Season of Wonder

by Paula Guran

  I stood and bent to kiss his brow. Then, I left so he wouldn’t see me crying. I tossed the ball of paper into my room and went outside into the yard to walk off the feelings that ambushed me. When I went back inside, I saw my father had gone to sleep amid the stories I’d written him over a lifetime of Dragon’s Mass Eves together. And when I checked on him even later, I found he’d slipped away.

  I gathered up the books, closed them, and stacked them neatly in his nightstand drawer. I carefully removed his spectacles and folded them up to lay them beside his bed.

  Then I went to find something to wrap him in and wondered if the coming night would be cloudy or clear.

  Motes swim. Light diffuses. Home rises.

  We see it through a smoky glass. We watch it twitch and meep with each note of the framing song.

  The Santaman laughs and beats his sword against his thigh: “Ho, ho, ho.”

  We few remaining weep and set our feet on emerald grass. We smell the reek of love upon the wind. We wipe our eyes. We wipe our eyes and look again.

  Ahead a dragon.

  Upon his back a world.

  Our New Carved Home

  The Santaman Cycle,

  Authorized Standard Version

  Verity Press, 2453 YD

  You arrived in autumn amid the buzz of change.

  But before that, while I waited for you, I started wrapping things up at our homestead on the edge of the world. I went through my father’s papers and organized them, separating out his working notes from his personal notes. Most, I kept. But some I left for the mine’s new owners.

  I felt you kick for the first time while I was taking the civil service exam, and after I finished, the test proctor sought me out in the waiting room after everyone else had gone to let me know he’d not seen a score so high in well over twenty years.

  I wasn’t surprised at all when the offer came through, and once it did, I started negotiating the sale of the mine. I knew going in that whatever I sold it for would be vastly more than I could make in a lifetime on government salary, working in the cubicle maze of the Bureaucracy. But a clean start seemed somehow right to me, especially as your arrival drew closer and closer.

  Still, I’m glad we had these three months together on the homestead where we both were born. Wandering the yard, it’s been a strange, new mourning as I accept the reality that I’ll likely not come back here again. You may when you’re older. You might want to see where your grandmother and grandfather lay buried. You may want to see the house where you were born. And I’m sure folks around here will be curious to meet you, too.

  There is a knock at the door on the morning of Dragon’s Mass Eve and it startles you. I go to answer and find Parson Brown on the porch. He sees the truck the Bureaucracy has provided me, shoved full of everything we’ll take with us when we leave. I’ve only left out enough to celebrate tonight and tomorrow, we start our weeks-long drive east and south.

  “So,” he says, “you really are going?”

  I nod. “Tomorrow,” I say. “Come in, Parson.”

  I brew him some tea while he plays with you and I can tell you’re as uncomfortable with him as he is with you. When the tea is ready, I hold you while he drinks it, mindful of his shaking hands. I want to ask him about your father, but I don’t. Last I heard, he’d ridden north with his sword and not long after, bits of gossip drifted back. I don’t know who exactly wields it, but there are rumors of a young man in red with a terrible blade and he’s earning quite a name for himself. I’m pretty sure it’s him. But maybe it isn’t. Maybe someone further north heard the cry of his heart. I doubt it, but it would be a fine story.

  Drawler season didn’t really subside this year—they pushed south all the way through summer—but the militias are holding them at Harrowfield and Lumner, and in a few weeks, I’ll be working supply chain for the headquarters of a new standing army.

  I don’t ask about your father. And I don’t tell Parson Brown your middle name is Simon, either. I know people are wondering and I’m okay with letting them wonder.

  I look into your eyes and I find I could fall into them. They are brown like mine and like your grandfather’s. The parson has to ask a second time before I realize he’s speaking. “I’m sorry?”

  “I was asking if you’d be joining us tonight,” he says as he drains the last of his tea. “I’ve a new acolyte. Brother Timothy. He’ll be giving the sermon.” Parson Brown leans forward and tickles your chin. “I’m sure everyone is dying to meet little Drummond.”

  I smile. “Maybe,” I tell him. “We’ll see.”

  But I already know we won’t be attending. Tonight, I’ll make our hats and after I’ve nursed you, I’ll eat rice stew and fruit salad. Then, we’ll walk up the hill and I will hold you close as I recite words that don’t need to be right or true to have their meaning for me. For us.

  I think I understand my father’s last Dragon’s Mass Eve gift to me now when I see his face in yours. His attachment to his old, discarded religion makes sense to me now, too, though I had to meet you before I could fully comprehend the truest object of his faith.

  Clear or cloudy, the only grace I’ll ever need has already found me.

  And the only home I’ll ever want is you.

  Christmas is not full of joy and light for all, but in Charles de Lint’s poignant story of friendship, he still offers the magic of hope. The presence of the dog, Fritzie, in the story brings to mind other stories of animals associated with Christmas. One of the editor’s favorites is about the tabby cat that helped quiet Mary’s newborn by cuddling up to the infant in the manger and purring him to sleep. In thanks, Mary blessed the cat. To this day, all true tabbies are still marked with an M on their brows as a sign of their service. (Right. The English letter M is an implausible anachronism, even for fantasy, but perhaps Mary knew a smattering of Greek—and Mariam in Greek starts with the Greek letter Mu, which is identical to the English M.)

