When you go to Little Caesars on Christmas Eve, ignore the feelings of indignity as you trudge through the snow in the poorly plowed parking lot with the stiff-legged gait of someone just emerging from their car after a long drive. Dismiss the sense of resentment you feel towards those who are enjoying a ham and turkey dinner with their loved ones around a lively dining room table adorned with festive seasonal candles and place settings. You must shed yourself of these distractions the way you casually brush the falling snow off the shoulders of your coat. The snow is coming down hard now, driving sideways into your eyes; a few inches now accumulated on the parking lot surface since the plow last made its rounds here. You’ll brace yourself against the wind, turning at a slight angle that is at odds with the direction you are walking, making it appear that you are looking back towards your car, perhaps having forgotten something and debating whether it is important enough to return to retrieve it. But you haven’t forgotten; you remember everything. You’ll look across the street. The Dunkin Donuts filled with cops. Your head filled with feathers and false choices.
You’ll approach the entrance, at the south end of the derelict strip mall along a busy suburban thoroughfare, next to the liquor store with the neon Yuengling beer sign with the “Y” seemingly permanently out and the handwritten sign in the window that says “We will delivery.” You’ve considered entering the store with a large black sharpie so you can do them a favor and cross out the errant “y”, or perhaps transfer it to the Yuengling sign desperately in need of such letter of which it has been unfairly deprived. You’ll vaguely recognize the young man standing outside nervously who asks you to buy him a twelve-pack of Keystone Light. He’ll pay for it, he tells you, he has the money. You can keep the change. As if this were some generous incentive to deviate from your plans and violate the law by supplying alcohol to minors, who may chug it while driving or participating in some other reckless teenage activity and lose control of their vehicle and injure someone or themselves – who knows what theoretical catastrophes can be conjured by such miscreant youth – and the guilt you’d inevitably feel at having somehow indirectly set this sequence of events in motion, acting as the unwitting impetus for this hypothetical holiday calamity.
You’ll recognize him as a former student at the high school where you taught driver’s ed. He never had a driver’s license, never took your course. You don’t know his name, but you’ve seen him before, running his hand through his straggly, shoulder-length blonde hair, the patchy stubble on his chin, late-blooming acne still pockmarking his cheeks. Probably 18 or 19 years old. You’re not sure whether he’s actually a troublemaker or just someone who softly adopts the posture of juvenile delinquency; at the margins of minor misconduct, always adjacent to inconsequential transgressions. A misdemeanor masquerading as a felony. His hands are in his pockets and he’s huddled over as if to protect his core from the frigid wind. You notice a faint glimmer of recognition in his eyes immediately after he asks for your assistance in obtaining illicit elixir, as if he’s coming to a sudden realization just a moment too late that he has inquired the wrong person. You won’t even need to decline his offer; your silence and the look you aim in his direction will be enough to send him spinning in the opposite direction without even a perfunctory indication that he is no longer interested in your services.
When you open the door to your destination, the warm air from inside will blast forth with surprising force, enveloping you in a warm, humid hug, the scent all baking dough, high fructose pizza sauce, sawdust-grade parmesan, warmed cardboard, and industrial cleaning solvents. You’ll notice the Little Caesars logo decal on the door has been updated for the holiday season, the minimal laurel coronet adorning the character’s head now replaced by a gaudy Christmas wreath, his orange toga now red and green and festooned with tinsel, and his wide open-mouth smile, waiting to imminently receive a slice of pizza held in his hand, is now a mysteriously imperious rictus grin, as he holds a gift with seasonal Christmas wrapping in his hand, outstretched to the customer.
The woman behind the counter reflexively checks the clock, chewing gum, your entrance perhaps a reminder to her that they’ll be closing two hours early for the holiday. But you know this and your premeditated arrival time will allow plenty of time to spare. You won’t recognize the cashier, she wasn’t here last year. The high turnover rate of staff at Little Caesars and other comparable fast-food establishments prevents the forging of any personal bond between seller and customer, precludes any sort of continuity that would foster the kind of warm smile and small talk among individuals who vaguely recognize each other, which might allow for memorization of a certain customer’s usual order or specific dietary restrictions or preferences. But apparently you’ve become something of a mythical figure at this particular Little Caesars establishment, arriving to pick up your order at the exact same time, 7pm, one hour before closing time, every Christmas Eve for the past 30 years, your consistency such that your order and arrival time have been passed down like some kind of storytelling tradition of ancient peoples, from generation to generation of assistant managers so low on the hierarchy of fast food employment seniority that they’ve been stuck with the highly undesirable Christmas Eve closing shift. Tonight, she’ll seem to be the only one there.
