The urge to go back and get stuck into my work again is overshadowed by the smell of creamy milk chocolate in the air, and my feet eagerly make a beeline right for the hot chocolate stand. She serves me a huge cup and compliments my scarf — which I made myself, so I accept it with glee — and tells me to come back at any point for free refills.
But the delicious drink, when it’s cool enough to pass through my lips, is just perfectly sweet enough that I know I’ll be done after one cup.
The sound of the choir and laughter from the others. The taste of sweet hot chocolate and the smell of snowy pines. Bright trinkets and handmade crafts, and bright, warm snow clothes. I feel almost more cozy out here than inside by the fire.
I pause by a stall of hand-carved toys and decorations, which wouldn’t normally catch my eye especially, but I’m drifting down memory lane and one of these creations is almost the spitting image of my old family cat.
With a gasp, I peel back the flap of my mittens and snatch it up to inspect the detail.
The stall owner appears as if from nowhere, looking me up and down with a small frown on his face, as if appraising my detail while I appraise his work. He clears his throat, gently, and I lower the cat and look at him. Up at him, since he is a full foot taller than me, and around a foot wider, too.
“Hello,” he grunts, and I give him a small, almost shy smile, feeling a little self-conscious about the way I grabbed his work and gawked at it without acknowledging him.
“This cat,” I say, wiggling it in the air as if he might be confused without some visual aid, “looks just like mine growing up. Sammie. She …” I twist my lips, realizing the problem. “Well, she only had three white paws, and this one has four. The last paw had a little white spot instead of a full sock. Almost in the shape of a heart.” I blink up at him. “Wow, I’m sorry. It just looks like her. I guess it’s the pose.”
He’s letting me speak, just go on, forever. I finally stop and clamp my mouth shut to stop myself from filling the silence, and the huge woodcarver’s lips turn up into an amused smile. “Don’t apologize. I make stuff to make people happy. It’s kind of the whole point.”
He lifts a steaming thermos to his mouth, eyes still on me, and I take him in. I found myself temporarily stunned by the man’s sheer size, but now that that’s settled, I’m noticing his open flannel shirt over a white vest. Sawdust flecks on his rolled up sleeves, and the light beard of a man who’s too busy to care give me some insight into what kind of man he is.
I think of my own high, tight ponytail, light but deliberate makeup, and carefully matched winter outfit, and wonder if I should feel embarrassed next to him. This man clearly doesn’t care much about the way he presents himself to the world. He cares about how he presents his creations.
The final thing to catch my eye is the fact that he clearly lives here, in the mountains in near-permanent snow, and yet he has an almost golden hue to his skin. Like a tan, but deeper than mine. He sets down his thermos and I avert my gaze, taking a few sips of my own hot drink as I peruse the rest of his wares. There are other adorable animals, some majestic carvings, and there is a whole half of the table dedicated to actually working wooden toys. Some puppets, some little bobblehead-type creations, and some large wooden rocking horses.
“Everything here is beautiful,” I profess, watching my cocoa-warmed breath curl up into the sky. “You do all of them by hand yourself?”
“Every single piece,” he says, his eyes never leaving mine, which stay adamantly on the toys. “All made from fallen pine in the forest.”
“This is amazing.” I inspect a rocking horse; the detail in the eyes, the mane, and the tail. I look up again, unwilling to walk away from something that took me back so instantly to my past. “How much for the cat?”
He shrugs. “You said it wasn’t exactly like your cat from home. I’ll paint a new one for you. It’ll be just like Sammie.”
I flush at his use of her actual name. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I know.” He gives me another genuine smile, which hits me just as hard as the first. It’s like his entire face changes. His warm skin even pinks at the cheeks, and I know mine do too. “I’m Braxen. Brax.”
“That’s not a name I’ve heard before,” I say, shifting around to stay warm. I don’t feel like walking away just yet. There’s something about this man, some quality I haven’t yet pinpointed, that makes me want to stick around and get to know him. “I’m Elle.”
