Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology

by Dr. Freud Funkenstein, ed.

  At the wretched looking tree, which I surreptitiously salvaged from the reject pile at the back of Carson's Christmas Tree Lot, I feel my muscles tense and swallow to clear my throat. "You're being silly. Every kid loves gifts. Just wait until you see what I got y—"

  "We want Mommy now. Bring us home," Isabelle says. "You weren't supposed to bring us here. You weren't supposed to take us away."

  Bathed by the sulfuric glow of the cheap lights I have strung chaotically around the palsied limbs of the tree, I bite my lip and drop to my knees. There are only two presents there, but they represent three weeks worth of overtime and worse, three months of sobriety.

  "Just wait until you see..."

  "We don't want your stupid presents," Isabelle yells, and stamps her foot on the floor, startling me. "We want to go home to Mommy, now."

  I can't move. I'm on my knees with my hands poised over her present, and I can't move. I feel as if my insides have turned to solid ice, my brain to fire. The trembling worsens. God help me I want to slap my little girl across the face and tell her to never speak to me like that again. That if she understood what life in this shithole little apartment has been like without her, without Kara, without her mother and the affection with which they used to treat me, that she would forgive me my trespasses and rush into my arms. She would gladly accept the gift I bought her then. She would gladly accept me as part of her life again. She would care.

  I weep, silently, as I unwrap the gift. I'm blocking it from her view, so she can't see what it is. But that hardly matters now, does it? It could be a pony, a car, a million dollars, and it wouldn't matter. She only wants her mother.

  "It's a cell phone," I whisper, running a finger over the small rectangular box. "An expensive one. I bought it..." My throat closes, trapping a sob. I wait. Try again. "...I bought it and programmed my number into it so that, even if you didn't want to talk...you could send me a text now and then." The sobs come, wave after wave of them rippling through me as I push the gift aside and reach for Kara's. I can barely see it through the ugly orange and dazzling white kaleidoscope the tears have made of my eyes. Blinking furiously, I tear open the wrapping paper and roughly fling it aside.

  "For you, Kara, honey." I raise the box to show it to her. I am heartened to hear her give the slightest gasp. "A Sassy Sarah doll. The clerk at the store told me they're the coolest thing out there right now." I continue to hold it up for a moment, waiting, wanting her to take it. When she doesn't, I let it fall to the floor and stand, my knees cracking painfully.

  We are a tableau of pain and misery and fear.

  I watch them, searching their small faces for the slightest hint of love.

  And find none.

  "Okay," I tell them. "Let's get you home. You can still take the gifts if you want them."

  They don't, of course.

  * * *

  They say nothing on the ride back to their mother, even when I tell them I'm sorry for scaring them, even when I tell them the words I've rehearsed in my gloomy apartment every night for over a year. Even when I open the car door for them and tell them I hope we can try again some time.

  They have nothing to say, and that says enough.

  Lit by the car's headlights, our passage up the snowy cross-studded hill is a somber one.

  "Happy Christmas," I whisper to Isabelle, as I lay her body back into her grave. The wind freezes my tears.

  "Happy Christmas," I whisper to Kara, as I lay her down in the hole, which is not as deep as I dug it thanks to the endless snow.

  I return to the car and retrieve the shovel, grimacing as the handle chafes against my calloused hands.

  And as I fill my children's graves back in, my eyes stray to the headstone next to theirs, to my wife's grave, and I wonder if she will ever forgive me, if maybe that's where a wiser man would have started. If maybe, just maybe, some day she might give me another chance.

  Hope is a dangerous thing, but without it, what else is there?

  I allow myself a small smile.

  We'll see.

  Valentine's Day is not so far away.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  FAR OFF THINGS

  CHILDHOOD, LEGENDARY, LOVE - all these things share one thing in common, a sense of misty, uncrossable distance. And that distance is also the depth of our longing for them; and that distance is an old song crafted from sadness. The song has always been old; its age and its sadness are one.