“We were wondering if you was gonna show this year,” she’ll say in a gravelly southern drawl, gesturing with her arm toward the snow falling outside, “what with the weather and all being like it is.” You’ll nod and smile politely, almost sheepishly, a slight embarrassment at being recognized by a stranger as if some kind of celebrity or strange creature. “Wouldn’t miss it, gotta keep tradition alive,” you’ll say with forced joviality. “Glad you made it,” she’ll say, “we was thinking of closing early tonight cuz it’s been so slow, but we just couldn’t. We were expecting you.” She’ll smile warmly, genuinely, as if your presence had made her entire tedious night manning the cash register worth it. She’ll look middle-aged, probably only a decade or so younger than you. You’ll glance at the cooler holding various sodas. There’s a special on Starry, the recent replacement for the discontinued Sierra Mist, but you prefer your sodas dark, impenetrable, and mysterious, so you’ll choose a two-liter Pepsi at full price.
Your order is “Hot N Ready” as they say in Little Caesars parlance. While there is the option to place your order in advance on the mobile app and pick it up from an automated pizza warming and dispensing machine next to the front counter known as the Pizza Portal® whereby one enters a three digit code to open a small window by which one can retrieve one’s order without initiating even the slightest of human contact with any employee, you have always preferred to place your order the old-fashioned way, at the counter, with the cashier, and wait the additional five or so minutes while it’s prepared. You will only order one pizza today rather than your usual order of two pizzas with a side of Crazy Bread® and Crazy Sauce®. The cashier will hand you a second pizza anyway. They had it ready, she’ll say, what else are they going to do with it, might as well not let it go to waste. The soda will be on the house too. You nod in acquiescence, not sure what you might do with this additional and unexpected gift. The additional pizza reminds you of the Little Caesars slogan “Pizza! Pizza!”, meant to convey that one can obtain double the pizza from Little Caesars for the same price it would cost to purchase a singular pizza from a competitor chain, which was somehow established as the trademark of choice over the more straightforward and simplistic but generic advertisement of two pizzas for the price of one. You will fondly reminisce about the golden years of the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s when Little Caesars steadfastly and stubbornly adhered to its $5 price point for a standard large cheese, sausage, or pepperoni pizza. There is something intuitive about the round $5 pricing that perfectly expresses the sensible economics behind modestly priced and unexceptionally prepared commoditized food, the most salient example of which being Subway’s years-long ubiquitous five-dollar footlong promotions. It was perfect and right and just. Little Caesars increased their pricing, first to $5.99 in the mid-2010s thus keeping some semblance of the prior flat $5 pricing, before succumbing to broader inflationary pressures forcing them to up the cost more drastically to $7.99 in 2022 and $8.99 in 2023, still relatively affordable compared to similarly situated competitors. The total comes to exactly $10 with tax, the new amount a similarly satisfying round number comparable in price to your old orders from twenty years ago, albeit minus one pizza.
