The Bread We Eat in Dreams

14. As to how Santa Claus delivers all those presents in one night, it has seemed clear for some time that he possesses a localized wormhole small enough to pack into a reasonably-sized steamer trunk and tidy enough to not smell too musty when taken out for the holidays.

15. It is probable that the silver jingle bells comprise a renewable energy source for the wormhole, being as they are the remains of superdense stars attached to his sleigh with red string.

16. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are not related, though of course they have had professional dealings, both of them being warriors, standing watch on either side of the winter. Santa feels it is rather cruel of the Bunny to hide the eggs, and the Bunny feels Santa makes the whole business rather too easy. It is a little known fact that the summer solstice and the autumn equinox also had champions. The Summer Horse brought dark red cherries and highly munchable tomatoes along with gifts of sunshine and unfrozen seas and little iron ponies mysteriously appearing on the mantle. The Autumn Maiden sat on a throne of pumpkins and whatever vessel she touched filled with steaming cider or cocoa. Children buried wishes written on bits of paper in the cooling earth, so that they would come up in the spring like tulips. Santa and the Bunny are all that’s left. Sometimes they miss their family, but they understand all too well the fragility of the consumer holiday cycle, and how thin the ropes that tie it to myth, like a boat barely tied to the pier.

17. During the rest of the year, Santa Claus sleeps. And studies advanced mathematics.

18. Santa Claus doesn’t need a chimney. A house is a closed system, and at one time the chimney was the only reasonable approach. It was the only vampire-proof entrance to a domicile, the doors being guarded by the invitation addendum and the chimney itself being far too filthy for the obsessive-compulsive vampire to bear. Santa Claus does not wish to be taken for a vampire. Vampires take, Santa Claus leaves. It’s not the same thing at all. But it is impossible to specifically invite Santa Claus, only to tacitly do so by the laying out of stockings, etc. Santa entered where he could. But these days, vigilance against vampires is extremely lax, and he can come through the front door without issue.

19. The list isn’t about naughty and nice. If you think about it, coal is a very useful present. Santa Claus isn’t a monster. You can burn that coal and stay warm in the winter. Just because it is black and grimy and it isn’t a fantastical electronic intelligent machine with a kung-fu grip and a pre-installed game suite doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful and warm and formed over millennia in the heart of the earth and very occasionally the difference between life and death. The list is about whether or not you need to figure out the lesson of the coal.

20. The stockings you hang up aren’t the size of your own feet. That would be silly—you need those socks in the December nights. They are the size of Santa Claus’s feet, which are wide and flat to help him get around the Pole.

21. The reindeer are immortal. They are, in fact, the eight demiurges of reindeer-kind, and this accounts for their flying. Their name might sound whimsical, but they are the closest the human tongue can come to approximating the true names of the caribou lords. Rudolph, far from being the adorable, earnest fellow of the tale, is in fact Ruyd-al-Olafforid, the All-Destroying Flame of the Yukon. His mother was Kali and his father was an ice floe. His nose appears red because his body is full of coals, and his eyes flare with a terrible conflagration of his soul. The tips of his antlers are like candles in the snowy wind. He is not vengeful, but he is the light in the dark of winter, consuming and giving life at the same time. Your carrots only make the lord of flame stronger.

22. Once, there was a war in Santa Claus’s kingdom. No one likes to speak of it. This was a very long time ago. It was not at Christmastime but during the summer when all in Tyg-qir-Mully is banked and waned and quiet. The duke of the orcas, Blig, wished to not only possess the wormhole and the steamer trunk that contained it but also eat the queen Gyfwoss’s royal seal, who was named Ghym and had a fondness for turkish delight. All were taken by surprise, and Blig’s hunger was very great. All pitied him, save the seal. Gyfwoss called down her spouse the moon and Blig ate it, such that when the moon rose back into the sky it took the body of Blig with it, and not only was the moon made much more beautiful by its new orca-coat, which you can see even now in the dark and light patterns on its surface, but Christmas, in a manner of speaking, was saved.

