Living With Murder

1.

Cedar Falls, Ohio

YEAR 2040

Her eyes were the cloudy blue fish-eyes you might expect a psychic to have and sometimes, at night, she forced them open and daydreamed that her own vocal cords had strangled her.  She could see the ropy things pushing through the skin of her neck.  Then, she imagined nothing but a half-gasp before death.

The early-morning air was soft and cool, and the grass was still brittle with dew.  Barefoot, Mary Miller walked the length of her yard, finally realizing that she wasn’t Brandon.  And she wasn’t dead.

Late in the afternoon and glazed with sweat, Mary awoke to the sound of glass breaking.  She sat straight up from a deep slumber.  Questions surfaced in her sleep-addled mind: Where was she?  Who was she?  She buried her head in her hands and fingered her unwashed hair, and nearly stepped in glass.  There, she saw the calla lilies, which had tumbled out of their blue vase and fanned out onto the floor.  Water dribbled along the broken shards.  She searched her mind for the dream, for Brandon, but just as the flowers had slipped away, so had he.

Mary Miller took quick, shallow breaths.  She tried to orient herself.  Her husband sat on the skeletal love seat across from her, staring.  She wore his favorite lingerie: a barely-there, moonlight-colored nightgown made to resemble an angel’s gossamer wings.  Her nightgown shone rainbows on the matte-silver walls—tiny triangles interwoven to create her spherical home.

“You were mumbling Brandon’s name again.  Same dream?” her husband, Kirk, asked.

“I…don’t know.”  Her eyes threatened tears; she fought against them, confused.  “I…don’t know…if the dream was any different.”  Lately, she lost days, forgot things.

Kirk swirled a green drink in circles, chugged it, and then slammed it against the coffee table she had left out the night before.  “Our son’s dead.  The sooner you realize that, the better off we’ll both be.”

“Our son?”

“Dead.  Don’t pretend like you don’t know.”

“How can you be so—?”

“I’m sorry.  Look, I loved him too.  I really did—I really do—but that won’t bring him back.”  Mary watched his jaw slacken and his lips begin to tremble.  Just before he stood up and walked away, he wiped at his eyes.

Today, tonight—what time was it?—was like every other.  And tiny glass needles of sadness stabbed her.  One day blurred into the next.  She slept on the couch as a silent vigil for her missing son.  Soon, he might be returned to her. 

“Where are you going?”  She followed him to the door.

“Work,” he said, and brushed a kiss across her neck.

Mary pulled the slinky drapes open, leaned against the kitchen counter, and closed her eyes.  Nothing ever changed. 

As a child, she wobbled over the uneven ground where corn grew “knee-high by the Fourth of July.”  And in the autumn, bright orange pumpkins splashed across the landscape farther than the eye could see.  That was before the weather changes.  Yet, things were not much different now except humanity devoured the earth in its desperation for land.  It sickened her, this need that overtook rural communities.  Property, real estate: Mary could have spit the words, knowing the way politicians helped to draw and re-draw imaginary lines to fit the financial “needs” of the area.  Cedar Falls struggled against its yuppie image, nicknamed Malls Falls by townies like the Millers.  And where was Brandon in all this?  A town is only as good as its community, and it seemed as if Brandon was scooped up by some omniscient hand and dropped off the earth.  He just disappeared. 

Some things were exactly as she remembered them.  Just nine miles north, the muck farms still flourished with sweet radishes, turnips, and other leafy-green vegetables.  The immigrants came from all over to pluck the bulbous plants from the rich, dark soil.  If only she didn’t have to look outside.  Mercedes airmobiles crowded the skies.  Her neighbors ran by, slurping overpriced coffee and wearing White Oleander jogging suits. 

Mary opened her eyes and turned around.  She could really use a drink.  Not her husband’s wheatgrass-health-gag concoction but a real drink.  The refrigerator door’s LCD screen blinked “instant waffles,” which were added to the weekly delivery list.  In the back, she found what she needed: apple juice, vodka, and Jacobstein’s Sour Apple™.  A special treat, despite everything.