You’ll recall the prior Christmas Eve, the last time you got to celebrate this tradition with your son before he moved away, the final remaining thread other than yourself tethering this tradition to its origins. You’ll think back to his childhood; when he was a toddler and even up until he was pre-school age, pizza was the only food you and Diana could consistently get him to eat and enjoy, and thus began the tradition of ordering pizza for Christmas Eve dinner rather than a more traditional holiday meal. It was a cheap and easy option, you and Diana weary and exhausted from wrapping gifts and prepping for the early rise and long drive to your in-laws house for Christmas the next morning. You looked forward to your quiet evening before the chaos. When Christopher was school age, the elementary school, middle school and high school in town all had “Pizza Fridays” sponsored by Little Caesars whereby students could order one or two slices of pizza for lunch, and with enough purchases would earn a free pizza coupon to be used at the local storefront. You’ll remember using the coupons there each Christmas Eve, Christopher proudly handing it to the cashier as if it were his own form of currency, hard-earned money netted from weeks of consistent pizza consumption. Little Caesars would hand out little trinkets around the holidays, kind of an inferior Happy Meal toy of sorts, so Christopher would not only obtain a free pizza, but also a sticker book, or coloring poster, or one year a finger flick football game with little plastic goal posts that you played across the table with him while you enjoyed your holiday meal. The excitement and anticipation in his eyes as you got home and set your purchases on the table and opened the cardboard box to reveal the greasy contents within, delight as he reached for a slice of pizza and stick of Crazy Bread®. He’d speak in childish hyperbole, loudly announcing “best pizza ever!” or “I love Christmas Eve dinners!” or “we have to do this again next year!” and the satisfaction you felt at how something so simple could bring so much joy to your family table, something almost like jealousy as well, wishing that you could still enjoy things with the same total abandon and lack of inhibition as Christopher, before such emotions were rendered incomprehensible and impossible due to the fixed cynicism and static aspect of rehearsed and learned adulthood.
And you’ll think back to when he was twelve or thirteen or so, sometime around middle school age, when his elation and enthusiasm for your traditional Christmas Eve dinner began to wane, the slipping innocence of adolescence. The first sign being when he didn’t care to accompany you to go pick up your order, head buried in his Nintendo Switch, playing Fortnite with headset on, talking to his friends. He still enjoyed the pizza, but the spark in his eye was dimmed, his animation tempered to a degree, no boisterous proclamations regarding the deliciousness of your meal. This gradual diminishing of excitement continued each year, dwindling energy and attention, and by the time he was a junior in high school, sitting down to dinner together seemingly become a sort of inconvenience for him, a chore to be done as quickly as possible, with minimal effort, no smile, minimal conversation other than one word responses, texting with one hand, pizza in the other. Thanks dad, gotta go. The divorce didn’t help matters, and Christopher blamed you for the fallout. You’ll think to yourself, he wasn’t wrong, nobody to blame but yourself. He followed Diana out of town after graduating high school, going to community college near her home upstate and living in the extra bedroom in her apartment. Strangely, she let you keep the house, now eerily empty, impossible to fill with the belongings or activities of a single fifty-something individual. The house now permeated with a damaged, haunted energy, the memories now strangely distorted and displaced in the ever-shifting kaleidoscopic parallax view of your stochastic memory bank, nostalgia disfigured and vectored by toxic reminiscence, filled with the impermanent dyadics and familial esoterica of a receding breed.
And now you will depart the warm confines of Little Caesars, your brief reprieve from the swirling snowstorm outside now over. You’ll say Merry Christmas to the cashier as you exit, she’ll return the same greeting, and you’ll be on your way into the night. The young man from earlier is sitting on the curb near your car, vaping, the scent of weed and bananas permeating the air despite the strong wind. Your driver’s side window will be broken, glass strewn about the interior, a dusting of snow accumulating on the seat. You won’t immediately determine whether anything is missing; there had been nothing in your car of any value anyway. You’ll instinctively direct your stare toward the teen, as he is the only other person you’ve seen in this parking lot since you’ve arrived. He’ll take another drag on his vape pen, deliberately trying to ignore your gaze until the tension becomes too uncomfortable for him and he looks up at you, then to the car. “Oh that?” he’ll say incredulously, “Dude, you don’t think that was…C’mon man, that wasn’t me, swear to god, bro.” He’ll put on a forced serious and stern expression, and shake his head as if in disbelief. You’ll say nothing, silently cursing the coarseness of this ruffian’s grammar, staring intensely into his eyes for any sign of insincerity, any cracks in his facade, forcing him into continuing through sheer tyranny of will. “It was some other guys, came driving through here. Stopped by your car, busted the window, looked around for a minute and took off.” You’ll scan the parking lot, no sign of tire tracks, and you’ll try to quickly do the math in your head to determine whether the hard falling snow could have possibly covered their tracks in the short time you were inside. “You get their plate number? Make or model?” you’ll ask with obvious skepticism. The teen shakes his head forcefully, too quickly, as if trying to shake something out of his unkempt hair. “Nah man. It was like, a black car or something. Big like an SUV maybe? Yeah, that’s about all I got, bro.” He’ll laugh, and when you repeat this anecdote in future conversations with others, you’ll only be able to describe his laugh as “dumb” or “stupid”, because those will simply be the most apt descriptors, and to ascribe any more eloquent or sophisticated characteristics to such laugh would be to imbue it with an inherent consequentiality of which it is not deserving.