23. Santa Claus cannot see when you are sleeping, nor can he see when you are awake. He is not that kind of man and is a little put off by the suggestion. He has his own affairs to tend to, thank you very much.

24. Santa Claus is a perfect integration of the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. He is a perfect icon of integration. In his guise as this triple god he simultaneously indulges all the most decadent desires of food and drink and wealth in a single Morning of Receiving, is driven across the whole of the world on the Sleigh of Purposeful Dedication, and considers very seriously both the array of presents he will give and whether he will give them at all, the great Judge of the Self. Once Freud asked for a cigar box for Christmas. Santa Claus did not read anything into it.

25. There is always the chance that Santa Claus will not come this year. It has never happened, but in the realm of probabilities we must concede that there is that floating strange variable. Without that chance Santa Claus would not be what he is, rather, he would be something dependable and every day, like the tide or the wind, and no one would think twice about him. It is this chance which makes children so excited on Christmas Eve. You simply cannot know. For this reason it is vitally important, especially as one gets older, to ask for exactly what you want for Christmas, whether it be a unicorn that really talks or an artificial intelligence that will not destroy the world or a new job or someone to love you despite your being a know-it-all or a teddy bear or universal health care or the ability to finish things you start. Santa Claus does not judge wishes. He only wants you to be happy. He can’t do everything—he is only a constru

ct, not a constant. But he tries his very best to be good at his job, and every year, the sun grows a little stronger after he has passed through the world.

We Without Us Were Shadows

It seemed as if I were a non-existent shadow—that I neither spoke, ate, imagined, or lived of myself, but I was the mere idea of some other creature’s brain. The Glass Town seemed so likewise. My father…and everyone with whom I am acquainted, passed into a state of annihilation; but suddenly I thought again that I and my relatives did exist and yet not us but our minds, and our bodies without ourselves. Then this supposition—the oddest of any—followed the former quickly, namely, that WE without US were shadows; also, but at the end of a long vista, as it were, appeared dimly and indistinctly, beings that really lived in a tangible shape, that were called by our names and were US from whom WE had been copied by something—I could not tell what.

—Charlotte Brontë

There was every possibility of taking a walk that day. Great dollops of sunshine melted on the moors; clouds and shadows cut the bare winter-sleeping land into a checkerboard. The servant Tabitha had gotten a whole egg, a wedge of bread, and a bit of her damson jam into each of the four children, bundled them in bonnet and gloves and extra stockings, and set them out of doors into a blue Yorkshire morning so cold it seemed ready to snap in half at the slightest touch. She thought absolutely nothing of turning them loose on the moor that day of all days—they needed a helping of the out of doors, such children as these, with their canny tongues and stubborn tempers. Judgment Day would come and go before those four would look up from their pens and papers otherwise.

Stiff gorse tangle burst underfoot as they took to the day. Charlotte, the oldest, a serious child with thick hair parted through the center of her skull like a dark sea, a round, pallid face, and a fearsome scowl, trudged resentfully up a worn purple path through the bruised February hills. “I do not see in the least why we must leave Our Work just to satisfy Tabby’s obsession with fresh air,” she sniffed to none of her siblings in particular but all of them generally, her nose beginning to run in the hard crystal air.

Branwell quickened his pace to keep up with her, his long curls whipping across the bridge of his great arched nose, his brow furrowed and fuming, frowning as if to reflect Charlotte’s expression as perfectly as possible though he could only see the back of her, her woolen dress prickled with bits of twig and old, withered heather.

“I had intended to explode the castle on Ascension Island today, with Crashey and Ross and Bravey and Stumps and Buonaparte and all the rest trapped inside!” he groused, his breath puffing ellipses ahead of him. “With much splendid blood and fire and leaping out of windows and dashing brains out on the earth! The heavens would have wept at my slaughter! Now Tabby has sabotaged me with her eat your eggs, there’s a lad and fasten up your coat good and tight; they’ll be safe and sound for ages yet. Until evening, anyway.”

