by Paula Guran
I turned up the thermostats in the living room and the bedroom and was plugging the space heater in when she brought in the soup. “I got chilled on the way over,” I said, turning the space heater up to high. “It’s freezing out. I think it’s going to snow.”
We ate our soup, and Mom told me about Sueann’s wedding. “She wants you to be her maid of honor,” she said, fanning herself. “Aren’t you warm yet?”
“No,” I said, rubbing my arms.
“I’ll get you a sweater,” she said, and went into the bedroom, turning the space heater off as she went.
I turned it back on and went into the living room to build a fire in the fireplace.
“Have you met anyone at work lately?” she called in from the bedroom.
“What?” I said, sitting back on my knees.
She came back in without the sweater. Her hat was gone, and her hair was mussed up, as if something had thrashed around in it. “I hope you’re not still refusing to write a Christmas newsletter,” she said, going into the kitchen and coming out again with two plates of cheesecake. “Come sit down and eat your dessert,” she said.
I did, still watching her warily.
“Making up things!” she said. “What an idea! Aunt Margaret wrote me just the other day to tell me how much she loves hearing from you girls and how interesting your newsletters always are.” She cleared the table. “You can stay for a while, can’t you? I hate waiting here alone for news about Dakota.”
“No, I’ve got to go,” I said, and stood up. “I’ve got to . . . ”
I’ve got to . . . what? I thought, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. Fly to Spokane? And then, as soon as Dakota was okay, fly back and run wildly around town turning up thermostats until I fell over from exhaustion? And then what? It was when people fell asleep in the movies that the aliens took them over. And there was no way I could stay awake until every parasite was exposed to the light, even if they didn’t catch me and turn me into one of them. Even if I didn’t turn my ankle.
The phone rang.
“Tell them I’m not here,” I said.
“Who?” Mom asked, picking it up. “Oh, dear, I hope it’s not Mitch with bad news. Hello?” Pause. “It’s Sueann,” she said, putting her hand over the receiver, and listened for a long interval. “She broke up with her boyfriend.”
“With David?” I said. “Give me the phone.”
“I thought you said you weren’t here,” she said, handing the phone over.
“Sueann?” I said. “Why did you break up with David?”
“Because he’s so deadly dull,” she said. “He’s always calling me and sending me flowers and being nice. He even wants to get married. And tonight at dinner, I just thought, ‘Why am I dating him?’ and we broke up.”
Mom went over and turned on the TV. “In local news,” the CNN guy said, “special-interest groups banded together to donate fifteen thousand dollars to City Hall’s Christmas display.”
“Where were you having dinner?” I asked Sueann. “At McDonald’s?”
“No, at this pizza place, which is another thing. All he ever wants is to go to dinner or the movies. We never do anything interesting.”
“Did you go to a movie tonight?” She might have been in the multiplex at the mall.
“No. I told you, I broke up with him.”
This made no sense. I hadn’t hit any pizza places.
“Weather is next,” the guy on CNN said.
“Mom, can you turn that down?” I said. “Sueann, this is important. Tell me what you’re wearing.”
“Jeans and my blue top and my zodiac necklace. What does that have to do with my breaking up with David?”
“Are you wearing a hat?”
“In our forecast just ahead,” the CNN guy said, “great weather for all you people trying to get your Christmas shopping d—”
Mom turned the TV down.
“Mom, turn it back up,” I said, motioning wildly.
“No, I’m not wearing a hat,” Sueann said. “What does that have to do with whether I broke up with David or not?”
The weather map behind the CNN guy was covered with 62, 65, 70, 68. “Mom,” I said.
She fumbled with the remote.
“You won’t believe what he did the other day,” Sueann said, outraged. “Gave me an engagement ring! Can you imag—”
“—unseasonably warm temperatures and lots of sunshine,” the weather guy blared out. “Continuing right through Christmas.”
“I mean, what was I thinking?” Sueann said.
“Shh,” I said. “I’m trying to listen to the weather.”