You’ll notice he’s wearing the same style engraved bracelet that Christopher used to wear, the one you and Diana bought for him as an 8th grade graduation present, which he actually kept and actively wore on a nearly daily basis, which surprised you at the time given Christopher’s teenage penchant for detachment and disengagement, eager to establish his independence through clothing and fashion choices indecipherable to anyone but peers of the same clique. He’ll see your gaze fixed upon it, and he’ll motion to it with his other hand, still holding the vape pen, and say “You like it? My mom got me this before she got sick.” And you’ll realize this young man is not so different from you, stranded and isolated here on Christmas Eve, defenestrated and adrift, purgatoried and cursed, his family perhaps unreachable, looking for something to permeate and fill this new and strange void. Perhaps he’s been traversing this same strange terrain as you, an unnavigable wilderness, unintentionally doubling back along similar worn trails, endlessly passing identical trees but never finding your way back to the trailhead; you don’t have the map and there’s no cell signal. You’ll tell him to wait here a minute, you’ve got something for him, and he’ll nod with a mix of curiosity and confusion, and you’ll retreat to the liquor store to pick up that twelve-pack of Keystone Light, and when you exit back to the snowy parking lot, you’ll gesture to him, beer in one hand, pizza in the other, to follow you back inside of Little Caesars. He hesitates for just a moment, as if considering whether this might be some kind of prank, looking over his shoulder at nothing in particular to see if anyone else is in on the joke, but he’ll realize you’re serious and he rises stiffly and walks inside as you lean against the door to hold it open against the wind.
The cashier will look surprised by your return, but also vaguely welcoming, perhaps grateful to be relieved of her solitude. You’ll set the pizzas down on the counter with your two-liter of Pepsi and case of Keystone, glancing at the cashier’s nametag so you can address her personally, and say “Carol, if you’ll allow for it, we’d like to have an early Christmas celebration with you, here, tonight.” There will be a brief moment of stunned silence, as if she cannot comprehend why one would choose to spend their evening in this establishment, before she broadly smiles and reaches into the case of Keystone and cracks open a can, which fizzes dramatically and foams slightly over the lip of the can before she takes a large swig and sets it down forcefully on the counter, declaring, “Damn, hun, you don’t gotta ask me twice!” She’ll glance at the clock showing that it is now 7:15pm and she’ll take out a pad of paper and pen, scribbling something down quickly before tearing the sheet from the pad, ripping a piece of tape off the dispenser on the counter and walking to the front door to turn off the “Open” sign and stick the handwritten note to the door reading in hastily scrawled penmanship “Closed early for Christmas dinner. May you spend it with those you love.”
You’ll all pull together the few plastic chairs that line the window of the storefront and organize three of them into a sort of crescent semicircle congregated around the front counter. You’ll introduce Carol to your newfound acquaintance from the parking lot, whose name you’ll learn is Cameron and who actually used to work in the back of this very Little Caesars when he was in high school, when Carol was still living in Missouri taking care of her dying father. Carol never married, she’ll explain, something about her asthma and diabetes and bipolar disorder made it difficult for her to date or have the energy to invest in an emotional relationship with a significant other. Cameron will disclose that his parents divorced when he was a toddler, he never met his dad. His girlfriend dumped him when he lost his job earlier this year for failing another drug test. It was just weed, he’ll say dejectedly, nothing bad, no hard drugs. But on this night, the three of you will engage and embrace, deviating from the forlorn drift of your current stations, trading it for camaraderie and companionship of former strangers now forever bound by this fast-food fellowship.
