We cannot conclude the ritual without the sanctification!"

"Betty, calm yourself," Steve said, stepping toward her. "We can use the Star. The foil star. It is in the other box."

"The Star is insufficient!" she shrieked, turning on him. Her face was flushed, sweat beading on her upper lip. "The Star is merely geometric! The Angel watches! The Angel knows! If we do not place her, the darkness will not recede! Don't you see the shadows, Steve? They are lengthening!"

He looked around the room. The shadows were indeed lengthening, stretching across the floor as the sun dipped lower. But they were just shadows. Shadows of the armchair, the bookshelf, the pathetic plastic tree.

"There are no shadows, Betty. Only furniture."

"You are blind!" she cried, clutching a handful of tissue paper. "You have always been blind! You walk through this world looking at your feet while the sky burns!"

She lunged for another box, knocking it off the side table. It hit the floor with a sickening crunch. The sound of shattering glass was immediate and final.

Silence slammed into the room.

Betty stared at the box. Steve stared at Betty.

Slowly, she sank to her knees. She reached out a trembling hand and lifted the lid. Inside, the shards of a dozen vintage bulbs glittered like diamond dust. Blue, gold, emerald. A kaleidoscope of broken memories.

"Oh," she whispered. The theatricality was gone entirely now. Her voice was small, thin, like dried paper. "Oh, Steve. Look what I've done."

Steve knelt beside her. The carpet was rough against his knees. He looked at the wreckage. It should have made him angry. He loved those blue ones. But all he felt was a strange clarity. The heat, the absurdity, the shouting—it all crystallized in the pile of broken glass.

He reached out and picked up a fragment of blue glass. It was sharp, dangerous. He held it up to the sliver of light coming through the curtains.

"It is just glass, Bea," he said. He hadn't called her Bea in twenty years.

She looked at him, tears cutting tracks through the powder on her cheeks. "But it is broken. It is all broken. And we cannot fix it."

"No," Steve said. He looked at the plastic tree, standing crooked in the corner, adorned with rotting feathers and tarnished balls. It looked hideous. It looked defiant.

He stood up. His joints popped, loud in the quiet room. He extended a hand to his sister.

"Rise, Betty."

"Why?" she sniffled, looking up at him.

"Because the floor is hard, and we are not done."

"But the Angel... the glass..."

"Forget the Angel," Steve said, his voice firm, possessing a new resonance. It wasn't theatrical. It was the voice of a man who had decided to stop waiting for the roof to collapse. "We do not need the Angel. And we do not need this tree."

She blinked, confused. "I... I do not understand."

"Stand up."

She took his hand. Her grip was weak, her skin like dry parchment. He pulled her to her feet.

Steve walked over to the window and ripped the curtains open. The sunlight hit them like a physical blow. Dust swirled in the sudden turbulence. The room was revealed in all its shabby reality—the faded rug, the water stains on the ceiling, the clutter of a life lived too long in one place.

Betty shielded her eyes, shrinking back. "Too bright! It burns!"

"Let it burn," Steve said. He turned to the tree. He grabbed the string of lights they hadn't even unravelled yet. He dropped them on the floor.

"Where are we going?" Betty asked, fear creeping back into her voice.

"Out," Steve said. "To a real tree."

"But... the ritual..."

"The ritual is dead, Betty. We are haunting our own house." He walked to the mantelpiece where the car keys sat in a china bowl. He picked them up. The metal was cool, a shock against his damp palm.

"Steve, you cannot drive. Your eyes... the cataract..."

"My eyes are fine," he lied. They weren't fine. The edges of his vision were blurry, a constant vignette of fog. But he could see enough. He could see that staying here, in this kiln, with these ghosts, was a death sentence.

He walked back to her. He didn't offer his arm in the formal, courtly way he usually did. He took her hand firmly, interlacing their fingers.

"We are going to the coast," he announced. "I recall a pine tree near the cliff edge at St. Jude's. A real one. Twisted by the wind. Alive."

"St. Jude's?" Betty breathed. "That is three hours away."

"Then we shall have a pilgrimage," Steve said. He pulled her gently but inexorably toward the hallway. "Do not pack a bag. We require nothing."

"But I am in my dressing gown!"

"You are a queen," Steve said, opening the front door. The heat wave hit them, smelling of melting tar and ozone-free exhaust—just hot metal and dry grass. "Queens dress as they please."

He led her down the steps. The walkway was cracked, weeds shooting up through the concrete like green fingers. The old Volvo sat in the driveway, covered in a layer of yellow pollen. It looked like a relic, a beast from another epoch.

Steve opened the passenger door. The interior would be boiling. The vinyl seats would sear their skin. It didn't matter.

Betty hesitated. She looked back at the house, at the dark window of the parlour where the plastic tree stood in the gloom.

"It will be waiting for us," she whispered.

"No," Steve said, guiding her into the seat. "It won't."

He slammed the door. The sound echoed in the quiet suburban street. He walked around to the driver's side, his heart hammering a rhythm he hadn't felt in years. Fear. Exhilaration. Life.

He slid behind the wheel. The air was stifling, hot enough to bake bread. He jammed the key into the ignition. The engine coughed, sputtered, and then roared to life with a triumphant, rattling bellow.

Steve put the car in gear. He didn't look back at the house. He looked at the road ahead, shimmering in the heat haze.

"Navigate, Betty," he said, his voice steady. "Point us toward the water."