“Lovely. Means ‘she’. Doesn’t it?”
I shrug. “Yeah, I guess, in French. What does Braxen mean?”
“It means shooting star.” He reaches up and rubs at the back of his head. His woolen beanie hat rubs against his forehead in unison, and he tilts his head at me. “Sort of, anyway. My mother tongue is a difficult one to translate.”
“Where are you from?” I ask, curious from the phrase. He has no discernible accent, but the warm glow of his skin stands out compared to everyone else who seems to live here in the snow.
He opens his mouth to answer, but pauses, and I find myself briefly mesmerized by the softness of his lips. The beard looks like it might be rough, but his lips look so full and soft.
“Mama!”
A kid’s cry makes us both look to the side, alarmed. He’s dragging his mother over to one of the creations. An intricately detailed robot, painted to look futuristic and cool, and yet a little more unusual and interesting than anything I’ve ever seen in a store. It’s like he had some source material for the figure that I’ve just never seen before.
“Yes, sweetie,” the tired mother says, smiling apologetically up at Brax. “It is absolutely beautiful.” Then back down at her eagerly hopping kid. “We’ve spent all the money for today, though. Sorry! Maybe some other time.”
She turns to leave, and Braxen’s voice kind of booms out of him, which I wasn’t expecting, and my cocoa sloshes. “Wait!” She spins around, surprised, as her kid attempts to pull her to the next shiny thing. Braxen holds out the robot, face stoic and still. “It’s yours.”
She shakes her head, face turning red, as she looks around to keep an eye on the child. “Oh. Thank you so much, but I couldn’t— I really..”
“I insist,” he says, and pushes it right into her protesting palm. The kid keeps pulling her, so she is soon lost in the crowd.
“Th-thank you!” we hear her cry before she’s gone.
I look back at Brax, and give him a smile, but he doesn’t look particularly happy about the exchange. He glares at his watch, which is a kind of strange neon green apparatus I have never seen the likes of before, and then looks up at me as if surprised I’m still there.
“No change,” he says under his breath. “Absolutely not a blip. It’s remarkable.”
I clutch my cocoa to my chest and look around, checking I’m not holding up foot traffic by lingering around this stall for so long. “Uh … what?”
He shakes his head, looking grumpy, but I’ve already come to figure that he isn’t as irritated as his expression might portray. “It measures positive energy nearby. I am absolutely certain it isn’t broken, and yet … nothing I’m doing seems to be working. It hovers at about the same, all the time. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down, but it just seems so random. Why didn’t she like the gift? They wanted it, now they have it. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?”
I shut my mouth, which was hanging open a little, and then realize … it’s a joke. He’s being ironic, or something. So I play along. “I’m sure she appreciated it.”
He taps at his watch screen. “She didn’t. I’m telling you, it didn’t make her happy. Why not?”
I raise my eyebrows, bizarrely intrigued by this enormous man who literally seems to glow with an energy I’ve never felt before in my life. This man who seems kind of crazily hellbent on spreading Christmas cheer. “Oh, um …” I begin, but then shake my head and smile, sipping my drink. “I guess I should—”
“What?”
>
Honestly, he looks pretty lost in this moment, and I feel a lot of warmth towards him. He didn’t know it at the time, but he almost recreated my childhood best friend in the form of pinewood. I feel a strange connection with him, and I’m unable to justify it to myself.
“It was a wonderful and generous thing to do, but …” He waits, brows furrowed, and I notice his eyes are the kind of icy blue that I could get absolutely frozen in, and never find my way out. “OK. Well, I think maybe she was a bit embarrassed. If you really want to know why she seemed awkward about it. Most people don’t feel comfortable with charity or uneven exchanges like that.”
“Uneven exchanges,” he mutters back to me, and then his mouth spreads wide in another happy smile that reaches his beautiful eyes. My stomach actually flutters, and I have to avert my gaze before I blush harder. “You’re kind of a genius, maybe, Elle. Are you a professional?”