Carrying an apple martini between her middle and ring fingers, she sashayed across the living room.  The heavy carpet changed color and texture as her soles sank into it.  While she walked, it transubstantiated from artificial grass that poked between her toes, to white ocean sand and again to prickly patches of crabgrass.  She tipped the fluted glass towards her mouth, a rare event--the unfamiliar sour taste made her shiver, and she squeezed her eyes shut against tears.  Covering her head with her hands, she sank to the floor and pulled deep inside herself.  Trying to forget.  She wasn’t sure when it happened, but, at some point, she slumped forward and fell asleep on her stomach.  Suddenly, she heard someone at the door.  How long had she been sleeping?  She yawned as she stumbled into the foyer, saw Kirk’s face through the peephole and unlocked the front door.  It’s ok.  Brandon’s alive.

Kirk caressed her cheek with the back of his hand.  “How was your day, babe?”

She turned on her heel and huffed into the spare room where she made traditional tack-on-telephone-poles style paper flyers and cardboard signs with the words:

Missing!

Brandon Miller

Height: 5’11”     Age: 22     Hair: Brown     Eyes: Hazel

Last seen with: Patrick Deegan

If you have any information regarding Brandon’s whereabouts, please telescreen the Miller residence at 1085.

“Oh, Mary,” Kirk said and stroked her mousy-brown hair.  “I don’t know why you do this to yourself.”

“I have to find him.”  She had found markers in the storage shed, buried under other old junk.  These almost-daily physical efforts seemed necessary: stabbing words on the pages and pushing staples into telephone poles (the few that were still around) so hard that she felt her shoulder muscles twinge.  E-mail, message boards, and other high-tech searches did nothing to alleviate her mixed anger and sadness that sometimes expressed itself as aggression.  They were too anonymous.  

“I know,” he said and tried to hug her before she wriggled from his grasp, “but he’s dead.  Why don’t you understand?”

She turned away from him, her long frizzy hair wet against her cold face.  Numerous times, she heard the details: her son was hitchhiking down a deserted road in West Virginia, wearing a sequin-covered gown, and some no-account hick killed him.  The man dumped his body in a place far from the edge of a dirt road that swiveled and swerved in continuous circles and loop-de-loops before, several miles away, it emptied straight into a major highway.

Mary pictured it all as Kirk told the murderer’s tale: The Man wore fisherman’s boots and trudged in knee-deep mud until he found a place far enough away that he thought it could hide his terrible secret.  Up, up, up a sheer hillside where thin birch trees grew in unsure diagonals and sassafras colored the ground in reddish sepia, he yanked Brandon’s dead body with his back and his arms, feeling that his overstretched biceps might break like dead tree branches in a high wind.  The Man.  To Mary, He didn’t exist.  He couldn’t.

Mary Miller shed violent tears at her son’s funeral.  Her body shook and swayed.  The smell of stargazer lilies made her contort her face in disgust; that was the smell of death.  Mary ran her fingertips over her son’s smooth coffin the way a blind person might, but instead of accepting the awful truth, she took a deep breath and told herself, My son is still alive.

But it wasn’t true.

The officer told her; her husband told her; and his dead body on that cold-looking table told her.  But she doubted her eyes, their words…the truth.  “No,” she keened.  She couldn’t believe it because she didn’t dream it.  Why was there no warning?  Not a single vision?  Brandon and she got along okay enough, but they were never as close as he and his father.  Yet, she dreamed about everything.  She saw almost everything, even things that didn’t seem to matter, like grades that Brandon was about to bring home from school.  Not that he ever bothered lying.  She would have known.

2.

On the first Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Mary and Kirk Miller awoke to footsteps clacking on their stone walkway, the only thing to mark the location of their house aside from the mailbox.  The doorbell, which was affixed to the solar panels that comprised the top of their house, buzzed and their home quickly pushed up from underground.  Mary looked out the peephole, suspicious.  “Who is it?” her voice sang politely.

“Mary Miller?”

She opened the door two inches and looked at a man with feminine features who wore a black and silver police uniform.  “Yes, I’m Mary Miller.”

Her husband hovered nearby.  “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.”

