A Christmas Carl Read Online Free

pointed
     
his crooked finger and ordered Carl to always leave his name over the front door. Carl
     
smiled and promised him he would.
     
Carl stared at the new sign and pressed his lips together. It looked good; it had
     
been worth all the money he’d paid the artist. He would have done it sooner, but he hated
     
spending money on unnecessary things. He knew Marty Keller would have ripped the
     
sign down and kicked it into the middle of the street, but Marty was dead now in a cold
     
grave out on Long Island, and it didn’t matter what Marty thought. Besides, Carl had
     
earned everything he’d inherited from Marty. He’d spent years catering to Marty’s needs;
     
he’d overlooked every pejorative Marty had ever tossed in his direction. Marty Keller had
     
been one of the nastiest men Carl had ever known. And now Marty was dead and Carl
     
had it all. Carl smiled at the sign, then crossed to a door only a few feet from the store’s
     
entrance. Carl opened it and stepped into a cold, dark hallway that had a long, narrow
     
flight of steps. The floors were black and white tile, with cracks and chips. The white
     
walls had yellowed with age. It smelled of damp towels and wet socks. Carl had inherited
     
the entire building from Marty Keller. He lived above the shop in Marty’s old living
     
space, with a separate entrance to his living quarters.
     
His soles tapped against the hollow wooden steps. When he reached the top, he
     
flipped on a light switch. A small pewter lamp on a round table gave a soft glow to Carl’s
     
sparsely furnished living room. After Marty died, Carl hadn’t bothered to change a thing.
     
There was a gray velvet Chippendale sofa beneath the front window, a threadbare oriental
     
carpet with frayed edges, and a brown leather wing chair with arms so worn the white
     
stuffing was showing. The cabbage rose wallpaper with a sage green background was
     
peeling in the corners. The hardwood floors had grown dull and warped with time. In
     
one corner of the room there was an old console television with knobs and dials.
     
He removed his coat and crossed to the back of the house toward the kitchen. He
     
switched on a fluorescent light and opened the refrigerator door slowly. It dated back to
     
the 1950s; the art deco chrome handle on the door had snapped off years ago. If he hadn’t
     
opened it slowly, he could have sliced his finger open on a jagged edge of the broken
     
handle.
     
When the refrigerator door was open, a light didn’t go on. The interior bulb had
     
burned out five years earlier and he hadn’t bothered to replace it. Carl knew what was in
     
the refrigerator anyway; he didn’t need a light to prove it. He pulled out a cardboard
     
container of leftover Chinese takeout from the day before and poured the contents into a chipped and dented white enamel pot. Then he placed the pot on the front right burner
     
and pressed the on button. It was one of those old electric stoves, which was unusual
     
because most people had gas in New York. There were four other burners, but only one
     
worked. The oven still worked, but it made strange sizzling noises so he didn’t use it very
     
often.
     
After he heated the food, he pulled a bent fork out of the sink and placed the
     
warm pot on top of a Formica table. The table wobbled a few times; he made a mental
     
note to find some new cardboard to shove under the broken leg. He sat down on a red
     
vinyl chair that had a long rip down the middle of the seat and ate right from the pot. He
     
didn’t see the point to wasting water on a dish and a pot. When he was finished, he stood
     
from the table, rinsed the pot out in the sink, and placed it on a towel to dry.
     
Then he turned off the lights in the kitchen and the living room and walked back
     
to his bedroom. He flipped on the bedroom switch and one small lamp with a forty-watt
     
bulb went on beside his bed. The bedroom wallpaper was