Magic Bullet

“Laughing all the way to the bank!” Doug screamed like a post-frat pre-wife twenty-something, raising his hand for a hi-five that I wasn’t planning to give him.
           
Doug yelled that at Sears, which is where he’s been working the past 10 years, in housewares. But he just heard he got promoted to managing the Santa display this Christmas and I pointed out that if he had to dress as the world’s largest elf, everyone would start laughing at him.
           
Doug leaned across the faux marble counter toward me, past the blender deal of the day sitting on the counter beside him, where I sat alongside a pole in the husband chair, waiting for my girlfriend to finish trying on a grotesque snowflake sweater in the adjacent ladies’ wear section that I told her “brings out her face,” whatever that means. Doug brushed his computer mouse off the counter, where it fell forward, dangling below his black computer wreathed with holly.
           
“This year’s Santa display is gonna kick ass!” he said, staring at me with the same intensity his beady green eyes usually infused into anything around him. He could turn a pot of decaf into Red Bull with that look.
           
“Don’t hit on the moms,” I said, remembering last year’s Christmas season, in which Doug used the lines, “You wanna jingle my bells,” “Silent nights are overrated,” and “Oh, how your rose ‘ere blooming” in the 24-hour period.
           
“Who wants the moms?” he responded. “Lest we forget that, over 2,000 years ago, we met a woman named Mary and learned that virgins can be hot, too.”
           
“Excuse me,” said a hefty woman standing behind the counter next to the rest of the blenders, draped in all black – a rotting pear. Doug barely flinched, pulled his mouse back onto the counter by the cord, and turned slightly, with a roll of his eyes.

“Yeah?”
           
“Do you have that blender from TV? The one that does pretty much everything, where you just, like, tap it or something and it liquefies stuff?”
           
“No.”
           
I believe it’s called the Magic Bullet, and they did carry it, at the end of the row the woman was standing at, the product name pointed directly at Doug.
           
“Do you know the name of it?” the woman asked.
           
“A chainsaw,” Doug replied. “Because I’ve never heard of a fucking blender that can do whatever the fuck you just asked.”
           
The woman rubbed the wrinkles out of her shirt, stood up straight, and disappeared along a line of toasters. Doug turned back toward me, adjusting his tie and smiling, as if a five-year-old just bumped him with his bike.
           
“So I’m thinking, instead of putting Santa on that big red chair, we’ll put him in a Power Wheel – you know, product placement,” Doug said, suddenly rosy in the cheeks, the red rolling around, tumbling merrily, as he adjusted his green-striped tie.
           
“What do you think?” she interrupted – the girlfriend – as she arrived next to us from the changing room in cotton snowflakes, two small ones bounded out slightly where her tits are. She smiled lifelessly at me as usual and I smiled back.
           
“Perfect,” I said.
           
Doug laughed. “You serious?” and he turned to the girlfriend and continued. “You look like Grandma Moses.”
           
The girlfriend raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t make sense,” she said, even though she didn’t need to.
           
Doug’s eyes shifted from the girlfriend, through the microwaves and artisan mixers, to the rotting-pear customer in black, now standing beside a man in a Sears nametag, a suit, and a scowl.
           
“Fuck!” Doug yelled, quickly running from the counter toward the pear to join their conversation.
           
We watched him vanish and the girlfriend pursed her lips and brushed the lint from her fitted sweater. I relaxed in the red chair, brushing my hands on the edges.
           
“Tell me again why you’re still friends with that guy,” she said.
           
“Christmas miracle,” I said, looking past her to the well-lit Christmas tree by the pots and pans, surrounded in ornaments without a star on top.