The Twelve Days of Catmas

Description

Krampus has been doing this job for five hundred and thirty-seven years, four months and sixteen days. He is counting.

The naughty list still gets processed. The consequences still get delivered. The coffee still goes cold on the desk while he works, which he has stopped noticing. Somewhere in the last three centuries the work stopped being a calling and became a filing system, and Krampus has not examined that closely, because examining it would require sitting down.

Then a crate arrives from the North Pole with a note attached and a cat inside.

The Goodwill Outreach Initiative is mandatory, non-negotiable, and enshrined in the Unified Holiday Operational Charter, which Krampus has read and cannot argue his way out of. He is to accept one partner for twelve days. The partner is small, black, absurdly fluffy, and entirely uninterested in his objections.

Over twelve days the cat knocks things off his desk. Claims his chair, then his shoulder, then his lap. Refuses to be relocated, or rather refuses to stay relocated. Finds the drawer where he keeps the ornament he does not look at. Sits on the paperwork. Purrs like distant thunder at four in the morning, when Krampus is counting cracks in the ceiling instead of sleeping.

It is not subtle. It was never meant to be subtle.

A deadpan, melancholic-comic holiday story about burnout, isolation, and the specific indignity of being gently dismantled by something that weighs eight pounds and will not leave. Cosy, all ages, and considerably warmer than its narrator would like you to think.