About Flagpole. (Athens, Ga.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 24, 2025)
18 FLAGPOLE.COM ■ DECEMBER 24, 2025 & DECEMBER 31, 2025 DC5C continued from p. 17 of alcohol. Today was the last day, Christmas Eve, and he had been paid in cash. He bought bottles for himself and two friends, and treated himself to his childhood favorite, a jar of pickles. Sober, broke and reeking of brine, Corwin saw two rips in his borrowed costume. Would they make him buy a new one? A bag then fell from the sky, and Hank heard a bellowing ancient voice shout a very bad word, followed by a commo tion of bells and the distressed bawls of draught animals. The bag landed a few feet from Hank, who hurried to see what it contained. As he moved towards it, he saw Erma, manager of the shelter Hank called home on those rare occasions that he met their high standard of sobriety. She was running towards the bag. Corwin was able to reach the bag first. He stuck his hand inside and pulled out a wrapped gift. “That bag’s mine!” Erma yelled. “I saw it first.” Hank handed the beautiful box to her. “These are Christ mas presents,” he said. “I’m Santa Claus, and I’m giving out presents!” Temporarily forgetting the bag, Erma tore the box open. Inside was a new cell phone. She looked with wide eyes at Hank. “This is what I wanted.” Her eyes narrowed back to their usual hatefulness as she yelled, “Give me my bag!” By the time the words were out of her mouth, Hank was already four steps away and gaining speed. He darted into an alley, hoping to elude the woman. Instead, he tripped and fell, losing his grip and watching the bag slide on the grimy asphalt. Erma stepped on his hand as she ran past and seized the bag. She turned and swung it, hit Corwin in the face, and ran from the alley and out of sight. As Hank Corwin sat up, the sound of the bells and animals came again. The sleigh landed in the alleyway, its rotund driver quickly dismount ing and hurrying to where the old man sat. “Where’s my bag, you drunk piece of shit?” he screamed. “Erma took it. She runs the shel ter on Glendale Street!” “You better not be lying!” St. Nicholas screamed as he shook a finger in Hank’s face. “I’m not.” The bearded elf leaped back in his sleigh, jostled the reins, and took again to the sky. “I hope he kicks her ass,” Hank said to himself. “I hope he beats the shit out of her.” Santa Claus did, indeed, beat the shit out of the woman who had his magic bag. When Hank heard about it the next day at the shelter, he realized it truly had been a Christmas miracle. The Endless Ring By Sean Hribal Sunn O))) is a drone metal band. The loudest band in the world. In the late ’90s, the founding member, Sean O’Malley, plugged a Les Paul guitar into a fuzz pedal into a cranked Sunn O))) tube amp and created an entirely new sound. That sound isn’t like other metal bands. It’s more like the blast of an oceanliner’s horns in a dark fjord. During the pandemic, I discovered Sunn O))) and lis tened to all of their albums. But what I kept hearing about the band was that you had to see them live. That it was a once in a lifetime experience. The loudest show you’ll ever hear. Louder than Jucifer. So when it was announced that Sunn O))) was coming to the Georgia Theater in December 2023, I bought a ticket. Two men in hooded robes walked on stage with their guitars. They stood before a wall of Sunn O))) amps. I rolled up my orange, foam earplugs and stuck them in my ears. Then, the other member of Sunn O))), Greg Ander son, raised his silver ring-adorned hand into the sky and brought it down across his guitar strings and the amps roared. Everyone said, “Holy shit.” The crowd stood transfixed in the relentless blast of sound. It was like a religious experience. Fog swirled through the light beams from the three white lights above the stage. We were microwaved by the sound. Thirty min utes in, I felt like one of my ears was short circuiting. I moved to the back of the theater and tried to put my ear plugs in deeper, but it didn’t help. So I went outside where I saw a friend who was working security. He told me the volume was over 130 decibels. I went to sleep that night with a dull ring in my ears. I wasn’t surprised. I figured it would go away in a day or two. Then a week passed, and the ring didn’t stop. In fact, it got louder and higher pitched. I realized I had tinnitus. The ring howled endlessly day and night, and I could barely sleep. I started having panic attacks in bed, worried that I’d never sleep