The child sits on the girl’s lap, playing with toys: spoons, a butter-knife, the hammer. The child finds the objects interesting. The girl does not understand the child’s amazement. She has forgotten what it feels like to see things for the first time. It has snowed this year, and it had snowed the year prior. The girl was pregnant then, and full. She had been twenty, and ready to pop like a balloon. Now, sitting on the living room shag, she is remarkably skinny. She has forgotten how to make eggs. Last time she tried to cook eggs, with the child in one arm and the spatula in the other, she had burned them. No lunch today. Not yet. The sun is in its maximal position in the sky, and the child is still playing with the toys, which are the father’s. He had left them behind with a note that said, “These can be used to repair things.” The heating bill has not been paid, and the girl knows the limits of what these tool-toys can do. She might get a job soon. She checks emails on her parents’ old Macintosh. Back when her parents applied for work, they would have to shovel the walkway and sift through the mail for news. They had left a snow shovel for her in their will. Tools lay strewn across the girl’s parents’ old charcoal-gray cape, which is now the girl’s house. She has come to understand why ancient civilizations kept ruins alive. It reminds the citizenry that something could still live after death.
The girl is contemplating going for a walk today. But the child will be too cold, and the girl’s gravitational pull is away from herself and toward the child. She remembers her parents’ justification for never getting a family dog. “When you want to go on a vacation, you have to put the dog in a kennel or bother a neighbor with it,” her mother had said. “Believe me, no one wants to watch an animal that’s not theirs.” The child is not the girl’s own. She had lost hers. One in every four women in America today has a miscarriage, she had read in a book. The fetus had been lost somewhere, in a place both deep inside and far away. She would have to accept where it was and that it was not with her. That was all there was to it. She hadn’t been able to talk to her parents about it, since they had died holding hands in the plane crash by then. Sally from the restaurant had asked how the pregnancy had been going, and the girl had told her it was fine, even when it wasn’t. This is what people said to one another. The girl had adopted the child then. The night before she signed the papers, she read that the Hoover Dam had a crack in the western side. Its holes would be fixed by engineers. The girl had struggled to comprehend what tools they could use, or how someone could stand so close to the edge and trust the carabiner to secure her if she fell.
The neighbor used to walk three dogs, but now walks one. The girl has never seen the postwoman smile. Across the street, a ranch house has been abandoned. Some old man had passed away, and his daughters hadn’t wanted the ranch’s old skeleton. It was on the market, but they wouldn’t spend the time to fix it up. They probably wanted to be done with the ranch already. The girl assumed the daughters were from the city. She had seen one of them park in front of the house, and stand outside of it. The daughter had lit a smoke and adjusted her Warby Parker shades, which she wore even though it was a foggy day.
The girl enjoys looking out windows and watching people. The child sits on her lap. The girl points to things and describes them for the child. “Orange wire. Lamp. Christmas tree.” The child can say nothing, but she can listen. The girl wondered what the child could comprehend. The house needed noise to fill its plaster walls; it was like an unwatered plant awaiting May rainfall. So, the girl played audiobooks on her parents’ old cassette player. They had owned the classics: Wuthering Heights, A Tale of Two Cities, Robert Frost: New and Selected Poems. The girl had no one to help her understand the reading. The child would be silent, since someone else was talking.
The girl wonders when she can take a walk. She cannot leave the child alone in the home, not with this toolkit, and not without the child screaming. When she would put the child down, it would morph into a reckless, wild creature that sounds like a dying animal. Detachment was a form of transubstantiation, and the simple cherubim would scream as loud as a motorcycle engine. The girl had asked the doctor for advice, and the doctor had told her to let the child cry. The girl had tried to explain that this wasn’t crying. This noise was guttural. The doctor, laughing, had suggested an exorcism. The girl had laughed too, then drove circles in the Baptist church’s empty parking lot on her way home. To take a walk was to have tremendous privilege, the girl has come to realize. To have space, a moment, and separateness was to be Queen.
Today is the winter solstice, and the next-door neighbors have decorated a backyard pine with clear lights. They are on all night, and turn off when the sun supplants the moon in the sky. The girl isn’t sure why the neighbors have picked this tree; there is nothing special about it, except that it is a pine like all the rest. She wants to smell it and bring it into her parents’ old home. Again, the child. No one wants to hold a child that’s not theirs for any length of time, even if it allows the girl to chop down a tree and give it a home. Again, the tools. They can only solve some problems. The girl speaks to the child. “Pine tree,” she says. The child is gripping the hammer, but cannot pick it up. It is looking at the nails intently, but does not speak of them. The child has no tools of language to express what it wants. It only knows feelings as an abstraction: wanting. The girl has read that, for the first time in 800 years, the Christmas star will be visible in the night sky tonight. The star is the light that appears when Saturn and Jupiter converge.
