1.
The boy ran through the streets of winter, his breath
fogging in front of him like the ghosts that pursued him from behind, the white
of the streets and the white arms of the trees and the white fog of the night
sky embracing him in an unwanted hug. The boy hit a patch of ice, skidding for
a moment robbed of breath, and then fell on his stomach. The ice scraped up his
coat and his sweathshirt and his undershirt, raising long gashes along his
stomach. The boy had nothing left: he began to cry.
From
the sky a great belly-laugh. The boy did not look up. On the ice next to him
something skidded, throwing up shards of ice which melted along his cheek. The
ground shook. Something clattered on the ice, hard like hooves. The boy did not
look up. He thought to himself that maybe there was a herd of deer rushing past
him. He thought that maybe he would get crushed, stomped under hard hooves,
ground to a bloody pulp. He wished for it.
There
was silence. The night air cold on his cheek. The ice cold on his stomach. The
blood leaking slowly from slowly congealing wounds. Strong arms wrapped him up, picked him up. The boy closed
his eyes.
Something
cold and firm under his back. Gentle, firm hands binding his wounds. Something
at his lips: something crumbling into his mouth. The boy sat up, coughed,
chewed, swallowed.
A
voice spoke, a voice like cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. “You’d better open your
eyes, son. These old flasks don’t take well to angst.”
The
boy opened his eyes. He was seated on the hard bench of what looked like a
wagon, with a rack of horses harnessed to it—but not horses: their eyes were
too big, and they were horned. The boy refused to believe.
The
fat man raised a curved horn, handed it to the boy. The boy drank something
that tasted like grapes and also like fire, lighting his belly in a way nothing
else ever had. He coughed. The fat man took back the horn and drank himself. He
lowered the horn, and regarded the boy.
“You
have to go home,” he said.
“Hell
no,” the boy said.
“Will
you fly with me for a time?”
The
boy nodded.
Impossibly,
in a manner the boy still refused to believe, the sleigh rose off the ground
and the houses receded into models and then into toys and then into mere
two-dimensional drawings. Somehow he was without vertigo, sure that he would
not fall, yet equally sure that he was on the verge of a world whose
consequences could be much steeper than a mere miles-long fall.
“Where
are we going?” the boy asked, as the world below him darkened from a patchwork
of light and shadowy squares to a rolling land of treetops and eventually
water, roiling and teeming with mysterious meaning.
“Back
in time,” the fat man said.
“Why?”
the boy asked.
“I’m
taking you home,” the fat man said.
“No,”
the boy said.
The
sleigh set down on a hillside. The air was no longer cold; it was warm and
seemed to be filled with moisture. There was a shack, a ramshackle place like
the boy felt his heart to be. The boy knew, somehow, that all the people here
were not here, in any real sense, and that they were here in the only sense
that matter. There were masses, singing hymns, and they seemed to process
through the shack’s open door, disappearing into a warm sort of glow that
emanated from the doorway of the shack, where around a feeding trough a group of
animals and a handful of people gathered. But the boy’s eye was caught by a
young man, maybe twice his age, whose eyes were on his sheep, herding them and
watching them even as, in the sky, a cacophany of angels sang, wheels within
wheels in the light of the stars, even as the shepherd’s own chest seemed to
fill with a light, unborrowed, uncreated, unreflected. The boy didn’t think the
shepherd could see him, but as one of the sheep wandered past the shepherd
glanced at him, just for a moment, and smiled.
“This
is home,” the boy said, looking up at Santa.
“Yes.”
After
a few more minutes which may have been hours—time did not seem to pass in a
normal manner, here—the boy turned and put his arms around Santa, who hugged
him back.
“I
have to go, don’t I?” the boy said.
“Yes,”
the fat man replied. “But you’ll carry this place with you. It is yours,
forever.”
The
boy nodded, understanding for perhaps the only time in his life.
The
boy stepped off the sleigh onto his front doorstep. Opening the door, he saw
what he had been afraid of all evening, what he had known would happen: his
father, drunk, swaying like a tree in a windstorm; his mother, curled into a
corner, her face a mass of bruises. The boy’s father’s eyes widened as the boy
opened the door and walked into the living room.