well again. I researched if you could get surgery to deafen yourself. When I found out that deafen ing yourself doesn’t work (because the ring is created by your brain), I resigned myself to thinking I had ruined my life. Over the next few months, I visited my ENT and read all the tinnitus forums online. I found out there’s no cure for tinnitus. So I tried to cope. I started listening to ambient music and nature sounds. I’d try to distract myself with work or hard exercise. Sometimes I’d just have to let my ears ring and try not to go crazy. I talked to other people who also had tinnitus. A colleague of mine said she got tinnitus from a Nirvana cover band. That made me realize how lucky I was to have gotten tinnitus from a much cooler band. It’s been two years now and, fortunately, my tinnitus has gotten much better. I can live a normal life again. Although, a few things have changed. I’m no longer interested in loud music. And I have learned how to tune into the sound of the world around me instead of the ring in my head. Occa sionally, I don’t hear the ring at all, and I cherish these moments of silence. They remind me of my life before I heard the loudest band in the world, when I lived with a peace I never knew I had. one By Steve Piazza because you are you are loved the that which makes a single moment exist invites the next that can’t resist quietly fills the space between to hold the next in place it seems a chance to breathe and not despair it’s ever fine when no one’s there because you are Heat Lightning By Nathan DeBar I blink my eyes open and see the flash streak brightly to the ground, silently breathing out the suffocating humidity. The sky is ablaze with bruised clouds stretching out these gleaming fingers to their playmates’ cheeks under the lazy moon. “Heat lightning,” I mutter softly to the faded rose holding my own hand. I want desperately to believe the hot passions of wind stir up nature’s lust too. A solitary scout of rain shatters my illusion. I stand, relieved, to cover the patio chair with its rain jacket and leave the rose to the cold, cold rain. How Thanksgiving Made Me Who I Am By Elizbeth G. Alder My childhood memories of Thanksgiving revolve around our driving to Waycross from Albany. There were five of us stairstep kids, so our parents gave us each a pill and loaded us into the back of the family sta tion wagon the evening before. By the first half hour we were knocked out and slept the rest of the way to Granny’s house. There we were put straight to bed. Our medication was Dramamine, kiddie Xanax for motion sickness. French kids got wine. I actually saw a Dramamine display in Toys R Us years ago. Of course, it’s not there now. But appar ently it was actually a thing for fami lies with lots of kids. The next morning when we woke up, the turkey and all the fixins were being prepared in full swing. There was roast turkey expertly carved by my daddy, a highball in hand, corn- bread dressing, green beans, sweet potatoes, rolls and cranberry sauce. My favorite coconut cake was made by my great grandmother, and the cinnamon pound cake, my sister’s favorite, was made by our Granny, a demure woman who taught my cousins how to smoke when they hit 12 years old. My great grandmother taught us how to drink beer. Who needs France? Then there was Aunt Hawk. Hortense was her real name. Why they called her Hawk, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe it was her nose. It looked somewhat like a hawk’s beak, but she didn’t seem to mind. She wore her name proudly. Her dish for Thanksgiving was ambrosia, minus the marshmallows. Aunt Hawk had worked for the telephone company. Think Lilly Tomlin. “Hello! Hello? Snort, snort. Is this the party to whom I am speaking?” Her hair was just like that, too. Dark hair with a kind of 1940s updo. I wonder if Lilly knew her. They looked so much alike. But to little 4-year-old me, Aunt Hawk wasn’t funny. I hid when I knew she was coming. Maybe no one would see me if I was curled up under the coffee table next to my mother’s legs, but it never worked. Unfortunately for me, Aunt Hawk loved me the most. Mother would make me sit right beside her. “Sit beside Aunt Hawk, honey,” my mother said, as she placed me on the couch, a cigarette held between her long fingers. Aunt Hawk was a patter. She would lean close so there was no escape from her claw-like hand. Patting, patting, endlessly patting my skinny little leg into oblivion. Finally, I’d start to cry, then go straight into the scream