“It’s supposed to be nice all next week,” Mom said.
It was nice all the next week. Allison called to tell me Dakota was back home. “The doctors don’t know what it was, some kind of bug or something, but whatever it was, it’s completely gone. She’s back taking ice skating and tap-dancing lessons, and next week I’m signing both girls up for Junior Band.”
“You did the right thing,” Gary said grudgingly. “Marcie told me her knee was really hurting. When she was still talking to me, that is.”
“The reconciliation’s off, huh?”
“Yeah,” he said, “but I haven’t given up. The way she acted proves to me that her love for me is still there, if I can only reach it.”
All it proved to me was that it took an invasion from outer space to make her seem even marginally human, but I didn’t say so.
“I’ve talked her into going into marriage counseling with me,” he said. “You were right not to trust me either. That’s the mistake they always make in those body-snatcher movies, trusting people.”
Well, yes and no. If I’d trusted Jim Bridgeman, I wouldn’t have had to do all those thermostats alone.
“You were the one who turned the heat up at the pizza place where Sueann and her fiance were having dinner,” I said after he told me he’d figured out what the aliens’ weakness was after seeing me turn up the thermostat on fifth. “You were the one who’d checked out Attack of the Soul-Killers.”
“I tried to talk to you,” he said. “I don’t blame you for not trusting me. I should have taken my hat off, but I didn’t want you to see my bald spot.”
“You can’t go by appearances,” I said.
By December fifteenth, hat sales were down, the mall was jammed with ill-tempered shoppers, at City Hall an animal-rights group was protesting Santa Claus’s wearing fur, and Gary’s wife had skipped their first marriage-counseling session and then blamed it on him. It’s now four days till Christmas, and things are completely back to normal. Nobody at work’s wearing a hat except Jim, Solveig’s naming her baby Durango, Hunziger’s suing management for firing him, antidepressant sales are up, and my mother called just now to tell me Sueann has a new boyfriend who’s a terrorist, and to ask me if I’d sent out my Christmas newsletters yet. And had I met anyone lately at work.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m bringing him to Christmas dinner.”
Yesterday Betty Holland filed a sexual harassment suit against Nathan Steinberg for kissing her under the mistletoe, and I was nearly run over on my way home from work. But the world has been made safe from cankers, leaf wilt, and galls.
And it makes an interesting Christmas Newsletter.
Whether it’s true or not.
Wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,
Nan Johnson
About the Authors
Whether writing noir, historical fiction, urban fantasy, thriller, or traditional mystery, Dana Cameron draws from her expertise in archaeology. Her fiction (including several “Fangborn” stories) has won multiple Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards and earned an Edgar Award nomination. The first of three novels set in the Fangborn universe, Seven Kinds of Hell, will be published by 47North in early 2013. Dana lives in Massachusetts with her husband and benevolent feline overlords.
Orson Scott Card is the author of the novels Ender’s Game, Ender’s Shado
w, and Speaker for the Dead, which are widely read by adults and younger readers, and are increasingly included in educational curricula. Besides these and other science fiction novels, Card writes contemporary fantasy (Magic Street, Enchantment, Lost Boys), biblical novels (Stone Tables, Rachel and Leah), the American frontier fantasy series The Tales of Alvin Maker (beginning with Seventh Son), poetry (An Open Book), and many plays and scripts. Card was born in Washington and grew up in California, Arizona, and Utah. Card currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina with his wife and youngest child. Ender’s Game will be released as a major motion picture in 2013.
Harlan Ellison’s published works include over 1700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, essays, and a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media. He was editor and anthologist for two groundbreaking science fiction anthologies, Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions. Ellison has won numerous awards including multiple Hugos, Nebulas, Stokers, and Edgars and Lifetime Achievement awards from the Horror Writers Association, the World Fantasy Convention, and the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as SFWA’s Grand Master Award.
