Something strange happens to humans on Christmas Eve when the town is hushed, and the streets are still. Frozen in the final hours of the night. A kind of purgatory. When the flaming eyes of the lampposts wink sleepily before the joy of Christmas Day tolls.
Christmas. Like a birthday, only a birthday for everyone. And who doesn't like birthdays? The celebrations of coming another year closer to death. That's my favorite part about birthdays, even though I can't participate in them. I'd very much like a birthday cake.
People are always surprised when you mention some kind of depressing thing on Christmas Day, as if the day were too sacred for something so morbid. Say the suicides committed by thousands of individuals who spend the winter alone. The poor and homeless loveless on the grandest holiday with nothing but broken candy canes from people who passed them by on the street and happened to feel jolly. Maybe a dirty penny. Maybe a card from a church. No family, no food, no home, no presents.
No one wants to hear that at the Christmas dinner table. No. They'd rather think of chestnuts roasting on a fire and Jack Frost nipping at their noses. And having personally met Jack, he detests the idea almost as much as I do.
So they'll talk of happy things, like Santa and red-nosed reindeer. Presents under a Christmas tree and kissing under the mistletoe. They'll eat richly and fall asleep to the oversung carols outside by a choir of children no one knows.
They do not see me. I live in the hours between death and salvation. They do not look at my handiwork and instead turn their faces from the shadows in the corners and the wailing wind outside, the Christmas moon, and the stiff, bundled bodies in the alleyways. The ashen faces which bright Christmas morning will never thaw. They instead look at the fires spitting in their living rooms and libraries and the roasted meat on their platters, the fuzzy wreaths, and bulky garlands. The dancing candles. Missing the magic of tears that have frozen on wrinkled skin.
Forgetting that death does not believe in Christmas any more than you believe in faeries.
Nevertheless, I come, just like every other Christmas Eve before.
This time, I came for her.
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Fantasy(Book #1 in The Ghosts of Christmas Series) Muriel Johnson has the misfortune of inheriting the grotesque wealth of her late husband Bell Johnson, the most celebrated singer in The Havens. On top of handling her grief, Muriel spends her Christmas ex...