  Pal o’ Mine

  Charles de Lint

  1

  Gina always believed there was magic in the world. “But it doesn’t work the way it does in fairy tales,” she told me. “It doesn’t save us. We have to save ourselves.”

  2

  One of the things I keep coming back to when I think of Gina is walking down Yoors Street on a cold, snowy Christmas Eve during our last year of high school. We were out Christmas shopping. I’d been finished and had my presents all wrapped during the first week of December, but Gina had waited for the last minute as usual, which was why we were out braving the storm that afternoon.

  I was wrapped in as many layers of clothes as I could fit under my overcoat and looked about twice my size, but Gina was just scuffling along beside me in her usual cowboy boots and jeans, a floppy felt hat pressing down her dark curls, and her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her pea jacket. She simply didn’t pay any attention to the cold. Gina was good at that: ignoring inconveniences, or things she wasn’t particularly interested in dealing with, much the way—I was eventually forced to admit that—I’d taught myself to ignore the dark current that was always present, running just under the surface of her exuberantly good moods.

  “You know what I like best about the city?” she asked as we waited for the light to change where Yoors crosses Bunnett.

  I shook my head.

  “Looking up. There’s a whole other world living up there.”

  I followed her gaze and at first I didn’t know what she was on about. I looked through breaks in the gusts of snow that billowed around us, but couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. I saw only rooftops and chimneys, multicolored Christmas decorations and the black strands of cable that ran in sagging geometric lines from the power poles to the buildings.

  “What’re you talking about?” I asked.

  “The ’goyles,” Gina said.

  I gave her a blank look, no closer to understanding what she was talking about than I’d been before.

  “The gargoyles, Sue
,” she repeated patiently. “Almost every building in this part of the city has got them, perched up there by the rooflines, looking down on us.”

  Once she’d pointed them out to me, I found it hard to believe that I’d never noticed them before. On that corner alone there were at least a half-dozen grotesque examples. I saw one in the archway keystone of the Annaheim Building directly across the street -a leering monstrous face, part lion, part bat, part man. Higher up, and all around, other nightmare faces peered down at us, from the corners of buildings, hidden in the frieze and cornice designs, cunningly nestled in corner brackets and the stone roof cresting. Every building had, them. Every building.

  Their presence shocked me. It’s not that I was unaware of their existence—after all, I was planning on architecture as a major in college. It’s just that if someone had mentioned gargoyles to me before that day, I would have automatically thought of the cathedrals and castles of Europe not ordinary office buildings in Newford.

  “I can’t believe I never noticed them before,” I fold her.

  “There are people who live their whole lives here and never see them,” Gina said.

  “How’s that possible?”

  Gina smiled. “It’s because of where they are looking down at us from just above our normal sightline. People in the city hardly ever look up.”

  “But still . . . ”

  “I know. It’s something, isn’t it? It really is a whole different world. Imagine being able to live your entire life in the middle of the city and never be noticed by anybody.

  “Like a bag lady,” I said.

  Gina nodded. “Sort of. Except people wouldn’t ignore you because you’re some pathetic street person that they want to avoid. They’d ignore you because they simply couldn’t see you.”

  That thought gave me a creepy feeling and I couldn’t suppress a shiver, but I could tell that Gina was intrigued with the idea. She was staring at that one gargoyle, above the entrance to the Annaheim Building.

  “You really like those things, don’t you?” I said.

  Gina turned to look at me, an expression I couldn’t read sitting in the back of her eyes.

  “I wish I lived in their world,” she told me.

  She held my gaze with that strange look in her eyes for a long heartbeat. Then the light changed and she laughed, breaking the mood. Slipping her arm in mine, she started us off across the street to finish her Christmas shopping.

  When we stood on the pavement in front of the Annaheim Building, she stopped and looked up at the gargoyle. I craned my neck and tried to give it a good look myself, but it was hard to see because of all the blowing snow.

  Gina laughed suddenly. “It knows we were talking about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It just winked at us.”

  I hadn’t seen anything, but then I always seemed to be looking exactly the wrong way, or perhaps in the wrong way, whenever Gina tried to point out some magical thing to me. She was so serious about it.

  “Did you see?” Gina asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I told her. “I think I saw something . . . ”

  Falling snow. The side of a building. And stone statuary that was pretty amazing in and of itself without the need to be animated as well. I looked up at the gargoyle again, trying to see what Gina had seen.

  I wish I lived in their world.

  It wasn’t until years later that I finally understood what she’d meant by that.

  3

  Christmas wasn’t the same for me as for most people, not even when I was a kid: my dad was born on Christmas day; Granny Ashworth, his mother, died on Christmas day when I was nine; and my own birthday was December 27th. It made for a strange brew come the holiday season, part celebration, part mourning, liberally mixed with all the paraphernalia that means Christmas: eggnog and glittering lights, caroling, ornaments, and, of course, presents.