Over the past thirty years, Nina Kiriki Hoffman has sold adult and YA novels and more than 250 short stories. Her works have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Endeavour awards. Her fiction has won her a Stoker and a Nebula Award. A collection of her short stories, Permeable Borders, was published in 2012 by Fairwood Press. Nina does production work for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She also works with teen writers. She lives in Eugene, Oregon. For a list of Nina’s publications, check out: ofearna.us/books/hoffman.html.
Janet Kagan (1946 – 2008) authored two science fictions novels and numerous shorter works of science fiction and fantasy. Some of her stories, which appeared in publications such as Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction, were gathered in the collection Mirabile. In addition to winning the Hugo Award, “The Nutcracker Coup,” was also nominated for a Nebula Award.
James Patrick Kelly has had an eclectic writing career. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays and planetarium shows. His fiction has been translated into sixteen languages. He won the Nebula Award for his novella “Burn” and the Hugo Awards for two novelettes: “Think Like A Dinosaur” and “Ten to the Sixteenth to One.” He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and has two podcasts: Free Reads and James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod. His website is www.jimkelly.net.
Novelist, performer, and public radio personality Ellen Kushner may be best known as the longtime host of the national series Sound & Spirit. Her award-winning novels include the “mannerpunk” cult classic Swordspoint, and Thomas the Rhymer. Kushner’s The Golden Dreydl: A Klezmer “Nutcracker” for Chanukah, has been produced as a CD (with Shirim Klezmer Orchestra), a picture book, and onstage by New York’s Vital Theatre. With Holly Black, she recently co-edited Welcome to Bordertown, a revival of the original urban fantasy shared-world series created by Terri Windling. Kushner’s audiobook recordings of her three “Riverside” novels were released this year by Neil Gaiman Presents for Audible.com. She lives in New York City, and travels a lot.
Charles de Lint is a full-time writer and musician who presently makes his home in Ottawa, Canada, with his wife MaryAnn Harris. His most recent books are Under My Skin (Razorbill Canada, 2012; Amazon.com for the rest of the world) and Eyes Like Leaves (Tachyon Press, 2012). His first album Old Blue Truck came out in early 2011. For more information about his work, visit his website at www.charlesdelint.com. He’s also on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.
Robert Reed is the author of more than 200 published stories and a smattering of novels. His novella, “A Billion Eves,” won the Hugo in 2007. He is currently at work on a trilogy set in his Marrow/Great Ship universe, due to be published beginning in 2013. Robert lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and daughter. His website is www.robertreedwriter.com.
M. Rickert is the winner of two World Fantasy Awards, a Shirley Jackson Award, and a Crawford Award. She lives in Wisconsin.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written a lot of bestselling, award-winning fiction under a variety of names, including Kristine Grayson, Kris DeLake, Kris Nelscott, and of course, her own name. She’s the former editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her entire thirty-year backlist is slowly returning to print, courtesy of WMG Publishing. For more information on her work, go to www.kristinekathrynrusch.com.
Sarban was the pen name of British writer and diplomat John William Wall (1910 – 1989). He served the British Foreign Office from 1933 until his retirement in 1977. The majority of his fiction was written during a short period between 1947 and 1951. Three books—Ringstones (1951), The Sound of His Horn (1952), and The Doll Maker (1953)—were published during his lifetime. The Sacrifice and Other Stories (2002) and Discovery of Heretics: Unseen Writings (2011), were published posthumously by Tartarus Press in 2002. A biography of Sarban can be found online at homepages.pavilion.co.uk/users/tartarus/wall.html.
Ken Scholes started writing stories at fifteen, but took a long break away from it while logging time as a sailor, soldier, preacher, musician, label gun repairman, retail manager, and nonprofit director. He returned to writing about a dozen years ago, and his acclaimed debut novel Lamentation (2009) became the first in a five book series, The Psalms of Isaak, of which Canticle (2009) and Antiphon (2010) have also been published. He lives near Portland, Oregon with his wife and twin daughters.