If Christopher were here, you imagine him next to you, but as a child again, the elusive youthful exuberance rejuvenated as he smiles that old gap-toothed smile and grabs a slice of pizza, grease dripping on his pants, stains that won’t come out no matter how many times you wash them. And when you’re done, Cameron now a child too, chasing young Christopher around the storefront as they shoot some cheap Nerf knockoff guns at each other, prizes they certainly earned through the school lunch pizza program, screaming with excitement and delight, crashing into tables and chairs, creating a magisterial cacophony of joy, a chaos of elation. Christmas sweaters untucked, unkempt hair loose from its moorings, scuffed shoes discarded indiscriminately across the floor, acting as tiny obstacles to be avoided or jumped over as they scramble under tables, chairs as shields from the foam darts, holding their weapons like the Terminator, yelling “Hasta la Vista, baby!” as they fire with wild abandon. And now you picture them again at their current ages, hunched over in their seats, headsets on, virtually blasting friends and strangers on Fortnite, elbowing each other in jest, cracking jokes and passing the vape pen back and forth. You watch Cameron sitting there in reality, staring into the middle distance, knowing Christopher is looking at his mother with that same blank stare, the two teens not quite as far removed from each other as you may have initially perceived them to be.
Carol will ask when you last spoke with Christopher, and you’ll say it was in the summer, maybe around the 4th of July, you didn’t know what to say and hadn’t seen him in months and his life was now alien and unknowable to you, his feelings inscrutable, his responses terse and rehearsed. He mentions something from his childhood, something at the edge of your knowledge, tip of your tongue, but the memory is lost to the ages and you have nothing to offer in response. The awkwardness of the discussion was so painful that you made up an excuse about the dog barking to mercifully bring the conversation to premature closure. You cried afterwards, recognizing the inaccessibility and untraversable distance between you and your son, the effective disconnect.
“You should call him, it’s Christmas. He probably needs you more than you know, maybe more than you need him” she’ll instruct sternly, shooting down your wounded resignation, putting it out of its misery with double barreled wisdom. You’ll feel momentarily as if you’re part of the plot for some tired Christmas movie trope, the forlorn father about to be reunited with his son through the magic of the holiday season, latent love and endless reservoirs of goodwill alone enough to overcome whatever transgressions have occurred in the past, no matter how profound. But cliche or not, you know Carol is right, this is something you must do. And you feel a newfound confidence as you say your goodbyes at the end of the evening and head out into the storm.
When you go to Little Caesars on Christmas Eve, you’ll open yourself up to all possibilities the world has to offer, every door now open and inviting, you’ll break Crazy Bread® in communal union, divide slices of Extra-Most-Bestest® pepperoni pizza amongst your newfound friends. You’ll choose life, choose opportunity, absorbing the collective direction and transient purposes of tens of thousands of previous customers, the disparate intentions tethered by the universal need to satiate hunger with something greasy and comforting and familiar, gleaning meaning and filling the void with something substantial, some meaningful sustenance. There will be no ambivalence or equivocation in your faithful commitment to custom, your observance of this ritualistic routine. You’ll feel the warm satisfaction of having revived the vestigial remnants of this asphyxiated tradition, converting it into some rejuvenated ceremonial observance, its ensuing history now unwritten, its future still to be chronicled by its devoted disciples. This tattered palimpsest now transfigured into some chimerical vision of what great recompense might come next. Some light now encroaching as you grind through the wind down of these dying days. Your belly will be full and heart content as you depart towards some unknown destiny, waiting for your son to pick up your call as his phone rings over your car speakers via Bluetooth connection, not having any idea what you might say, this auspicious first day of the rest of your life, looking back at the lone string of Christmas lights hung in the windows, the ethereal glow creating some intangible magic, acting as bulwarks against the endless enveloping darkness and swirling snow, the glittering beacons blinking on and off haphazardly and unpredictably, like eternal possibilities, when you go to Little Caesars on Christmas Eve.
Nick Caccamo is a resident of Illinois who lives in the Chicago area. He has a degree in Rhetoric/Creative Writing from University of Illinois. In his spare time Nick enjoys watching (bad) movies, drinking (good) beer, taking (long) road trips, listening to (loud, ear-bleeding) music, and cheering on (hopeless) Chicago sports teams. Nick is not particularly talented at writing short statements about himself in the third person. He’s up too late, distracted by the TV, and probably has to work in the morning. His fiction has previously appeared in publications such as Midwestern Gothic, Random Sample Review, The McNeese Review, DarkWinter, Bull, and Rappahannock Review.