When Mrs. Biederman brought home the copy of Tony Hawk: RIDE, carefully tucking it away behind the towels in the family linen closet, she must have missed the thick gloom that followed her car back from the Best Buy like the grimmest of wedding cans.

Excreting from the video game’s box, a tangible sadness embedded itself deep within the Biederman household, hidden behind walls and in unused cabinet space. It was at first no more noticeable than a fresh mosquito bite. The kids would just suddenly lack any drive to help clean the table or Mrs. Biderman might cry a little longer than usual during those seasonal commercials where the son comes home from Iraq — with a tin of instant brew coffee nonetheless. No one knew where these feelings came from or why they had arrived. They just were. And then they weren’t.

Ignored and enraged, the portents persisted. One late afternoon, the Biedermans’ dog, Bo, barked at the front door for a good two hours with nothing out there but the slightest of drizzles. And on another, while doing her Algebra homework, their daughter and middle child, questioned if maybe, like was it possible if, Mr. and Mrs. Biederman had adopted her. After all, neither of them had her nose.

The uneasiness brewing in that linen closet was almost pinned down when, on a night less than two weeks from Christmas, Mr. Biederman tucked in his youngest. While plucking crusties from his son’s eyes, he noticed the child’s skin had turned rigid and cold. “Like a crocodile,” he told Mrs. Biederman during their nightly alone time together in front of the television. “You,” she snorted, “have never once touched a crocodile.” “I’ve touched crocodile boots,” he countered but by then Dancing With the Stars had returned from the commercial break and the peculiar occurrence was all but forgotten.

No matter how clear the omen, how obvious the warning that something was wrong, really, really wrong, it seemed the Biedermans managed to fold it up neatly with their logic and pack it away to be forgotten like all those old linens in the closet. And the copy of Tony Hawk RIDE ensconced between them.

On Christmas Eve, the gods, or whichever forces in the universe whom decide what is right, took action against the looming threat of a Christmas morning with Tony Hawk RIDE. Like a Roman candle, the Christmas tree erupted spontaneously into flames after one of its infinite tiny colorful light bulbs burst with a charge, lighting the dry green needles and sending them whizzing across the living room. Ornaments cracked and ruptured from the heat and the sharp smell of burnt popcorn filled the house since the healthy snack had been freshly strung and hung on the tree that morning.

When the firemen finally let the Biederman clan return to the house, they found a heavy glob of brown and green goop pocked with sparkly glass and ceramics where the tree and the presents once were.

But Tony Hawk RIDE had not been there under the tree. Mrs. Biederman originally thought it would be such a surprise, on Christmas morning after the kids finished with the other presents, to send them up to the linen closet for one last gift. Now, RIDE would be the only present as the rest had been destroyed and any remaining money in the family’s savings account would be used to repair the house and finance their eldest daughter’s reconstructive surgeries — her burns were quite hideous.

24-hours passed slowly, as they tend to do while filling out home insurance claims and tending to your burn-victim daughter, but soon enough Christmas morning arrived. The children and their father huddled in the living room around the Christmas glob, which hadn’t been removed though they all knew it probably should have been as it was clearly a health hazard. Mrs. Biederman, upstairs, reached through the towels in the linen closet until her hands blindly clasped the hard videogame box. She pulled it out and made her way downstairs, delusionally triumphant, thinking this the savior of an otherwise dreadful holiday.

She set the parcel before the family and perched herself on the glob. The youngest son, whose skin had grown so cold and hard that it flaked where it met his cuticles, gingerly peeled back the wrapping paper. “Tony…” he read aloud, pulling the paper back more.

And darkness swallowed the house.