December has arrived, twinkling with festive cheer and the promise of holiday magic! We’re thrilled to present the seventy-second edition of the Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter, just in time to welcome the most wonderful time of the year. This month, our theme is Clone Claus, where the spirit of the season takes a clever, mischievous twist. Prepare to unwrap tales filled with jolly doppelgängers, festive duplicity, and holiday hijinks! A heartfelt thank you to everyone who submitted their work this month—your stories brought us both joy and shivers. Here’s to a December filled with cloned cheer and festive surprises!

Congratulations to both winners of the December theme: Zach Shephard and L.N. Hunter!

Ho Ho Toe by Zach Shephard – Santa’s first gift delivery to Mars spirals into a chaotic adventure involving a space station, an evil clone, and a daring mission to save Christmas with a missile-guided miracle…

Clone Qlaus by L.N. Hunter – After years of rigorous training, a new Claus embarks on his first quantum-powered Christmas Eve…

 

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This month's newsletter features:

• Myths, Gods & Immortals + Gothic Fantasy new titles
• Ramsey Campbell at 60
• Calls for Submissions
• Original Sci-Fi Flash Fiction #1: Ho Ho Toe by Zach Shephard
• Original Sci-Fi Flash Fiction #2: Clone Qlaus by L.N. Hunter
• EXCLUSIVE Newsletter Subscribers Special Promotion
• Next Month’s Flash Fiction Theme

Ho Ho Toe

Zach Shephard

 

The first-ever gift delivery to Mars, was by Santa’s estimation, a huge success. Sure, the colony’s glass dome had lacked a chimney for him to slide down, but that was nothing a candy-striped pickaxe couldn’t fix. The colonists must have been impressed by Santa’s problem-solving, because the moment the glass cracked, they ran from their homes, waving their arms overhead and screaming. Some even passed out from the excitement!

Smiling with satisfaction, Santa headed back to Earth in his reindeer-guided sleigh. Halfway there, he came across the space station.

It floated in the starry black, shaped like a spinning top. The lights were on, but there were no signs of activity.

Santa withdrew his list and checked it twice. (The first time, he’d been holding it upside down.) It didn’t mention the space station, but if there were children aboard, they’d certainly need gifts.

Santa entered the enormous metal docking bay. He parked his sleigh next to the only other vessel present: a shiny red fighter jet, twinkling like an ornament.

Santa checked his watch. “We’re ahead of schedule. Everyone relax while I poke around.” He unhooked the reindeer and then removed his boots and socks. (Space travel, it turned out, led to some pretty significant foot-swelling.)

Wriggling his jolly red toes, Santa passed through a sliding door. Lights flickered in the corridor ahead. Exposed wires sparked. A rotten smell filled the air.

“Oof,” Santa said, wrinkling his nose. “Can’t have that.”

He pulled a cinnamon-scented pinecone from his coat and hung it on a nail under the flashing lights. He then realized the nail was actually a finger, attached to an inverted body that’d been impaled high on the wall by metal spikes.

Santa noticed more bodies up ahead. After a moment’s contemplation, he smiled and wagged a finger at the air.

“Halloween decorations still up on Christmas Eve? Tsk-tsk,” he said, long-stepping over a pile of ribcages. “That’s naughty behavior, space-friends!”

Santa came upon a room marked “Communications,” and decided to check-in. He sat at the control console and leaned toward the microphone. “North Pole, please.”

Ringing tones followed. After the third, a squeaky elf voice came through.

“Hello?”

“Twinkle! How’re things on Earth?”

“Santa? Where are you?”

“On a space station.”

“What? You’re supposed to be delivering gifts! Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“Of course! It’s only—” Santa checked his watch. “Oh, dear.”

A frustrated sigh came through the speaker. “Santa. Tell me your watch isn’t upside down again.”

Santa felt his cheeks grow even redder than usual.

“If you hurry back, you can probably make half the deliveries.”

“Only half? Nonsense!”

“Sorry, but it’s just too much work for one Santa.”

Unacceptable. The magic of Christmas always pulled through.

Santa looked around for a solution. Across the hall was another doorway, with a sign that read: “Cloning Station.” He grinned.

“Twinkle—I have an idea.”

“I can’t begin to describe how much this concerns me.”

Santa entered the cloning room, admiring the festive red handprint beside its sign.

#
Back at the communications console, Santa called Twinkle.

“I may have screwed up,” he said.

