Ugly Sweater Day

by H.A. Eugene

Kids lined up in front of the blackboard as their teacher, Miss Hervey, called them forward, one at a time. Mikey was first. His sweater featured an airbrushed image of a wolf baying at the moon. A blinking Christmas tree adorned Sharla’s; opening it revealed a cartoon mommy kissing Santa Claus. And the plaid on Akeel’s knitted tartan crewneck was so bright the principal almost fell over laughing while crammed into a tiny desk at the back of the class.

Tobey stepped forward wearing a yellow raincoat. Miss Hervey asked him to take it off so their audience of kids from other classes, administrators, and other teachers could behold his Ugly Sweater Day offering. He shuffled his feet, unzipped the raincoat, and set it down on her desk.

Silence fell.

The clock ticked as adult hands whipped out phones to snap pictures. Nobody noticed Miss Hervey’s skin flushing as her jaw muscles contorted, leaving her mouth open, unable to speak. She leapt out an open window and sprinted across the school parking lot.

The class hamster jumped into its wheel and ran as fast as it could at the same time the principal vomited into a girl’s open backpack. Kids stampeded out the door, nearly trampled by the adults behind them.

Tobey was unsure if this meant his presentation was over, so he remained standing as the Sheriff and two deputies walked through the door and entered the otherwise empty classroom, only to break down, pleading to God at the spectacle before them.

A TV camera from the local FOX affiliate burst into flames in the hall as soon as the cameraman hit record. The police sniper’s infrared scope went white when he tried to get a fix on the garment from his vantage point above the cafeteria, 500 meters away.

Following its upload, the one photo taken from the only phone in the classroom that didn’t crash that morning collapsed every Amazon data center and CDN server that housed it, taking entire swaths of the internet with it.

A National Guard unit penetrated the police perimeter at 1100 hours to find the school deserted. Two paramedics were found inside an ambulance parked on the curb of the school bus roundabout, overdosed on every painkiller they could get their hands on. Behind them, a police car idled, its driver’s side door open. In the driver’s seat, Officer Hernandez’s unblinking eyes fixed on the paramedics’ motionless bodies but saw nothing (his brain had long since stopped processing any incoming ocular signal).

USGS seismographs spiked at the exact moment Tobey took off his raincoat, and every 27 minutes after, as raw data from keyhole spy satellites imaging the anomaly’s geographic location caused computers in the Pentagon’s War Room to error and go offline. Over two thousand miles away, NSA analysts in San Francisco complained of headaches.

Upon hearing of her creation’s inclusion in the school’s Ugly Sweater Day festivities, Tobey’s nana, Myrna—knitter of the abomination—sent a text to her daughter-in-law. As with all her texts, she structured it like a letter:

Dearest Tilly,

Surely you understand that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So is ugly. Please note that every one of my creations contains a big helping of my love.

You’re welcome.

Love, Nana

At 1330, air raid klaxons blared as the Emergency Alert System engaged, announcing, through every networked electronic device across the Eastern Seaboard, that the president had declared DEFCON 1.

Meanwhile, Tobey remained standing in front of the blackboard, calling out to Miss Hervey. He wanted his raincoat. The windows and doors of the classroom were open, and it was getting cold.

H.A. Eugene is an O. Henry-nominated writer of strange stories about food, work, and death. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y Lit, Radon Journal, HAD, and Flash Fiction Online, among others. Witness him talking to himself on Bluesky @autobono.bsky.social and Instagram @h_a_eugene.