James Stoddard’s short stories have appeared in SF publications such as Amazing Stories and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. His science fiction story, “The Battle of York,” was included in The Year’s Best SF 10, and his fantasy story, “The First Editions,” was included in The Year’s Best Fantasy 9. His novel, The High House, won the Compton Crook Award for best fantasy by a new novelist, and was nominated for several other awards. A sequel, The False House, followed. He has recently published a rewrite of William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land.
Von Jocks also writes as Yvonne Jocks and Evelyn Vaughn. The tripartite author has published a bunch of novels, the most recent of which is Evelyn Vaughn’s Underground Warrior (2010). She has also edited (as Evelyn Vaughn) two anthologies, Words of the Witches and Witches Brew, for Berkley Jove. She has a master’s degree from the University of Texas, Arlington (her thesis traced the history of the romance novel), teaches in a community college, and lives between Fort Worth and Dallas, Texas.
Connie Willis is the award-winning author of Blackout/All Clear, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Doomsday Book, and Bellwether. She’s won six Nebulas and eleven Hugo Awards, and was the first author to have ever won both awards in all four categories. Willis was recently inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and is the newest SFWA Grand Master of Science Fiction. She lives in Colorado with her physics-professor husband, a bulldog, and two very bad cats.
Robert Charles Wilson was born in California but has lived most of his life in Canada. His work has won the Hugo Award (for novel Spin), the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for novel The Chronoliths), the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (for novelette “The Cartesian Theater”), three Aurora Awards (for novels Blind Lake and Darwinia, and the short story “The Perseids”), and the Philip K. Dick Award (for novel Mysterium). His other novels include Axis, Vortex, A Hidden Place, Memory Wire, Gypsies, The Divide, A Bridge of Many Years, The Harvest, Bios, and Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America. In addition to his novels, he is the author of the short-story collection The Perseids and Other Stories.
Gene Wolfe worked as an engineer before becoming editor of trade journal Plant Engineering. He retired to write full time in 1984. Long considered to be a premier fantasy author, he is the recipient of the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as Nebula, World Fantasy, Campbell, Locus, British Fantasy, and British SF Awards. Wolfe has been inducted into the Science Fiction
Hall of Fame. His short fiction has been collected over a dozen times, most recently in The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009). His latest novel, Peace, will be published in December 2012.
Acknowledgments
Special Thanks to Matthew Kressel, Ellen Kushner, Stina Leicht, Lavie Tidhar, and especially Ann VanderMeer for helping with the Great Chanukah Story Hunt.
“The Night Things Changed” by Dana Cameron © 2008 by Dana Cameron. First publication: Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, eds. Charlaine Harris & Toni Kellner (Ace, 2008).
“Wise Men” by Orson Scott Card © 2010 by Orson Scott Card. First publication: Intergalactic Medicine Show, Issue 20, December 2010.
“Go Toward the Light” by Harlan Ellison © 1994 by The Kilamanjaro Corporation. Reprinted by arrangement with, and permission of, the Author and the Author’s agent. Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., New York. All rights reserved. Harlan Ellison is a registered trademark of The Kilamanjaro Corporation. Originally broadcast as a segment of Chanukah Lights, a National Public Radio presentation recorded on 15 November 1994. First print publication: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1996.
“Home for Christmas” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman © 1995 by Mercury Press. First publication: The Magazine of Fantasy& Science Fiction, January 1995.
“The Winter Solstice” by Von Jocks © 1995 by Yvonne Jocks. First publication (as written by Evelyn Vaughn): Witches Brew, ed. Yvonne Jocks (Berkley, 2002).
“The Nutcracker Coup” by Janet Kagan © by 1992 Janet Kagan. First publication: Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1992.
“The Best Christmas Ever” by James Patrick Kelly © 2004 by James Patrick Kelly. First publication: Sci Fiction, May 26, 2004.
“Dulce Domum” by Ellen Kushner © 2009 by Ellen Kushner. First publication: Eclipse Three: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Jonathan Strahan (Night Shade Books).
“Pal o’ Mine” by Charles de Lint © 1993 by Charles de Lint. First publication: Christmas Forever, ed. David G. Hartwell.
