Demon

“When haven’t I been?” I wanted to type in large, angry caps. I wanted to yell through that chat window that I was like a man possessed, that I was running on an average of four hours of sleep, Chinese takeout, coffee, and whatever happened to be in the office break room, that he had manipulated me, that I was never going to give the story to Helen, and that the sooner hell was invented, the better.

BandHClay: As though I could help it, as you very well know. You know you could have written it all down and really submitted it to Katrina—or even here—yourself.

Light1: And languish in submission and publishing hell? Please and no thank you. Besides, I told you: My story is ultimately about you.

BandHClay: I still don’t understand!

Light1: You will.

I must have broken a sweat at the first appearance of the chat box. It beaded now against my nape, my hairline.

Light1: Distribute the proposal for next week’s meeting.

BandHClay: What makes you think I have a proposal? I need a synopsis for that, and to write a synopsis, I need to know how it ends.

Light1: Just give her what you have. Helen will love it and ask for the full manuscript.

BandHClay: Don’t you get it? There isn’t a full manuscript!

Light1: There will be.

19

The old woman’s scalp was just visible through the feathery curls of her hair. Beneath the fake fur collar of her wool coat, her back curved up into a bump at her nape, reminding me of the woman at Vittorio’s as she blew out the candle on her cake. Over the tops of her gray boots, stockings a shade too tan bridged the distance to the hem of her skirt, the skin beneath as veined as pink marble.

I was shopping for my niece, studying an elaborate nativity scene. Aubrey had started Susanna’s collection two years before we married, and that had been our gift to her every year since.

The woman’s head swiveled on her bent neck as she looked from one Christmas tree to another, each of them crammed with ornaments like a chicken breast stuffed with bread crumbs. Above us, glass baubles hung from the ceiling in a fantasy rain of giant, multicolored drops.

“How I love the trappings of the season.” She plucked an ornament from a nearby tree: a rendition of a snowman worthy of Dr. Seuss.

My happiest childhood memories were of Christmas, when a covert visit from Santa was the pinnacle of the season; before I learned that some children got more gifts than others, that visits from Santa cost money. Before I got my first job and the holiday got reduced to paycheck bonuses, unpleasant gatherings, and a pile of trash left out on the curb on January 2.

“And how I adore your nativity scenes. Porcelain and pristine, so pretty.” Separating the syllables of “pretty” as my grandmother used to do, the demon passed along the edge of the table, looking down at the nativity scene the price tag of which was quietly displayed on a corner of the stable: $2,499. She plunked the snowman down in the manger on top of baby Jesus.

Watching her, I could have sworn something moved behind the milky iris of her eyes.

“Of course—” she picked through elaborately painted wise men, turning Joseph over as though to see what he had on beneath his robes—“it never really happened that way. The wise men didn’t show up at a quarter ’til ten, the animals didn’t gather round, and Mary didn’t wear blue. She wasn’t wearing much of anything, come to think of it.”

“Lucian!” I hissed. The thought of a naked Mary offended even my vestigial religious sense.

“What? She was in labor.” She dropped Joseph on his back in the middle of the sheep.

I left the nativity table, disgusted, wanting one sacred thing—even if it was an amalgamation of pagan feasts I would likely not take part in this year—to hold onto. I had come here under the guise of shopping but mostly to experience the holiday vicariously, to seek out the commercial trappings of a season that had once meant happiness.

“Your Christmas ditties, the ones about the actual incident and not about dancing snowmen, flying deer, or fat men in red, always make me chuckle.”

To any passerby she might have been any little old lady talking about her grandchildren, her white hair fluffing around her head like the spun fiberglass snow of the village display at the store’s main entrance.

“Had it not been for the identity of the baby, it would have been an otherwise unremarkable night, and your polite ‘Greensleeves’ would have been an appropriate soundtrack, after all. But it wasn’t an ordinary baby. It wasn’t an unremarkable night.”

I felt, rather than heard, a suffocating silence close in around me like the endless void of space. Then I saw the blinding flash of a star careen toward its zenith.