Monday, December 15, 2014

Snowflakes and Sugar Plums



Pillow stuffed with snowflakes, Paige dozed. These weren’t the snowflakes of legend that succumbed to heat and time. These were the snowflakes of the Pole and they never lost their cool. Because they were always cold, they were perfect companions for Christmas Eve, the night one froze the sugar plums in their dreams.
Paige had a large collection of sugar plums, but thirsted for one in particular. In her dreams she sees her mother, father, parents of long past. She lives alone now, in an igloo, lucky her skin is resilient as the snowflakes, numb. If she can freeze that sugar plum, that memory too old to remember, she has a chance to have her parents.
She stumbles through lanes of giant candy canes, avoids cloven hoofs raining down, presses her palms to her ears over the bellow of partridges and turtle doves, until she finds them. They wear red fur rimmed in white. Her father smiles wide, his cheeks flush, his belly bouncing. Her mother stands with the sweet aroma of cookies wafting from her. In her dream, Paige pinches her eyes shut, attempting to freeze the moment. When she opens her eyes, her parents are gone.
Again, she opens her eyes, this time in the real world. She gasps. Her snowflakes have vanished. In their place rests a candle magically lit so it can’t burn, only warms her hands. Through moan of wind and snow, she hears the jingles that find her once a year.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Static



A hiss interrupted Janice’s Christmas tunes, always. Not the usual radio static, no. She heard it over the mall intercom while watching shoppers stumble with gift bags weighing down one arm, a screaming toddler hanging off the other, men browsing women’s clothing stores here and jewelry shops there, all with the same baffled look on their faces. She heard it when she tried plugging her ears with headphones. She heard the noise then too, coating the holly, jolly music streaming in, noise like a slow unending sigh streaming from her iPod. She yanked out her plugs. People passed on by. Everyone was so oblivious, and none of them heard the hiss masked with holiday cheer.
Why should she hear it, Janice with her unadorned apartment, parents MIA, and nonexistent love life? Janice bought one lonely Christmas present for herself and placed it under her naked tree. She couldn’t wait to open it. She had been searching the mall for the perfect set. Finally, she’d come home with one, provided by one of the men in the jewelry store. They’d been a chore to wrap, the hue of the wrapping paper going from white to pink to red in a minute’s span. Still, they were wonderful ears.
Perhaps, when she put them on, the noise would go away.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Ornament Too Many




“Tree’s a bit cluttered this year,” Xen tells his wife. He flips through his newspaper, casting glances at the tree, watching his wife bustle with ornament after ornament atop a ladder. The tree spans a good ten feet, its tip tapping the ceiling. The ornament’s rainbow décor blots out the tree’s natural green, weighing down its limbs like oversized dewdrops.
“What do you suggest, dear?” Xen’s wife sweeps her hair from her eyes, searching a place for a bulbous red globe in her hands. “Most of these have been in our family for years.”
“New ones are crafted every day.” Xen shifted his reading glasses. “I say, ‘out with old, in with new.’ Snuff out the ones going on a few billion in age, dear.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Xen’s wife moans. Xen watches her fumble, unhanding the ladder. The red sphere still in her hand, she brushes over a couple blue ones, shifts one with lollipop-bright rings, another with a perfect red spot. “They are old, indeed. But they add something to the atmosphere, I think. Like this one here— Opps, oh my!”
An ornament leaps with the branches, sails down, down, to shatter on the floor. Shards of blue dotted brown and blue disrupt the tile.
Xen sighs as his eyes return to his paper. “Don’t worry, dear,” he says with a dismissive wave of his purple hand. “That one was getting dull anyway.”