An elvish sigh. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”

“While I was waiting for the cloning station to warm up, I flipped through a journal on the desk. It turns out there’s something wrong with the machine—its clones come out evil! A batch of them attacked the station’s crew. Which explains why no one was around to take down the Halloween decorations.”

“Please tell me you didn’t use the machine.”

“Well . . . it turns out my bare toe was on the cloning platform. Its DNA got scanned. So now there’s a second me running around. But it’s not exactly me.”

“What’s different?”

“Its head is a giant toe.”

“A giant toe. You made a giant toe of yourself.”

“It even has the beard. Hat, too. But its face is a nail. That’s the dead giveaway.”

“Okay. So where’s Santoe Claus now?”

“I’m not sure. He shoved me and ran off.”

“Is the sleigh okay?”

Dawning horror filled Santa, like swallowing a gulp of expired eggnog. He grabbed a communications headset and ran for the docking bay.

The sleigh was gone.

Santa donned his headset. “Twinkle! He took the sleigh, but . . . the reindeer are still here? I’m so confused.”

“The sleigh can fly without them.”

“What?”

“The deer are a PR thing. But that’s not important right now! Who knows what that clone has in mind? You have to stop him!”

Santa looked at the nearby fighter jet. His lips pursed with purpose.

“Okay, Mr. Claus. Time to put on a show-ho-ho.”

He climbed into the cockpit and zipped through space, stars twinkling like ice crystals in a black blizzard.

Santa spotted the sleigh, barreling toward Earth. He closed in. The clone turned to face him. If a bearded toenail could look sinister, this one did.

Through Santa’s headset, Twinkle’s voice: “Force him into the ocean. We’ll be able to recover the sleigh from there.”

“But we’ll lose the toys!”

“It’s too late to deliver them anyway! Christmas is cancelled this year. Just cut your losses!”

No—there was always time for one more miracle. Santa just had to open the way.

He scanned his controls for anything that evoked the holiday spirit. The jet entered the atmosphere, shuddering. He was running out of time.

Then he saw it: just the Christmas connection he needed.

Santa activated the jet’s targeting computer. An image of the sleigh bobbed side to side on his monitor, gravitating closer to the crosshairs with each swoop. Finally, a bell jingled—the target was locked.

“Merry Christmas,” Santa said. “Enjoy your kiss under the missile, Toe.”

And laying a finger aside of his nose, Santa launched an explosive warhead at his weird alien foot-clone.

The sleigh exploded, throwing debris everywhere. But something magical happened then: the gifts from Santa’s sack flew into the air and circled the globe, like ash from a volcano.

“Santa,” Twinkle said, “why are there gifts flying over my house? And how did one of them fall straight down my chimney?”

Santa smiled. “I’m heading back for the reindeer. Merry Christmas, Twinkle.”

And back to space Santa flew, as Christmas magic tumbled down the world’s chimneys below.

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Zach Shephard lives in Washington state, where he serves as one of Santa’s lieutenants by spreading Christmas cheer throughout the holiday season. (July through December.) He loves colorful lights and festive garland, and once had his driver’s license suspended due to an “alarmingly high blood-gingerbread level.” When he’s not admiring yuletide decorations or shaking gift-boxes under a tree, Zach occasionally writes stories—several of which can be found in Flame Tree’s beautiful anthologies. (For some of his personal favorites, check out Medusa and Circe!) Links to more of Zach’s work can be found at www.zachshephard.com, which he seldom updates because these reindeer require constant supervision to avoid flying into the sun.

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Santa Qlaus

L.N. Hunter

Tonight’s the night! After years of training, my moment of glory has finally arrived.

I’ve been through it all. High-speed probabilistic reindeer husbandry, transdimensional sleigh piloting, meditation under pressure. Not to mention being poked and prodded, pushed and pulled, time-dilated and stretched—those air force centrifuges are nothing compared to slingshotting around a black hole. But it’s all finally paying off: I get to be the Claus!

Well, a Claus—I’m not the only Father Christmas. There are hundreds of us, but what a glorious few we are, following in the footsteps of our childhood heroes. Tonight, I get to be a hero for a whole new generation.

I stride towards my refraction chamber, as do the other Santas to theirs, looking smart in our bulky red life-support suits. Those identical wide-eyed, grinning faces all look as eager as I feel—it’s as if we’re all glowing with excitement. The reindeer are already in the chambers, calmly waiting to carry out their duties, their sleighs fully loaded. We mount up, and the doors hiss shut.

