(Christmas)

“Why are you calling me now, Lauren?”

Lauren could hear the hurt in Tisa’s voice and knew she’d inflicted the pain that resonated there.

“I’ve just been thinking of you is all.”

“I tried calling you for months, and you just blocked me out.”

Missing Tisa worked like this–at first Lauren was glad to be rid of her. She liked waking up alone in bed no longer fearing how Tisa’s mood might ebb and flow over the course of the day. Lauren liked cooking for herself because she could make her meals quick and simple. Tisa, an amateur chef with aspirations to go pro, had always insisted on multi-course meals shared at the table.

Lauren liked watching whatever she wanted on television rather than debating what was ethical to watch. Who cares if Cheers rarely passed the Bechdel test and every other joke was a loaded innuendo about Sam’s sexual prowess? It was some darn good comedy in the context of the time. Lauren could appreciate that while Tisa was always looking for a way to evolve.

Except at Christmas. For the holiday, Tisa was all about tradition. The real tree decorated with white lights and red ornaments. Creamy homemade eggnog that packed a boozy punch. Iced Christmas cookies–a recipe handed down from her grandma. Genuine caroling–Tisa loved to sing almost as much as she liked to cook.

March through November Lauren had felt she was better off without Tisa this year, but now it was December and the shelves at Target were overflowing with holiday lights, stuffed penguins in scarves, and balsam fir candles. All the seasonal excess had Lauren longing for what had been. Hence the phone call.

“I needed some time,” Lauren said.

“I’ve moved on with my life.”

“You don’t miss me?”

“Lo Lo, you kicked me out.”

“What if I was wrong?”

There was no reply on the other end of the phone line. Only silence to which Lauren entreated.

“Tisa, baby, please come home.”

Bears the Crown

A story a day until there’s a sleigh! This holiday season, I’m sharing a new flash fiction piece inspired by a holiday song every day of December until Christmas. Today’s story is inspired by The Holly and the Ivy.

The day the king fell the thud was heard throughout his kingdom. It echoed out to the valleys. The snap came first, an awful breaking of his brittle trunk, which had swayed steadfastly through centuries of windstorms but could not endure one more.

He’d taken that long to grow too becoming higher and higher until his leaves seemed to be paintbrushes for the sky, coloring it a robin’s egg blue. Generations of birds had taken refuge in his branches, some species that were no longer surviving, gone extinct with overhunting. The logging camps had come close to the king but luckily his kingdom had been put under protection before his bark was sliced open by the lumberjack’s saw.

On the day of his demise, the way he fell was the way he’d leaned as his authority was declining. Other trees had grown up alongside him stretching up and up in attempt to overtake him, and their roots had grown closer and closer to his depriving him of nutrients. Make no mistake about it–this was a coup.

As Shakespeare once wrote, “heavy is the head that wears the crown.”

Silver Bells

The magnificence of the Magnificent Mile was that you never felt alone. There was the rush of shoppers in and out of Marshall Field’s. There was the roar of dinner conversations as restaurant doors swung open. There were the bell hops tipping their hats at you and then shouting, “Taxi! Taxi!” There was the hum of traffic punctured by horns honking. There was the clip clop of horses as they conveyed tourists by carriage. There were the panhandlers asking for change. There was the rush of the L train and the screech of its brakes. There was the blast of holiday music from stores. There was the man ringing a bell as he collected donations for the Salvation Army. There was the plink of the bucket as you dropped in your coins which prompted him to say, “Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!”

The Knocker

Hank sighed into the empty street. His breath filled the night air with a puff of smoke. It made him want another cigarette. He’d already had two. He could only put off the inevitable for so long.

From his front pocket, he retrieved the list of men killed in action. He’d already been to three homes that day and had ruined three Christmases by letting the families within know that not only would their son not be returning for the holiday, he’d never be returning. He didn’t know if he could take a fourth, but those were his orders.

He knew men overseas followed orders that plunged them into the kind of danger that landed them on his lists. They were called upon to take lives. Hank was called upon to break lives–to devastate mothers and wives and daughters with the sound of a knock.

Most of the time now, the wailing would start before he even said anything. The women knew him for what he was–the grim reaper standing at their door letting them know they were the unlucky ones whose boys had been sacrificed to the war.

When Jesus was born to Mary, King Herod, who ruled at the time, ordered all the boys in Bethlehem under two years old to be slaughtered in an attempt to preserve his power and eliminate the threat he thought Jesus posed. Christmas carolers often tried to capture the effect of the choir of angels singing triumphantly about the birth of Jesus, but Hank imagined another kind of choir composed of the wailing mothers of the innocents slain. He knew their chorus too well.

One more set of voices to add to the choir tonight.

Hank held his breath as he ascended the final set of stairs and knocked on the door once…twice.

You better not lick that

“You better not lick that!”

“I want candy.”

Marla grabbed Jackie’s hand and yanked him back to her side.

“Candy is for good boys and you’re being naughty.”

Jackie stomped his feet and his face scrunched up in tears.