“You are the parents of Brandon Miller.  Is that correct?”  He took his hat off and bowed his head, nervously moving his fingertips over the hat in a continuous circle.

“Yes,” Kirk, her husband, replied.

Mary’s world whirled like a tire swing spinning too fast.  She had to get off, to tell the kids pushing her to stop, just stop already.  Then she fainted in the doorway.

Bleary-eyed, Mary smelled something metallic and tried to understand what had happened.  Her husband stood over her.  Slowly, she sat up and rubbed her temples; still woozy, she asked, “Can I see where he died?”  Until she could touch it, smell it, and taste it for herself, she wouldn’t believe it.  The Spirit World gave her no warning. 

“Yes, ma’am.”

The couple walked side-by-side to the police-issue airmobile, the officer in front.  Once the vehicle reached some switchback dirt road, they hiked into the woods single-file. 

Mary wrung her hands.  The deeply wooded air edged her eyelashes and skin with a paper-thin frost; it was as if the trees breathed. 

Kirk bent down, hiding his tears.  Jaw clenched and hands curled into tight fists, the officer’s eyes looked teary.  The wind was cold and strong that afternoon when they arrived at Brandon’s place of death.  Mary bowed her head.  This was a holy place where his spirit might return.

“Right there,” the officer said and pointed.  He walked farther away, up to the old dirt road, probably to give them some privacy.

Mary bent and touched the ground where the officer had pointed.  Her flat ballerina-style shoes crunched the thin layer of snow that had recently dusted the autumn leaves.  The spot on the ground that the officer referred to seemed warmer than the surrounding area.  She pushed the leaves aside, her hands slimy with their mitten shapes, until she reached the warm earth.  There was blood.  Not much blood, but it was there.  She dabbed her fingertip to the drop that had gelled on the wintry ground and held it against her lips.  That might seem disgusting to someone else, but to her, it was all she had left of her only son.

Kirk stood over her and watched.  “At least it wasn’t cancer,” he said.  “It was faster than that.”

Mary turned around, face contorted in confusion.  How could he be so glib about their son’s death?  “He probably writhed in agony for three full minutes.  It’s not as if he was shot between the eyes.  He was strangled to death.”

“I know,” he mumbled, and nudged dirt around with the toe of his left work boot.

Mary expected to fall into her husband’s arms and weep.  She expected that he would rub her back and tell her everything was going to be okay.  She expected that through their tears and her willpower, maybe they could bring him back—she did have psychic abilities, after all.  Instead, Mary stared at the blue hills off in the distance while Kirk watched the young police officer’s barely noticeable movements.  Neither spoke until Mary looked up and asked, “Can we get out of here?”

“Yeah.”

THE FUNERAL

Mary knelt, the hem of her dark purple dress wet with dew, and picked goopy dandelions as they walked up the hill.  Kirk reached for her other hand twice.  Both times, she smiled lopsided and whispered, “Do you think Brandon is here?”

“I don’t know,” Kirk said, letting out a deep breath.

She smelled the lily-of-the-valley that she had pasted against both sides of her head, hair tightly woven in a French twist.  Brandon had always liked her hair down so he could jump and reach with his tiny fingers all splayed out and try to climb her braided tresses.  Finally, she cried.

Lobster-style, Kirk interlaced his hand in the crook of her arm, fingers brushing her elbow, and whispered, “Are you going to be okay?”

“No,” she said, the word a barely audible gasp.

“I love you.”  He fingered the lily-of-the-valley on one side and pushed her chin gently towards him for a kiss.

“Where’s Brandon?”

“Come on,” he said, and gently prodded her nearer to the burial plot.  “Let’s get this over with.”

Mary didn’t understand most funerals.  They were often solemn.  Quiet.  The mourners huddled around each other in tight-lipped grief.  Nobody convulsed with tears--it was undignified.  So when reporters, curious college kids, and zealots of every variety swarmed the graveyard where they would soon bury their son’s ashes, fury colored her cheeks red and leapt from her mouth, “Out of my way!”

She watched their eyes widen, and they dashed several hundred yards away.  But she still heard them.  Her son was a political issue.