  Christmas wasn’t centered around presents for me. Easy to say, I suppose, seeing how I grew up in the Beaches, wanting for nothing, but it’s true. What enamored me the most about the season, once I got beyond the confusion of birthdays and mourning, was the idea of what it was supposed to be: peace and goodwill to all. The traditions. The idea of the miracle birth the way it was told in the Bible and more secular legends like the one about how for one hour after midnight on Christmas Eve, animals were given human voices so that they could praise the baby Jesus.

  I remember staying up late the year I turned eleven, sitting up in bed with my cat on my lap and watching the clock, determined to hear Chelsea speak, except I fell asleep sometime after eleven and never did find out if she could or not. By the time Christmas came around the next year I was too old to believe in that sort of thing anymore.

  Gina never got too old. I remember years later when she got her dog Fritzie, she told me, “You know what I like the best about him? The stories he tells me.”

  “Your dog tells you stories,” I said slowly.

  “Everything’s got a voice,” Gina told me. “You just have to learn how to hear it.

  4

  The best present I ever got was the Christmas that Gina decided to be my friend. I’d been going to a private school and hated it. Everything about it was so stiff and proper. Even though we were only children, it was still all about money and social standing and it drove me mad. I’d see the public school kids and they seemed so free compared to all the boundaries I perceived to be compartmentalizing my own life.

  I pestered my mother for the entire summer I was nine until she finally relented and let me take the public transport into Ferryside where I attended Cairnmount Public School. By noon of my first day, I realized that I hated public school more.

  There’s nothing worse than being the new kid—especially when you were busing in from the Beaches. Nobody wanted anything to do with the slumming rich kid and her airs. I didn’t have airs; I was just too scared. But first impressions are everything and I ended up feeling more left out and alone than I’d ever been at my old school. I couldn’t even talk about it at home—my pride wouldn’t let me. After the way I’d carried on about it all summer, I couldn’t find the courage to admit that I’d been wrong.

  So I did the best I could. At recess, I’d stand miserably on the sidelines, trying to look as though I was a part of the linked fence, or whatever I was standing beside at the time, because I soon learned it was better to be ignored than to be noticed and ridiculed. I stuck it out until just before Christmas break. I don’t know if I would have been able to force myself to return after the holidays, but that day a bunch of boys were teasing me and my eyes were already welling with tears when Gina walked up out of nowhere and chased them off.

  “Why don’t you ever play with anybody?” she asked me.

  “Nobody wants me to play with them,” I said.

  “Well, I do,” she said and then she smiled at me, a smile so bright that it dried up all my tears.

  After that, we were best friends forever.

  5

  Gina was the most outrageous, talented, wonderful person I had ever met. I was the sort of child who usually reacted to stimuli; Gina created them. She made up games, she made up stories, she made up songs. It was impossible to be bored in her company and we became inseparable, in school and out.

  I don’t think a day went by that we didn’t spend some part of it together. We had sleepovers. We took art and music and dance classes together and if she won the prizes, I didn’t mind, because she was my friend and I could only be proud of her. There was no limit to her imagination, but that was fine by me, too. I was happy to have been welcomed into her world and I was more than willing to take up whatever enterprise she might propose.

  I remember one afternoon we sat up in her room and made little people out of found objects: acorn heads, seed eyes, twig bodies. We made clothes for them, and furniture, and concocted long extravagant family histories so that we ended up knowing more about them than we did our classmates.

  �
�They’re real now,” I remember her telling me. “We’ve given them lives, so they’ll always be real.”

  “What kind of real?” I asked, feeling a little confused because I was at that age when I was starting to understand the difference between what was make-believe and what was real.

  “There’s only one kind of real,” Gina told me. “The trouble is, not everybody can see it and they make fun of those who can.”

  Though I couldn’t know the world through the same perspective as Gina had, there was one thing I did know. “I would never make fun of you,” I said.

  “I know, Sue. That’s why we’re friends.”

  I still have the little twig people I made, wrapped up in tissue and stored away in a box of childhood treasures; I don’t know what ever happened to Gina’s.

  We had five years together, but then her parents moved out of town—not impossibly far, but far enough to make our getting together a major effort—and we rarely saw each other more than a few times a year after that. It was mainly Gina’s doing that we didn’t entirely lose touch with each other. She wrote me two or three times a week, long chatty letters about what she’d been reading, films she’d seen, people she’d met, her hopes of becoming a professional musician after she finished high school. The letters were decorated with fanciful illustrations of their contents and sometimes included miniature envelopes in which I would find letters from her twig people to mine.

  Although I tried to keep up my side, I wasn’t much of a correspondent. Usually I’d phone her, but my calls grew further and further apart as the months went by. I never stopped considering her as a friend—the occasions when we did get together were among my best memories of being a teenager—but my own life had changed and I didn’t have as much time for her anymore. It was hard to maintain a long-distance relationship when there was so much going on around me at home. I was no longer the new kid at school and I’d made other friends. I worked on the school paper and then I got a boyfriend.