Thursday, August 21, 2014

A Hill of Beans




Jess put a bean in earth and watched it sprout. Leaves burst from stem and beans dropped under them in little sacks. She plucked off hordes of beans from their sleeping bags and popped each of them in new beds around their Mother. Each bean became sapling became adult within a minute. Jess gathered up all the beans from the grove she’d created. Staring at them all, huddled in the hem of her dress, she sighed. Her work wasn’t done.
She started for the summit. The hill wasn’t tall but it was long and steep, a ramp to the heavens. Sun whipping her, Jess trudged on. On the crest Jess gazed at the townspeople below her. They weeded. They plowed. They planted.
Nothing grew.
Dead brown dominated their fields, some of it born from withered leaves, some from baked earth ever bare, all of it with no signs of changing green. They knew nothing would grow, nothing ever had.
They were the first generation to take up residence here, their ancestors having died off in far off lands. Why they had settled here, Jess didn’t know, but she saw they loved Earth as she did. She saw it when they took breaks from working, when they spread their arms wide above their heads and let their tears free, barefoot and beaming, the lone time their grins touched their eyes. Life was hard for them here. For survival, they attempted anyway. For survival, they suffered.
Jess watched moments more. She could grant the people her coveted miracle soil. She could end their harbors so that they could harvest fruits plump and ripe, roots, and sprouts of their own. But, surely, the day she did that would be their end.
She smiled on them, men and boys huffing, kicking up dust clouds that clung back on their clothes and feet. Women threading their fingers in dirt, sweat beading and rolling into their dazed eyes, daughters by their sides for sake of outspoken incentive through snarling stomachs. Jess smiled, and began tossing beans.
At first, people were unfazed, missing the confetti striking about them. When a bean or two strayed ground and tapped shoulder, arm, forehead, there was a pause filled with silent open mouths, and then came cheers. Jess continued to throw down beans, laughing with the now prancing people. They couldn’t see her for the girth of their joy. Once a handful of beans were collected, some ran back to their homes to put them on the stove; others got busy right on the ground they were on, digging trenches to build a fire, their children running further downhill to assemble wood and dry leaves, eager for earth’s flavor to play on their tongues.
Jess stopped on the last bean, rolled it between her fingers, and headed back down her side of the hill. She’d provided enough hope for today, enough to keep the people driving for tomorrow and tomorrow’s tomorrow. They never saw her dishing beans from the tip of the hill. For all they knew, beans were falling in rain’s stead, their strife having birthed a miracle. Jess continued rolling her solitary bean and prayed for her own.
At the plot of miracle soil, Mother and Children bean plants had vanished. She took her last bean and stuffed it underground. There grew a new bean plant, as before, lusher than its parent and siblings. From it she gathered more beans and planted, gathered and planted. With each ordinary green bean, she sighed. With blues and reds and yellows, she held her breath.
One bean had brought her here; a fruit of paradise lost its way. And only one could take her home. It had to be a bean elongated, born of a parent royal purple with dog-eared leaves. Only when she had that bean’s twin would the plant she bred stretch and break through cloud. It seemed improbable that she’d ever create a new magic bean, but the first magic bean had grown here and its magic remained. It was all a game, breeding and selecting, stock and demand. And every game had a winner.
A prick disturbed her finger. She left her thoughts and witnessed a beetle parading from a mark on her knuckle where blood welled. Reflexes made her flick her hand and send the creature flying. Pests were her constant neighbors and bites came like greetings, but none before had left her so numb. She curled onto the soil and let a bout of cold shivers take her to a restless slumber. Through waves of vertigo and teeth-bracing pain, she gripped the fact that, yes, this was a game, but one like none other.
She was playing without rules. Her life was delicate as these spouts with their tender roots. If she were to stay on the ground too long, a crippled bird allergic to flight, she would soon expire. Her skin would thin; her bones would brittle, crumple like rock to sand, sediment. She worried she was ending now.
But, no, seconds or hours later, the cold sweat ceased and, weary as she was, Jess got herself back up, got to work.
Hour past, she sat, hands caked and cracked, listening to her newborn plants whisper, she figured she may create a talking sprout faster than the tall-and-taller growing specimen she needed. Tired, disheartened, she decided to give it a rest, a momentary pause.
A rest was all it took.
Once she’d slept peaceful and awoke anew two days later, she smiled and got busy again. Improbable wasn’t impossible. With magic soil, it wouldn’t be long. If she didn’t find it today, she’d be giving the persistent people on the other face of the hill their tomorrow, beseeching that someone grant her ailing parents the same. She could hear her father’s dry cough, her mother’s wheeze. Tears overwhelmed her eyes. Her trembling hands kept working.
For survival, she attempted anyway. For survival, she endured.