“I want big candy!”

“Maybe if you sit still like a good boy you’ll get a piece of candy later.”

“I want candy now!”

Jackie pulled free from Marla’s hand and dashed away toward the object of his desire. A bell rang behind her as a door swung open.

“You better not lick that!”

Marla turned toward the man who’d called out. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“Happens all the time,” he replied. “Now are you coming in for a haircut or what?”

“As soon as he realizes that barber pole isn’t made with sugar.”

Train Town

There was a time before this–you would have known, you would have heard about it–when riding a train was your best option for traveling across the country. It was how you traveled to new towns just forming. Maggie lived in one of those towns–a train town.

The first to arrive in a train town are the industrious single types, typically men, who are willing to lay tracks, manufacture lumber, haul goods, tunnel mines, and pan for gold.

Once it’s clear there’s money to be made, the family men move in–the upstanding gentlemen, the breadwinners, the moral and the faithful.

The former group, the first arrivals, build saloons for fellowship–the latter churches and schools. Undoubtedly, everything comes to a head eventually.

“You need to quiet down now,” Maggie called out to the drunk. “The children here are asleep.”

“What are you yelling at me for?” Where’s your man?” the drunk called back.

Her man was dead two months–buried before the first frost–and Maggie had not yet managed to scrounge the funds to buy passage for her and her children back East.

A voice came from across the street, “Is this sot troubling you?”

Through the dark night, Maggie saw Tom Blair standing on his front stoop rifle in hand. Between them lay a dirt road regularly traversed by wagons and carriages.

“I came to sing the children some carols,” the drunk said as he stumbled toward them.

“I was just asking him to leave,” Maggie said to Tom.

“Silent Night,” the drunk belted. “Holy Night.”

Tom fired a warning shot. “The lady asked you to leave.”

“I’m just trying to spread some Christmas cheer.”

Tom stepped off his stoop, closing in on the drunk. “Church services are tomorrow morning at nine. Until then, I suggest you see yourself home to bed.”

“No bed to go to,” the drunk said, and he then turned toward Maggie. “Unless this fine lady is willing to share hers.”

Before Maggie could offer any response, Tom had smacked the drunk across the head with the butt of the rifle. He moaned in pain and dropped to the ground landing in a pile of horse dung.

Behind her, Maggie heard the door creak open. John Jr. stood in the doorway.

“Ma, is Santa Claus out there?” the boy asked.

Maggie looked out to the street where the drunk was lying in the road, Tom hovering above him.

“Yes,” she said to John Jr. “But if he catches you out of bed, all you’re going to get is a lump of coal.”

She hurried John Jr. back inside and fastened the door tight behind him. If she couldn’t have her man back with her for Christmas, she wanted the next best thing: a ticket out of this godforsaken train town.

Shchedryk

A story a day until there’s a sleigh! This holiday season, I’m sharing a new flash fiction piece inspired by a holiday song every day of December until Christmas. Today’s story is inspired by Carol of the Bells, which I learned is based on a Ukrainian New Year’s song called Shchedryk. I also read an article in the New York Times today about Ukrainian soldiers which influenced this piece.

You can’t take porcelain dolls with you when you’re fleeing for your life. So we left them on the shelf in the bedroom I shared with my sisters, and they were there, stoic princesses with demure expressions, when the bombs came and shook them off the shelf. Rumble, rumble, and they tumbled to the ground.

The picture window in the front room where the Christmas tree stood sentinel every holiday season was blasted out by those same bombs. Now there’s a gaping hole that lets in wind and rain and sleet and snow. The carpets are molded. The damask wallpaper hangs loose and is covered in ash. The banister is detached from the staircase and parts of it have been taken for firewood.

This is no longer a home but a military compound.

I never thought I’d be back here holding the fragments of the doll I was given for Christmas the year I turned thirteen. I thought I was too old for dolls then–even if the dolls were not for playing but for sitting on shelves and waiting for bombs to break them.

There used to be swallows outside the Christmas tree window, the kind whose chatter foretold luck and good fortune. Now there are snipers. I worry my luck will run out soon, and I’ll share the same fate as my dolls. Broken into fragments. Left behind.

An Island Christmas

“I’ll leave you to your bah humbugging,” Jenny said as she slid the glass door closed. Her Mai Tai was half full and Jeff registered that he should probably for the sake of their marriage follow her inside and apologize to save their beachfront cocktail hour, but he didn’t want to risk waking Anders and Charlotte. Jet lag had turned the toddlers into even more hellish versions of their persistently destructive selves, and Jeff couldn’t take another tear soaked, ear splitting meltdown. No, better to let Jenny stew in her anger and just sit here on the balcony taking in the expansive view of the Pacific. It was her dumb idea anyway to trek halfway across the world to spend Christmas on the beach. “The kids have had such a tough year,” she’d said like the kids had any real idea of how much being in the world sucked right now. If anyone had had a tough year, it was Jeff, forced to work from home, spending all day on mute on Zoom trying to pretend like he cared about anything that was being discussed while slowly being driven insane by the soundtrack of screaming toddlers. Yes, the nanny was there. Yes, they had their health. That’s the way Jenny looked at it. She tried to see the bright side of things, but Jeff liked to stew in the misery. Lately, he’d sensed that he’d been pulling her too far into the stew with him. They were both going to simmer and drown. The balcony door slid open and there was Jenny again in her wraparound sweater. She handed him a can of beer and sat back down beside him. He thanked her and popped the tab. The moon shone off the water.