“Thought
I tol’ you never to come back again.”
The
boy ignored his father, walked to the phone, and called the police. His father
watched, open-mouthed in shock. The boy put the phone down and walked to a
place between his father and his mother, taking his father’s blows until the
police arrived.
2.
A single string of sad, wilting, half-burned-out white
lights hanging above the long counter was the only concession the bar made to
Christmas eve. Below the lights a long row of burned-out men and women huddled
over their drinks, making conversation in low growls. The young man was at the
end of the bar, four beers in, not talking to anyone.
All
at once he made the wrong move: eye contact with the wrong man, a big burly
A-shirted man with tattoos of dragons, or lizards, or worms encircling his
biceps, a misplaced leer. In under a second the man was across the room,
smashing his beer bottle on a table so it became a serrated edge of terror,
stabbing the young man’s hand into the counter of the bar.
A
big man in a red outfit clapped the tattooed man on the shoulder, spun him
around, and decked him. The big tattooed man went down and stayed down. The
red-outfitted man clapped the young man, who was too shocked to move, on the
shoulder and steered him toward the door of the bar.
“Thanks,”
the young man said, glancing for the first time at the other. His eyes bugged
for a moment, and he refused to believe.
“If
they have heard Moses and the prophets, but they still will not believe,” the
big man said, as if to himself.
“What?”
“Nothing,”
said the big man. “I’ve got to go.”
3.
The boy’s mother’s grip was tight, yanking the little boy
along through the crowd. She was a tall woman, bristling with faux-fur, looking
down at the boy with her wide upper lip curled in disgust. The line snaked
across the dull grey tiled mall floor as insincere Christmas hymns floated down
from the mall’s ceiling.
“Santa
is ridiculous,” the boy’s mother said.
“I
need to see Santa,” the boy said, looking at his feet.
“Why?”
the woman said, her grip on the boy’s fingers tightening. “We’ve been here for
half an hour, and we’ll be here for another half an hour before you get to sit
on his lap for two whole minutes. I’ll buy you a candy bar if we can skip
this.”
“I
need to see Santa,” the boy said.
“Why?”
“Santa
is important.”
The
woman snorted. “You little shit. Santa is no more important than your imaginary
friend Elmer.”
“Elmer
is important too,” the boy said. “He and Santa are friends.”
The
woman snorted, having nothing to say to this. She tightened her grip enough
that the boy cried out.
4.
The next child in line was a small six years old, the old
man guessed. The old man sat on the wooden slab of Santa’s thrown, knowing he
was an imposter, taking comfort in the fact that at least his beard was real.
As the boy shuffled forward the mall Santa inspected him: the ghost of rings
around his eyes, the way he kept his eyes on his shoes, the way his lip curled
back a little as if in anticipation of being hit, told Santa that he had been
abused many times in his life. To keep from crying out, Santa raised his
hand—the one with the circular bruise—to rub at the ghost of a bruise behind
his own right eye.
The
boy sat on Santa’s lap and looked up, for just a moment, into Santa’s face. He
reached his hand up; the tiny fingers hovered in front of Santa’s face for just
a moment, then retreated.
“It’s
okay,” said Santa. “You can touch my face. Pull on my beard even. It’s real, I
promise.”
Tentatively,
the boy did: he ran his hand over the lines on Santa’s face, and he pulled the
old man’s beard, which hurt, a little. He turned his back to Santa, still
sitting on the old man’s lap, and he picked up the old man’s big hand. Slowly
his hand traced the ring on the back of Santa’s hand.
“Did
that hurt?” the boy said.
“No,”
Santa said. “Hey. What do you want for Christmas?”
The
boy put his hand to his chin, considering a moment. Then swiftly he turned to
hug Santa, burying his head in the old man’s beard.
“I
love you, Santa,” the boy said.
“I
love you,” Santa whispered, in full knowledge that he could be jailed for
saying so. “Always,” Santa said. “And never forget it.”
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