With the child in her arms, the girl opens the attic. Heat rises, but the attic is cold today. She imagines that someday, long in the future, she’ll take the child someplace warm. She has seen pictures of Aruba. Maybe they will go to Aruba. Each step up the wooden ladder lets a pained creak escape into the empty hallway. The girl looks at the child, who doesn’t mind the noise. When they reach the top of the stairs, the girl surveys the dusty attic looking for the carved-wood nativity crèche. The girl has always been in charge of setting up the scene. Her parents are not here to remind her, but she can still hear their voices. She wonders if the dead still think of the living. She knows the living are fixated on the dead. The porcelain Baby Jesus has stumbled out of the crèche’s sideways cardboard box. He is laying at the feet of a rusted patio chair. The girl picks up Baby Jesus, about the size of a nail, and hands him to the child. “Baby Jesus,” she says. The girl trusts the child to hold onto him. She grabs the box and brings the crèche downstairs. With every step, she repeats “Baby Jesus” over and over again to the child. She closes the attic and the house is warm again. The girl hadn’t realized how much the house smelled like baby powder. Possession of the cape had skipped a generation. It was her parents’ house, and then the child’s. “Baby Jesus,” the girl says, and the child drops him into the girl’s open hand.
A fire truck drives down the street and blares its horn, but the girl sees no fire. She opens the box and picks out the figurines, one-by-one. The child is pulling on her hair. It needs something to fiddle with, so the girl walks into the kitchen and gives the child a spoon. When the child drops the spoon on the carpet, the girl realizes all the figurines are broken, even Baby Jesus. Both his feet are missing. The bottom-half of Joseph’s cane is gone. Mother Mary’s head has fallen off her torso. The girl hadn’t noticed. Inside, she is hollow. She takes the figurines to the island in the kitchen, and looks in the cabinet for a glue gun. “Glue gun,” the girl says to the child. “Glue gun. Glue gun.” She sits the child on the island, and begins to glue pieces back together. The child is disturbed because it is not held, but it does not scream the wild cry. The girl makes frequent eye contact with the child and says words to comfort it. “Glue gun. Mother Mary. Baby Jesus.” Her hands are full of glue now, and things will stick to them. There is glue on the child’s onesie. The child reaches for the glue gun. “Glue gun,” the girl says. She arranges the figurines in the wooden crèche around the Baby Jesus. They are fixed. The island is coated in glue.
It is time for a walk. The girl knows a nativity scene alone does not a Christmas make. She scans the pines behind the cape and pushes open the sliding door. The child grabs onto the girl’s sweatshirt. It is cold. The girl walks out to the backyard and points toward the trees. “Pine,” she says. Then, she points at the deck below them. “Pine,” she says. The girl wonders when children first recognize some things as transubstantiations of other things. It was once a tree, and now it is a deck. The child points to one of the trees and smiles. The child wants it, but not because of anything describable. Language is not a useful tool for the child. The girl reaches for a saw covered in snow, leaning on the deck fencing. When she picks it up, the warmth of her hands begins to melt the snow into a runny, icy liquid. The girl wonders how she can hold a child and cut down a tree. She will assume the child pointed at the smallest tree on the lot, which is as high as the short wooden ladder in the garage. The girl hears the mail truck pull up at her neighbor’s door. She has an idea, and walks with the child through the unshoveled cobblestone walkway to meet the postwoman at her mailbox.
“I’m so sorry,” the girl says. “Please. Could you hold her for just a minute?”
“Do you need something?” the postwoman says.
“Yes,” the girl says. “I need to cut down a tree for Christmas. I need someone to hold her.”
“Ah, okay. Of course,” the postwoman says. “Raise her up now. There.”
The girl hands the child to the postwoman, and turns to chase her pine. She is unsure why leaving the child behind for five minutes boils such tremendous guilt. She believes herself to be a bad person in these moments, as if she is a worker performing a duty incorrectly. The girl begins to jog, with the saw in her hand, and kneels in the snow when she arrives before the tree. When she begins to saw its trunk, the girl realizes that she has not eaten today and knows she must. She saws past the bark, deep into the sapwood and heartwood and vascular cambium, and past the pith back through the vascular cambium and heartwood and sapwood. When the saw clears straight through the trunk, the girl realizes that she has killed the tree. That’s what this was – killing trees. Even when she put lights on it, the tree would still be dead. Once stripped from its roots, it is no longer a pine; it becomes a Christmas tree. She drags the Christmas tree into the house, and a runway of snow follows her steps. The girl leans the tree against the living room wall and realizes she still needs the base from the attic. And the skirt. And the lights. And the ornaments. But those are things she can carry with the child in her arms. Her hands are full of both glue and sap and things will stick to them.
When the girl walks back towards the truck, the postwoman is bouncing the child on her lap. Both are smiling. The girl would like to leave the child there – not because she feels unburdened, but because her baby is without her and happy. Her baby. This is all the girl has ever wanted to see. Her baby is a planetary convergence and a distant, shining star. “Mother,” she says.
Larry Flynn is a writer and teacher. He has received fellowships and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conferences, Columbia University's Teachers College, Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and is an alum of the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop. He will be a Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholar for emerging writers in fiction at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Workshop in June 2022. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in The Normal School, Portland Review, The Petigru Review, Sports Illustrated, several greater-Boston newspapers, and others. He received an MS in journalism from Northwestern University, where he reported and produced a documentary selected as a finalist for a Midwest/Chicago Emmy. He is at work on a collection of short stories.
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