I laugh softly. “A professional?”
“Like, are you a full-time happiness expert here? Maybe a harvester of goodwill or just a researcher?”
I laugh louder. “I’m a journalist.” He looks confused, which confuses me so deeply that I actually find myself explaining what a journalist is. “I write, uh, about stuff that’s happening, so people can know about it?”
He is thoughtful. “How would you say the quickest way to make people happy is? The easiest way to bring happiness to a whole town, perhaps?”
“What a crazy, intriguing question,” I say aloud, and he doesn’t seem bothered that I kind of called crazy. I also called him intriguing. “It’s sort of a huge philosophical or psychological debate that I wasn’t really expecting when I came out for a walk today.”
“The psychology of happiness,” he repeats, looking up at the sky and frowning. I note the light stubble lining his handsome jaw, and look away before he catches me staring. “So what’s the answer?”
I bite my lip, enjoying the weirdness of the situation a little. My theory is writers love to have strange encounters. It’s like kindling for our minds. Then an answer comes to me. “I think it’s all down to … words. What people consume daily affects mood. The way you word things affects perception. I think, not to toot my own horn, that a lot of it is down to the media. What they chose to portray every day, and how they portray it. Stories are everything to us, in kind of a primal, very real way.”
He frowns. Mouths ‘toot my own horn’ to himself, and then shakes his head, and looks me very carefully in the eyes.
“What would make you happy?”
“This cocoa makes me really happy,” I say, taking another sip. “I’m going to get a danish in a minute, and I expect that will bring me some joy.”
“Blips,” he mutters. “Barely blips.”
“I’ve never met anyone so interested in making strangers happy. It’s, uh, nice.” Truthfully, he’s weird as hell, but every time he turns his ponderous scowl into a smile, I feel a fishhook tug from my core in his direction, and I’m finding it hard to want to walk away and look at the rest of the fair. I feel like I’d rather stand here in the cold and discuss the semantics of joy with this icy-eyed stranger than do anything else right now.
“When you write about happy stuff,” he says, “you probably make people happy. Happier than when I give them gifts.”
“Oh, no one wants to read happy things,” I joke, but only partially. “Scary, weird things get clicks. I’m actually here to investigate the monster of Seven Pines. Have you heard much about it?”
His face falls, not into the normal resting scowl, but to something more akin to mortification. “No, that sounds ridiculous. Hearsay. Libel.”
I’m a bit surprised by this answer. I thought it was a well-known thing in this area. I thought we might be able to joke or laugh about it a bit. “Sorry,” I say. “It’s just a little story for the internet. Nothing mean about the town or any of its people. It’ll be fun. Cute. You really haven’t heard of it?”
“Nonsense,” he says. “You should write a story about something else. Something nice. Like the Christmas fair.”
I take a mental step back and look around, and I wonder if he’s actually wrong. A fluff or human interest piece around Christmas might be the great partner piece to the dramatic horror of a ski slope haunting.
The way he’s looking at me has changed. He had been amused, jovial overall, and friendly. Now his eyes scrape up and down me with careful deliberation, as if he is trying hard to see right into my soul. I might not get his sense of humor, with the whole watch bit, or pretending not to know what journalists are, but I still feel like we got along well up until the ‘monster’ thing.
He must just think I’m so silly, believing in monsters. I give him a small smile. “If you think of anything,” I say, “I’d love to talk to you again.”
I’m accidentally taking a page or two out of Liara’s book, and giving him a shy, coy smile as I write my number on a piece of notepaper, fold it, and push it across his table to him.
“Really,” I add, making eye contact.
I watch as he swallows, and stirs, but his facial expression stays locked on some emotion in the family of ‘suspicion’, or even ‘anger’, so I give him a small nod and walk away.