This, she believed, was why Brandon wouldn’t admit he was gay or transgendered or whatever.  She remembered a recent push to ban homosexuality and when that didn’t happen, there was a move to outlaw homosexual behaviors.  Historically, the subject had always caused fights, and Brandon abhorred conflict.  Not far away, she watched them fight among themselves.  As if they could force each other into believing the rightness of their personal opinion. 

She just wanted to bury her son.

Mary and Kirk ducked under the gravesite’s flimsy green awning.  They held hands tightly in their united grief; and it was several minutes before they noticed anyone else.  But there he was: small glittering tears filled the strange man’s piercing blue diamond-eyes.  He brushed his yellow-blonde hair out of his way.  The tears looked heavy as they splat against his subdued charcoal gray suit.  He must have known Brandon well, the way his chest heaved in sadness.  Suddenly, he looked up, startled.  “You must be Mr. and Mrs. Miller.”

They looked at each other quizzically and then back at the stranger, waiting for more information.

“I’m Patrick,” he said, and reached to shake their hands.  “I loved Brandon very much.”

Kirk looked down at the Kelly green grass and rocked back and forth from heel to toe.  “This is all…I’m sure you understand…our son wasn’t forthcoming about his, um, you know, sexuality.”  Unable to make eye contact, Kirk scratched his upper lip.

“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Pastor Dylan of the Illuminated Worlds Church smoothed his gold cloak as he ambled towards them.  He held a short, lit taper candle in his right hand.  There was no greeting as he touched the flickering grave marker and it flashed to Brandon’s name.  Ten years ago, when most Baby-Boomers died, cemeteries ran out of unoccupied space; some stopped burial altogether, but this one buried the burnt remains with bones and coffins and other ashes, and created electronic grave markers that flashed all the names and faces in each plot.

“Brandon, we miss you,” Pastor Dylan began.  His body swayed as he lit loved ones’ candles.  “We pray for your peace.”

Mary held her hand against one side of her green candle.  Brandon’s favorite color.  Slowly, she closed her eyes and slipped into darkness.  There was only the candle’s orange flame in front of her closed eyes.  Then, a sudden sizzle and pop jarred her senses.  Her eyes flashed open to Pastor Dylan sprinkling something that smelled as strong as mugwort over a charcoal, and it sparkled.  Again, she closed her eyes.  This time, she heard his deep smooth voice speaking in tongues and then commanding that Brandon’s spirit make itself known.  This wasn’t a parlor trick.  Pastor Dylan was a C.M., Certified Medium.

“Brandon?”  Mary asked.

“Yes, Mom?” came Brandon’s voice from the C.M.’s mouth.

“Maybe we should hurry this along,” Kirk whispered to her, fiddling with something in his pocket.  The practices of Certified Mediums were outlawed in 2034 when the Religious Right officially took control of the American government.

“I love you, Brandon,” Patrick said and, softly, he took the C.M.’s hand in his.

Pastor Dylan smiled and opened his eyes, which suddenly wrinkled with worry.  “Go.  Now.”

A crush of reporters stumbled into each other, tripped over microphone cords and heavy camera equipment, and risked serious injury as they shoved electronic devices into the Millers’ faces, demanding, “The world wants to know: how are you feeling?”  Mary turned on her heel indignantly and pushed through the crowd, hiding her face, afraid of arrest.  Had they witnessed the illegal ritual?  The C.M. trying to communicate with her dead son?  Dead.  That word was heavy, a stone she couldn’t fit in her mouth.  How am I feeling?  She always wanted to answer the same way: punch the reporter repeatedly in the chest and eventually stop, and then say, “That’s how I’m feeling.”  Of course, maybe they really waited for the riot that would ensue between the Millers and the anti-gay community should anybody be foolish enough to speak a mean word about her Brandon.

