Tis the Season to be...
by Steven Saus
I saw the note under the tree late in the
afternoon. Mike was cleaning up after brunch. The
kids had already toted the loot to their rooms and were busy
discovering every adventure the molded plastic and their imaginations
could devise. The note was near the empty cup and crumby
plate where we'd left the traditional yearly offering. The
parchment was stiff and dry on my fingers as I began to read the small
cramped handwriting.I have only a little time before my errands (it said). The cat, the collective misunderstanding of millions of high school physics students, twines about my legs while lying dead on the hearth, mewling softly. I don't count for him - or he for me - no matter how much we look at each other. He meows again, and I pour a saucer of milk for him. I'm sick of milk and cookies - a hot coffee and muhallebi would suit me better - but I keep the stuff around for the cat.
But I remember the first time. Iser was twelve, and a delight. I had baptized her and her sisters, watched them grow up. And it had come to this. Their mother had died shortly after the youngest was born, leaving Ahmel to care for the three girls. He was a kind-hearted fool, ready to believe every merchant with a get-rich-quick scheme.
A rat - completely real - scurries across the chilly floor, pausing at some crumb. The cat, while still lying dead, begins to stalk his prey.
Ahmel found himself broke and his girls without a dowry. He had confessed his scheme to me before Mass: He'd decided to sell Iser into slavery. With her good looks, she'd be treated reasonably well, and he would be able to feed his other girls. As he spoke, I could still taste the cabbage dolma I'd had for dinner.
That night, I tossed a bag of gold down Ahmel's chimney. My parents had been rich, my inheritance was large. I would never miss it. Later, I hear that the bag falling in them had ripped Iser’s hose, but no one minded.
The rat, fatally, notices the cat stalking instead of the cat dead, and then there is only one cat, biting into the rodent's spine. I know when the rat dies; the dead cat reappears. Nobody's watching anymore, after all.
It was simple charity - for Iser, and later her sisters. That was the message I practiced and spread. Those who had gave to those who didn't. Iser and her husband came every year at Christ's Mass; I let them give the first gift to the beggars who flooded the church. The story had finally gotten out after Ahmed saw me leaving the gift for his third daughter. And that was supposed to be the end of it.
I'd been dead for years when I noticed myself again. I found myself putting coins in tattered stockings, and then winking out again. It happened again. And again. A hut here, a poorhouse there. At first it was just a few places each year, then more and more. I began to catch glimpses of myself in windows - I was blurred, like a faded recollection of a friend long dead. Slowly, I began to change. In a billion million hearthside instants I lost my swarthy complexion. I found myself in unusual clothes - English robes, wooden Dutch shoes, even a red fur-lined coat. One year, a white beard simply appeared full-grown from the ether. Even the shape of my body has changed, and not just from the cookies I'm compelled to eat.
All this I could bear. I am like the cat. I exist because of some unlikely trick of physics and observation, an unreal event made physical by imagination. It was an odd existence, but an existence giving gifts to those in need.
But it's different now.
No longer am I at the poor huts and hovels, giving small gifts of charity to those with little. I find myself in splendorous homes, warm in the coldest days of winter, my arms laden with plastic trinkets destined to join the junk heap in the corner of a spoiled child's room. The poor children don't expect me to come anymore, so I cannot.
The cat, both alive and dead until you look, nudges my hand. He has dropped the rat at my feet. It is a gift; he has not seen me eat for three hundred sixty-four days. I will be sick from cookies tomorrow, but today I am famished. We both exist in this twilight quantum world, only existing when observed and remembered. The cat jumps on my stomach, and it quivers like a bowl full of jelly.
I do not see the poor any more, but unlike me, they always exist. Even when you don't notice them.
My hands were shaking as I read the signature, the name that I could barely let myself believe. "Honey," I called into the kitchen, "I think we got a letter from Santa Claus."
He didn't bother to stop washing the dishes. "I know, we wrote it last night on the computer. I think the kids recognized the font."
"No, a real letter. From the real Santa."
I heard the eye roll in his voice. "That's impossible, Martha."
As the words left his lips, the parchment crumbled in my hands, the dust blew away as if it never existed. Now I know what to put on my list for next year. Now I know what to wish for.
"It's not impossible," I say. "Just very, very improbable."
I hope you enjoyed this little holiday story. It's my present to everyone. You can share this story, as long as you attribute it to me, Steven Saus, and don't change it or make money from it. If you share it in a newsletter or the like, it'd be nice if you let me know.
If you liked this story, you can poke around my older stuff here, more current works at my "professional" domain, and my blog is called Ideatrash.
All text of this work is original, and is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. A human-readable summary of the license is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.
Happy Holidays.
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