  Poets, philosophers, sages - since words have been at their disposal they have devoted those words to one of the three above. But is it not strange that love - for that is the word in question - which has no sure existence in this world at all, should be the object of so much elegy and debate?

  Sometimes, swollen with sighs, I would add words of my own to this debate. My words would be thus: that true love is another world that has existence only in the lover's solitary heart. Upon contact with the harsh air of this, our world, it dies away. And to illustrate my words I would retell a tale of childhood - perhaps in some form known to some already - and one that belongs to the no-time of legend.

  Both the latitude and the age, as befits a tale of legendry, were isolated from all maps and history. We can say that the town was in the north, and by that understand that its streets were grey and cold, that these events took place in the olden days, and by that understand that barefoot children in threadbare clothes played hopscotch and whipped hoops through those streets. But amongst those children was one child who could not play such games.

  The boy had not spoken a word since his birth, though his hearing was sharp enough. That in itself would not have forbidden him from playing with the other children. There was simply something wrong with him. It seemed he could not bear to look another human being in the eye, as if he was afraid of what they might see in his own. And so people were just as uncomfortable with him as he was with them, until he acquired the title of idiot and everyone felt much relieved. As an idiot he could have his place in the town, and even if he was not respected exactly, he was ignored.

  So while other children chanted their skipping rhymes he would sneak from one dank, crumbling alley to the next as if he wished himself invisible. Indeed, all around seemed to abet his invisibility so that, to a stranger, his exaggerated stealth must have looked comic and pathetic.

  Out past the last alley, the last brick wall and all the unspoken mourning that is reared with stone and clay, the town gave way to meadows and hills crowned with copses. At this boundary the boy would suddenly run, bursting with a mixture of excitement and release.

  The open fields, the sky pupilled by clouds slow with peace and wonder: these were the boy's schoolroom. Life to him was as unfenced as they. He did not count the years, nor did he reckon how he should act or what he should feel according to how many had passed. He foraged for pine-cones and chestnuts amid leaves. Where the water stilled and swelled at the bend in the stream, he lay flat and reached out to tickle the bellies of trout. He found out the nests of all the birds and watched the progress of their eggs and their fledgling young. In the vine-crowded tower of the broken old lime kiln he waited for bats to waken or to come home.

  To the boy these things were familiar. They were his very own treasures. But enfolded in the valleys between these hills the boy had also found out something that was to him strange and enticing. Wilder than the ragged hills around, to the boy at least, was the farmhouse and the people who lived there. When the tide of evening drew in he would pause amid the long grasses of the meadow that looked down upon the house, and gaze at the yellow windows. He heard with distinctness sounds from the kitchen, and from without the barking of dogs and the restless clucking of hens.

  Perhaps he would not have paused so long in the evening, listening for the different voices from within, if it were not for something he sometimes saw during the day. Her name was Leah. She was the daughter of the house and old enough to work around the farm. The boy would catch a glimpse of her now and then, on lucky days, when
she sat on a stool in the barn to milk the cows. Without knowing why, the boy made this one division in his life, between the time before he had ever seen her and the time since. And yet he did not question his own fascination, and indeed, hardly thought about the girl except when he was near the farmhouse and remembered her again, as if afresh, like an animal curious at a scent it did not understand.

  Time passed and the boy could now hardly remember his life before he knew of the girl. It happened that one day Leah failed to appear in the barn. When her absence continued the next day and the next, the boy felt downcast and was unable to enjoy his usual solitary play as before. Suddenly, all he could think of was when he would next catch sight of her. The boy was quick-eared and heard much that was not meant for him. He knew the girl's name already and soon he learnt from a few words let fall here and there in the town that she had taken ill. It seemed her illness was of a kind from which few recovered.