Emily and Anne hung back from the older children, holding hands and picking their path carefully, so as not to crush any sweet plant that might erupt in spring with blossoms to cheer them. Emily looked up at the frozen sun, her brown ringlets crowding a narrow, sharp face that looked already quite grown, though she had only nine years. “We would have made them alive again by supper, Bran,” she snapped, tired of her brother’s thirst for the blood of their favorite toys, a set of twelve fine wooden soldiers their father had given as a present to his only son—but the girls had made a quick end to that. No sooner had Branwell got them but his sisters had colonized the kingdom of the soldiers, named them and claimed their favorites. The Young Men ever after ruled their hearts and idle hours.

Little Anne, the youngest, laughed. The prettiest child in Haworth, her hair almost reaching the blonde shades of girls in lovely paintings, she watched everyone with her wide violet eyes as though spying upon them, with the necessity of making future reports to some unseen master. “It’s a wonder Crashey doesn’t get dizzy, with his forever falling down dead and getting up again!”

Charlotte stopped short at the flat top of a little hill that kept watch over a low leafless valley full of the starving prongs of black yews and thorn trees and tumbling colorless grasses, thistle and old ivy, worn stones near as high as Anne. Every branch and blade was limned with glassy golden light, which gave the scene a strange affect, as though the children were seeing it from much further away than they really stood, and through a frosted pane besides. Charlotte put out her arms and her young sisters huddled into them, for the wind bit at their cheeks and made rosettes of their dimples. Branwell did not partake of their cup of affection, though he wanted to. But he felt Crashey would not, and certainly Buonaparte would have the head of any lad of his who behaved in such babylike fashion. Branwell had of late begun to feel his sisters were not quite serious about the game. They had romantic notions and did not submit to his pronouncements of death and disaster by flood or spectral conflagration, but went about healing everyone with phials until all his fun was spoilt.

“There’s nothing to be done,” Emily said. “Unless we should sneak back. Let us see if we can’t find the mushroom patch again and make believe there are fairies there. I’m sure you can explode the fairies if you like, Branwell, though since they have the power of flight you won’t get quite so many brains dashed on the earth, but perhaps you can arrange a duel to make up the difference. Duels are superior to battles anyway.”

“I shall have a duel with Tabitha if she puts us to bed without our writing hours this evening,” Branwell said, kicking the hardened black earth with the toe of his boot. “I shall whack her with a biscuit.”

“If there are to be fairies,” said Charlotte imperiously, “the Duke of Wellington will have to be their King.” Anne ventured that her own favorites, Ross and Parry, the great polar explorers and namesakes of two of the smaller wooden soldiers, might be fairy lieutenants, perhaps wed to sensible fairy maids. But her sister, chief of the tale and engine of the game, did not hear her. The Duke stood always at the center of their pretended worlds, for Charlotte adored him as fiercely as Branwell worshipped Buonaparte. They had called their favorite wooden soldiers after the mortal enemies, and insisted on their inclusion in every adventure. And what a dashing crystal image it was that rose in Charlotte’s heart then—Sir Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and King of the Fairies, with long black wings and a crown of lightning, astride, not a white horse this time but a white rhinoceros, his sword a blue, lamplit flame! The beauty of the dream expanded like a silk balloon in her chest, almost painful in its familiar sweetness, the pricks of a tale, and as ever, she felt as though she could never be big enough for even one of the stories that stormed inside her. It would drown her entirely and or burn her up from within and leave no part of Charlotte behind. She could see him in ruby clarity, really see her Duke, putting a lance of rose-colored ice through the forehead of the pig-footed, ram-headed, lizard-mounted Emperor of France.

A cracking, rustling thump down in the wintry hollow broke Charlotte’s vision into pieces. The sun dug down into a trench of clouds, casting the vale into shadow, sending a brute wind to rattle the thistle-heads. Something moved between the long, sharp trees.

“Look,” Emily whispered, her breath strangled and squeaking.

“I don’t see anything,” said Branwell, peering through the shade.

“Look.”