Damn. I try to tell myself that I’m a little upset at losing out on a lead for my story, but I know that truthfully, I would have loved for him to call me anyway. There was something about the smoothness of his voice; the warm comfort of the way he towered over me and yet seemed to have such a gentle disposition. I could learn to understand his jokes, I suppose. It has been a very long time since a man has interested me. It’s a shame I blew it without knowing how, but that’s OK. It means my vacation remains wide open for what I came here for.
I wander around the rest of the fair lost in my head, daydreaming about headlines and taglines and snappy closing lines.
I have never been so filled with ideas before. It must be the clean mountain air — maybe a vacation was a great idea after all.
Chapter Four
Braxen
I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t really have done any of that. I try not to engage much with humans, except to try to get my damn positive energy meter to twitch whenever I can, but that woman was … interesting.
There was something about the way her looks seemed to clash with her shy personality. The way she fiddled with the cup in her hands and asked me questions, and yet was able to stand there being the most beautiful human I have ever seen. For some reason, I opened up to her, and yet she barely reacted.
It doesn’t matter, since as soon as I fill my harvest quota, I am hoping against hope that my mothership will arrive and take me. But … I don’t know. She’s not only the most gorgeous, intriguing person I know, she taught me more about human happiness in five minutes than I’ve managed to learn in five months living in a cave in the mountains.
Maybe it’s for the good of my job here for me to find her again. Spend more time getting to know her, and therefore all humans in a way, before I leave. Maybe she can help me find the trick to getting the damn dial to move.
I stand in the same spot for the rest of the day, trying different tactics as usual to try to make people happy. I refuse payment, add free gifts, even try out a compliment, but the measuring device I wear on my wrist doesn’t note any significant alterations in the base average happiness. But why? Back home, I would be sure that giving extra good deals in a trade would make my people happier. But here, are they actually a more complex species? Or are they incapable of feeling any happier than this?
This isn’t good. It isn’t good at all. Surrounded by so many people with such average moods has not only completely sapped me of my natural gifts, but it’s also … well, to try out some local slang, it’s kind of bumming me out, too.
I make enough money to pay for my spot in the fair for the day, and when I pay the mayor’s assistant, I give him the rest, too. “For you,” I say. “Have a good Christmas.”
He blanches, and hands
it back. “Thank you, Braxen, that’s very kind, but I can’t accept this much money.”
“I honestly have no idea the worth of what I gave you,” I say dryly. “I live in a cave and mostly subsist on wild vegetation.”
There’s a pause, but then the man laughs, and claps me on the back. He walks away, shaking his head and chuckling, and I go back to get my bags filled with hand-carved wares.
I don’t understand humans at all. He refused money, which he can exchange for anything he desires, and yet when I told him I eat weeds he experienced an actual uptick in positivity?
At least I have a few watts of positive energy logged to my harvest device today. I just wish there was some kind of a pattern to it. Every now and then I’d pick some up from Elle — lovely Elle, she didn’t know she had paid and more for the cat figure she’d been eyeing up — but I couldn’t figure out what I’d been doing to achieve it.
It’s an endlessly frustrating job, but at least I know it isn’t one hundred percent impossible.
That’s something, right?
I lock away my stuff in a rented cubby by the tourist center, and get ready for the night. A rumble in what I can only describe as my very soul tells me a tiny avalanche is coming nearby, so I will do what I can to stop humans from leaping into the abyss. I guess.
There’s something else tingling at the periphery of my extrasenses, too. Something I can’t figure out; normally they just stick to predicting avalanches or similar disasters. I just can’t seem to get Elle out of my head.
It’s interesting. And I decide there’s no harm in pursuing it. I take off for the Seventh Pine trail, or ‘home’, and I wonder what could possibly be about to happen that my subconscious is trying to warn me about.
Chapter Five
Elle
I tried to spend more time in the market, but my fingers were itching to type. Instead, I went back to my room and warmed up and typed out some skeletons. The town of Seven Pines inspired me, and I wanted to get some stuff down before I forgot it.
The Alien Reindeer's Wish Page 2