  Now, when the boy passed near the farmhouse, the place seemed desolate. He was sure that even the sounds from within had become sad and subdued. As he stood and looked down from the upper meadow the thought struck him with peculiar sharpness that he might never see the girl again. The world that had begun with the first sight of her, and had grown almost to be the whole of his memory, might soon be gone. He felt as much urgency as helplessness, and beyond these two vying emotions a sadness as if he had only just woken to the sober, nagging loneliness of himself. It seemed appropriate that autumn was deepening towards winter, and that a frost was in the air.

  The boy passed by the farmhouse no more and no less often than before. Without hope there was nothing else he could do than this. The light was short, the darkness long, so that the days were as nights and the nights seemed almost to meet each other in one unpassing night. And somewhere deep in the heart of this night, unable to bear the weight of his hopelessness any longer, the boy slipped out of his house. With all the world lost in dreams around him he realised this is what he should have done before.

  The boy was fond of secrets. They were to him the most precious things in the world, and in this unexchangable currency he had long ago acquired riches. Who can say but that there was some deep link between his love of secrets and his muteness? As the wide night took him in its soughing embrace he knew that he was seeking the most precious secret of all. The girl's fate had been decided, and when one's fate is decided one is already moving and breathing in another world. The boy had to get close to that house, if only to hear her sleeping breath or to know that she was there dreaming with the night's vast and single dream.

  As he emerged from the line of trees at the top of the meadow he heard an eerie, shivering sound, clear on the frosty air. Echoing in the loneliness of nature, it was not a sound of nature. He moved a little further, like a cautious fox. Leah was leaning from her open casement in the upper storey of the house, as if to release her sobs to the thrilling cold and endless freedom of the night where they would not disturb her tired family. As the moon gave to the clouds that fogged it a mystical effulgence, so it seemed to the boy, Leah's sobs leant the night a wondrous beauty. It was then that the mystery of love was disclosed to him, by Leah and by the night, more breathless and complete than the most ancient love poem. Love was hidden from the world in the shape of this child, to be revealed only to the eyes of another child. And the child whose eyes they were was one untutored in the uses the world has for things. He did not know there should be a use for or an object to anything. So this love simply was, and there was nothing for him to do but gaze and admire.

  It is an irony worth noting that of all the love songs and poems that ever were, none of them succeed in recording any sense of what the being who inspired them was like. All that is recorded is the feeling of love itself. And yet for the author of the song or poem there was only one person who it could be meant for. Why is that person always lost? Why do they become nothing more than an anonymous 'you'?

  The face and name that love had assumed this time were Leah's, and the boy was keenly affected by her uniqueness. It was all part of the secret now his. In all of history there would only be one Leah, and since she was already not long for this world, it seemed that all of time and creation had rejected a beauty too great for it. Only the boy was there to see it. He saw it in the treacly dimple of her cheek, the jutting of one of her teeth, the way her hair seemed to melt into wisps, making the slightness of her whole frame something gossamer that might disappear in too bright a light. He saw these things, and he also numbered among the privileged few in all the starry span of time to know her voice. Oh, most indescribable of all things, the human voice! In hers he sensed a gentleness and shy intelligence that must understand him, and yet which could only be too good for him. The boy could not imagine that such beauty could ever touch something so intrinsically lowly as 'himself'. Nor could he imagine that it could possibly spurn him, since his love was that beauty's mirror. All that he could do was try and grasp the unique and elusive thing called Leah in the deer-like movements of her body and as it trembled in her voice.

  He saw this uniqueness as a colour, the rarest ethereal blue, bordering on turquoise. His memories of Leah were full of this colour and serene. But when he saw her now, her voice was wracked with tears and that beauty was a naked, devastating thing. If the blue of his memories was like the flashing limpidity to be seen sometimes in a peaceful stream, then that colour was transformed now into the frothing, violent white where the stream meets the rapids.