Claudius

“Please, drink,” Claudius said pushing the silver goblet toward Valentine. He watched as the prisoner clasped the goblet with both hands his wrists bound together with rope woven from papyrus stems.

Valentine didn’t break eye contact with Claudius as he sipped–Claudius expected the prisoner thought he would be poisoned and wanted to look the him in the eye as he died. But Claudius hadn’t ordered his personal poisoner to infuse the wine with a tincture of deadly herbs.

“Why do you insist on marrying Christians against my decree?” Claudius asked.

Valentine set down his goblet on the stone table. “Love sanctified by Christ is stronger than the will of any man.”

Claudius slid closer to Valentine along the stone bench and whispered in his ear, “You consider me just a man.”

Valentine turned toward him, his lips a breath away, his face a picture of serenity. “You are but an earthly leader, and my salvation lies with Jesus Christ, the true Lord.”

The thwap of Claudius’s fist against Valentine’s cheek echoed off the walls of the triclinium. The prisoner slumped over the table knocking over the wine goblet sending its contents flowing across the stone surface. A servant rushed over to clean up the mess, but Claudius waved him back.

“Out! All of you,” he ordered. The servants and the guards retreated to the atrium.

Claudius pushed Valentine up from the table and grabbed the rope tied around his wrists and twisted it. Valentine winced in pain but didn’t cry out.

“I am your emperor, and you shall kneel before me,” Claudius said, attempting to pull Valentine to the ground in front of him, but the prisoner, blood rushing from his busted lip, resisted.

“I will not kneel before you. I will kneel with you when you repent and pray to the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Claudius threw another punch across Valentine’s face. He’d honed his arms for combat over decades of military campaigns. The Goths taken prisoner had quaked in fear at the sight of him, but Valentine remained steadfast.

“You know how this ends, right?” Claudius asked. “You either recant your faith, or I recant your head.” Claudius tugged at Valentine’s ropes and pulled him close. “If you choose to give up your God, you will be well rewarded in my palace.”

“Why would I trade my heavenly kingdom for an earthly one when the rewards above are far greater?”

Claudius rewarded Valentine’s question with a swift kick to the groin, which made his prisoner howl.

“Have it your way,” Claudius said and snapped his fingers.

The guards returned, seven of them, and surrounded Valentine who’d sunk down to the floor in pain.

Claudius pulled Valentine up by the front of his frock and ran his hand along the prisoners neck commanding the guards to carry out the sentence.

“In the atrium. Where I can hear the blows,” Claudius said and then sat back down at the table to finish his wine.

Internal Memo: Santa Resigns

To My Dear Elves and Reindeer:

After over two centuries of delivering presents to children by sleigh every Christmas Eve, I’ve decided to resign as Chief Present Deliverer of North Pole Enterprises. I know many of you may be wondering why.

It’s always been my belief that by giving gifts to children we not only bring them joy in receiving but also cultivate a spirit of generosity that collectively across generations can transform the world. It was never my intention to have the idea of Christmas gift giving be embodied by one white bearded man with a belly that shakes like a bowl full of jelly but rather to challenge each child to find the Santa spirit in themselves.

With this in mind, I’ve decided it best to step down as the face of Christmas and allow new leadership to rise up. After an extensive search and interview process, the board has selected Mariah Carey as the new Chief Present Deliverer, and I couldn’t be more happy about their decision. Since the 1994 debut of her album Merry Christmas, Mariah’s music has become synonymous with the Christmas season. No doubt she’ll be a hit behind the sleigh like she’s been on the holiday pop charts.

In addition to the selection of Mariah, the board has also elected Jesus Christ as its chair. As we all know, Jesus is the reason for the season–he puts the Christ in Christmas. I’m confident that rooted as He is in the real meaning of Christmas, Jesus will be able to lead North Pole Enterprises forward while maintaining our connection to the past. Also, with the supply chain issues anticipated this year, we’re going to need a miracle to pull off all our deliveries, and Jesus specializes in those.

Finally, despite what the Coke ads may want you to believe, I am not a perfect man. Still, Mrs. Claus has stood by my side all these years, a true partner in our holiday endeavors, and for that, I am forever grateful. I can’t wait to spend more time with her at our beach house in Boca Raton.

I will remain in the workshop until the end of the year to support Mariah and Jesus through this transition, but this will be my last Christmas at the North Pole. I love you all and am grateful for the time we have spent together bringing joy to the world.

Ho ho,

Santa Claus