The reindeer are bred in the quantum domain and the sleighs are designed to slot into the gaps within matter. It’s only we humans who don’t fit in this weird non-physics world, yet our consciousness is essential—without observers, there is no quantum collapse. Being a Claus used to be a suicide mission, but now survival rates are in the high nineties, thanks to intensive training and our bulky protective suits.

The insulated pods our sleighs sit in will soon rotate and shuffle into the accelerator, a ring that dwarfs anything at Fermilab. Once inside, we’ll be cooled to almost absolute zero and then flung into quantum space.

‘Temperature stabilizing at 1.2 Kelvin,’ the flight director announces on the tannoy. ‘Launch in three minutes. All non-essential personnel, please evacuate.’

I try to empty my mind, to run only on unconscious thoughts. I can’t help but think of the months of Zen training, and wonder if people would be amused to discover that Father Christmas is a Buddhist.

The flight director’s voice interrupts my meditation. ‘Engaging. Fermionic dissolution in five… four… three…’

We’ve had 364 days of training runs, so I know what to expect, but the nuclear smearing still comes as a shock. Even the most realistic simulation can’t prepare you for actual quantum launch superposition—QLauS for short. Each Santa ceases to exist as a particle (a jolly big one, it must be said) and becomes a quantum probability energy distribution, existing everywhere in the universe at the same time, at least until we collapse the wavefront to make our present drop. And that’s the crux of it, how we can visit so many houses in one night—we’re in them all at the same time.

‘Two… one…’

Suddenly, I can see everything, hear everything—a million voices at once, each with a billion echoes. I engage my focus just enough to solidify for a few nanoseconds in the first of the houses on my schedule, and as soon as the reindeer indicator flashes red, I drop off the appropriate presents. Then I defocus and instantaneously travel to the next house.

Damnit, a kid’s awake. I freeze—I mean, I solidify in front of him, trapped by his widening eyes. It’s the worst thing that can happen to a Claus. If I’m lucky, it’ll be a small delay, but it could make the difference regarding the completion of all deliveries on Christmas night. Mr Mackay, one of our trainers, said a bad freeze could cause the destruction of the universe, and I’m not sure if he was joking.

The kid drops his teddy bear and opens his mouth: ‘Wow!’

My training kicks in and I half-whisper, half-growl, ‘Hey kid, didn’t your parents tell you to go to sleep and stay in bed until morning or you won’t get presents?’

‘I– I need a drink,’ he stammers.

‘No harm done, ho ho ho. Go on now, son, close your eyes.’ As I speak, I flick a pinch of pixie dust towards him, and he blinks by reflex, releasing me back into the domain of the quantum. The sparkles’ composition is top secret, but they’re totally biodegradable and will evaporate within minutes, leaving no evidence that I was there. I’ve heard of Clauses who were trapped by large families because they could never get all the kids to shut their eyes at the same time.

Eight hours later, my sleigh is empty. The reindeer are exhausted, and I’ve aged a decade and a half. The flight director’s voice fades in: ‘Shift’s over, everyone, prepare for cessation of the quantum field, in five, four…’ With that, I find myself solid again, back in the refraction chamber, which slowly clunks its way out of the accelerator and returns to its starting position.

As is the case most years, there are one or two empty pods, agents missing in action. Some were trapped by kids and will reappear over the next few days when the kid blinks. Some got lost in wonder and let a twinkling star grab their attention, causing them to solidify in space, or worse, within the star itself. It’s difficult to contain your panic in that situation. You know you have to close your eyes and stop observing long enough to reenter the quantum realm, but you just can’t force your eyelids to react before it’s too late.

Despite sadness at the loss of my comrades, I can’t help the feeling of euphoria that hits me; I’m sure the grin on my face is as broad as that on all the other Santas I can see.

I know I’ll do this only two or three more times before having to retire if an accident doesn’t catch me first. The stresses of being a quantum Santa do take their toll, but it’s still the best job in the world.

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L.N. Hunter’s comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp (Three Ravens Publishing), sits alongside works in anthologies such as Best of British Science Fiction 2022 and Ghostly, as well as several issues of Short Edition’s Short Circuit and the Horrifying Tales of Wonder podcast. There have also been papers in the IEEETransactions on Neural Networks, which are probably somewhat less relevant and definitely less entertaining. When not writing, L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate. https://linktr.ee/l.n.hunterhttps://www.facebook.com/L.N.Hunter.writer

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