  Leah brimmed and overflowed with tears for the passing world that was her self. Night after night, how many tears had fallen on that patch of earth next to the door? The boy could think of nothing more sacred than those tears. So, when Leah had utterly exhausted herself with crying and withdrawn into the muffled darkness of her room, he crept right down to beneath her windowsill and looked for any trace of them. They had melted the frost a little, and the earth had drunk them up. This was what the boy found the first time. The second and third time tiny shoots were pushing themselves up through the stony earth and into the unwelcoming autumn air. They grew with astonishing speed, until, in a week or so, they were recognisable as a kind of cowslip.

  But there had never been cowslips like these before. They reminded the boy of something. Just as Leah's sobs had expressed a sadness and beauty transcending nature, so these flowers, too, seemed to be something other than nature's scions. They were not of nature, and not of the everyday world of humankind. They were visitors from the world of faerie. When Leah, exhausted of all tears, withdrew and closed her window, the boy would draw close and examine the blossoms. They were a silvery blue colour, almost turquoise, like Leah's teardrops in the moonlight. When the boy breathed in their scent he was taken by an irresistible nostalgia, like the knowledge that youth is the most ancient of all things. Their scent could have been Leah's very breath, and no doubt their nectar was warm and salty. It was certain that these flowers were the external, living efflorescence of all Leah's beauty.

  Leah herself must have been blinded by her tears, till all the world blurred and ran and the stars were drowning in the sky. She did not seem to see the flowers till they had grown a little over waist height. She had been weeping almost silently, one night, when her attention seemed to be caught by her own falling teardrops, as if there might be some consolation in watching her own sorrow fall through the empty space, detached from her, like rain. Then she saw the flowers where her teardrops fell and the night was made intimate with her little gasp of wonder. She appeared to forget her sadness as she gazed. She must have been strangely moved by the strength of such fragile-looking flowers, blooming effortlessly amidst the icy bleakness of the season.

  "If only I could live as long as one of those," she said to herself, "just to see Christmas Day again, I would be happy."

  As he watched, the boy's eyes followed Leah's down. As if both of them had forgotten her words they saw only the pearly wonder of the flowers. And while their eyes were drawn downwards, Leah's words w
ent up, up like a prayer, into the night where no human eyes were now turned. The sky stretched out more vast than any landscape below it. The stars and the webbed effulgence of the moon shed a cold, marmoreal light upon the clouds below, as if they were ruins and the clouds were the desert dunes they stood in. But the skyscape was not empty. In the vapours of the clouds, stirring in the deepest pools of night's blackness, throwing out an arm in the midst of their slumber, or muttering words that make sense only in dreams, were all the demons, bugbears and gooligars that look down upon our world and make sure that no part of existence goes by unwitnessed. They are the far-off things for whom dreaming and waking is one. All things happen under the same sky, and because of the far-off, grey and shapeless things that dwell there, the unseen background to all that passes in the world, in a sense all things are far-off, one thing from another.

  There, in their cracked and crumbling Olympus of weirdly glinting stars and bottomless night, gargoyles of cloud vomit in play over bat-winged cherubim; there lesser imps disport upon the backs of sky-borne behemoths. And there in the teeming loneliness and the howling silence, Leah's prayer could be heard.

  * * *

  Something wonderful had occurred to the boy. He did not need to hide and watch any longer. So far his love had simply been the act of seeing. Now he could step into the picture of his own love. It was a simple matter, and yet the plan the boy had made was such that he began to feel himself walking in that other world to which Leah already belonged, a fateful world where all deeds were as the language of the gods. All he had to do was to show Leah her own beauty. He was the only one who could show it to her because he was the only one who understood it. The savage emptiness of Leah's lot was real. All the possibilities of the infinite had been broken off to leave something merely incomplete. It was unbearable. But the fact of its unbearableness turned what was small once more into an infinite platform for beauty. It was not a real beauty as the emptiness was real. Not yet. But if he showed it to her it would be. He could not speak, but if he only gave Leah the gift of her own beauty their hearts would not need words. Then something would happen that had never happened before in the history of the world.