“Fuck! You really busted my lip!” Santa or Not Santa shouts.
“That’s not a very Santa-like word to use,” Quinn whispers behind me. I shush him. He’s only going to escalate the situation. This man is already red-faced and steaming.
“I know this was a good gig for a while, but I can’t handle it anymore. I have had it up to here with this holiday horseshit!” The pan-that-started-it-all clatters to the ground and with the same hand that had been holding it, Santa audibly snaps his mittened fingers.
A tornado of gold sparkles whips around him. The red suit and the white hair all fall away until, before us, where Santa once stood, there’s only a tattooed man with scraggly hair and a stubbly face who couldn’t be more than thirty-five. “I quit!” he yells up to the ceiling.
Around his feet is a cloak with a halo of gold dust wiggling around it. It captures my attention until the man walks toward us with intent. Jabs a finger in our direction. “It’s your problem now.”
The man exits the house. Disappears into the night.
A frantic beat goes by before Quinn yells, “What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know,” I mumble, awestruck. My heart sputters.
This whole night is bending my mind into a glass pyramid that’s refracting my thoughts like colorful light in a thousand different directions.
I’m inexplicably drawn to the left-behind cloak. It glimmers there on our floor like it’s transported here from another realm. So bright I might even mistake it for a fallen star. As if hypnotized, I inch closer.
“Pat, what are you doing?”
“I just want to get a better look.” Why is this glowing piece of fabric somehow calling to me?
“What if it’s cursed or something?” Quinn asks, voice pitching up into a scared place.
“We can’t just leave it in the middle of the floor!”
“At least go get your gloves!”
“I’ll be fine!” I’m bending over. Leaning into the light. Sensing an unexplainable warmth.
Right as I begin to reach for it, someone who is unquestionably not my husband shouts, “Don’t touch it unless you’re willing to take the job!”
10AN ELF APPEARSQUINN
I’m staring at an elf.
At least, I think he’s an elf.
I guess it’s insensitive of me to assume but there is a short (though not that much shorter than me) white man wearing a pointy green hat on top of a mop of messy black hair with pointy ears sticking out the sides.
“Don’t touch it unless you’re willing to take the job!” Patrick snaps up and looks back at me. All I can do is point at our new visitor who is still standing in his own tornado of golden glitter. Slowly, it swirls to nothing.
“Who are you?” I ask because my husband is clearly too stunned to speak, still crouching centimeters away from the glowing cloak that lies crumpled on our floor. Who knows where that’s been? I teach second graders. I know the dangers of touching lost items, just rewind to my last three head colds.
“Bart. I mean,Hobart Holly, head elf.” He shimmies up to full height, shoulders back, smile tight. He wears velvety deep green overalls and leather boots with pointed toes. “All my friends call me Bart.”
“Nice to meet you, Bart,” Patrick says, extending a hand in the professional way he’s been programmed to do.
“I saidfriends.” There’s a firm edge to his otherwise singsong voice.
The shade of it all! Patrick retracts his hand awkwardly, so Istep forward, needing to pronounce some agency here because Patrick is fumbling. “Hobart, excuse my husband. He didn’t mean to offend you by assuming we were all friends here. We obviously just met. Listen, we’re having a very bad night, and we’re a little stressed out.”
Hobart sighs. “You’re stressed out? This is my first Christmas as head elf and Santa has just quit on me!”
A rational, less tired version of myself would question everything that’s going on here, but right now, either Patrick and I are having a joint hallucination or this is really happening. Strangely,this is really happeningseems to be winning out, so I aim for the easiest answer I can get. “To clarify, that man who just walked out of here is Santa Claus?”
“WasSanta Claus,” Hobart clarifies.
