Magical Girl Home For Christmas

the holidays are always a rough time for magical girls like Sarah Sappho. she grew up in a town that could be charitably described as being in the middle of nowhere ("do you know where _____ is? yeah, it's twenty miles east of there" is something she says frequently) and drives back every year to see the fewer and fewer friends who remain there and out of a sense of obligation to her parents.

she senses it within her dream before it finally wakes her up: there's a monster nearby. she tumbles out of the twin size bed she'd slept on throughout her childhood, pulls open the window, and transforms as she leaps out into the winter night air. her Doc Martens hit the snow and crunch through the thin skin of ice that tops it, making deep footprints as she runs towards what turns out to be several monsters.

she kicks a monster in its many-eyed face, sending it flying into the neighbors' yard. as two more monsters come at her, she dodges away towards the back door of her parents' house. her fingers close around the handle of a steel-tipped snow shovel leaning against the door, and she swings it at the monsters. it hits the three remaining monsters with a muffled thud, and she strikes again, cutting one in half with the ice-removing blade. with a few more stabs and swings, she takes care of another one, leaving just one monster.

although she hopes to defeat this monster quickly, it has other plans. it runs at her, its uncountable legs a blur amidst the darkness. if she had been truly awake, she might've wondered how many legs it actually had, but she is definitely not entirely awake. it claws at her, scratching her face. "eat this!" she yells, throwing the shovel at it, but it bounces off the monster and hits her instead. she stumbles toward the monster, shoulder hurting from being hit with a shovel, and kicks it until it dissolves into magical dust.

her transformation fades and she sneaks back into her own house. "fuck." she mutters to herself as she looks at her own face in the bathroom mirror. the fight hadn't gone perfectly, but she hadn't realized how poorly it'd gone until she saw the gashes on her forehead. she dabs at them with a washcloth before going back to bed, too tired to think of lies to tell. she never told her parents that she'd become a magical girl and had only really kept it secret by being hundreds of miles away in the city.

in the morning, she looks in the mirror again and mutters "i'm bleeding for normal reasons, seriously" to herself for the fifth time. her story isn't at all believable, but it's still more believable than her being a magical girl.

FIN.