Mary never would have predicted so much hate at Brandon’s funeral—he was such a good kid, an even better man; at least, so she thought.  People spit words and raised their fists, holoslogans glowing.  Holographic, three-dimensional words, some mixed with images, swirled in a mostly circular pattern around the protester’s heads, as if halos, or in the immediate line of vision.  One spoke the standard: IT’S ADAM AND EVE, NOT ADAM AND STEVE, and flashing an almost pornographic image of Eve eating an apple and letting it dribble down her chin.  Another spoke of tolerance while yet another spoke with a loud mechanical voice as it swirled, “WE’RE HERE, WE’RE QUEER, GET USED TO IT!”  Mary couldn’t look at these people; her son wasn’t a political issue.  He was a human being with thoughts and feelings and a soul.  And these people couldn’t give her enough privacy to cry for the son she never knew. 

To some, this was an evil that never should have happened: murder over sexual orientation.  To others, it was the inevitable conclusion to a sinner’s life.

She gazed at the people who had come despite the cold weather.  Their young tongues wagged hatred—hatred for what, she didn’t know.  Justice.  The word rolled through her mind.  There is no justice for the dead.

Strange how it didn’t snow, even though Christmas was approaching fast.  Usually the white stuff fell every day until just past mid-March.  She hugged her trench coat tight against her body as a gust of wind cut through her.  The cold nipped her ears.  At least it wasn’t summer.  All the college kids on summer vacation might have come, making it even more of a show, just to say they had been there someday when their children asked.  A fleeting moment in history. 

Mary stared into her clasped hands, fighting back tears.  The pre-cremation coffin cast a long shadow that she closed her eyes against. 

“This is the last time you’ll ever be able to see him.  You’ll regret it if you don’t say goodbye.”  Kirk said she needed to see his cold waxy skin, to smell the strong flowers on his white dress shirt.  Why did he have to be so graphic? 

She turned away and her tears rolled down her husband’s shoulder.  “That’s not him.  I know that’s not him.”

3.

It was almost a month since Brandon’s death, and nearly Christmas. 

A thick cigarette dangled from Kirk’s lips, and he struggled to light it against the wind, holding one hand over the cigarette and lighter to shield the tiny flame.  Finally lit, he puffed on it and held it close between his thumb and index fingers—not many people did it that way anymore.  Of course, most people became official nonsmokers after the ban.  Kirk couldn’t remember the last time he saw anyone smoke so publicly, but he didn’t have anything to lose.  Brandon was gone.  His wife, in her way, was gone.  And the sidewalk was clear of secondhand smokers.

For a few minutes, he stood under the wide awning of Puffy’s Restaurant; fifty years before his birth, the place was a train station and then some rich yuppie thought he could convert it into an ultra chic restaurant.  Instead, it became a place for good food and underground booze and coffee where college kids liked to hang out.  The wealthy sector of Cedar Falls craved a polished appearance.  So it surprised Kirk that the brick road was never bulldozed into dust and supplanted with a wealthy sky-way complex.  The “wave” of the future.  Too many damn “waves” lately, as far as Kirk was concerned.  One such wonderful-as-apple-pie technological advancement headed his way right now.  Fucking machines.

Along slid one of those weird robot cops that reminded him of his mom’s old vacuum cleaner.  “Smoking is illegal.  Smoking is illegal.”  Before the machine printed an automated ticket, Kirk smothered the cigarette in the “vacuum cleaner’s” eye and flicked the butt in the street.  Suddenly, the machine went quiet.  Anyone could see why the jails were overcrowded: too many damned laws.  Kirk’s mouth tugged at one corner.  That was the closest thing to a smile he experienced since Brandon’s death.

When the bitter cold that hung white against a perfect-blue sky subsided a little, he pulled his heavy triangular collar close around his neck and walked home hunched over.  His grandfather’s brown leather coat nearly busted at the seams as he shrugged it around his broad, thick-muscled body.

Home.  The neighbors did decorative Christmas things.  Kirk cried himself to sleep in an empty bed.  Mary probably wouldn’t notice he was home.

December 15, 2040 – Kirk tossed his airmobile keys on the coffee table—some things never change.  Hard to believe that people still needed keys.  The geekazoids invented electronic passcards like what hotels once used; but they guaranteed about as much security as tissue paper on a rainy day.

A blast of teethchattering-cold air hit him, pronto.  He kicked off his wingtips and threw back a couple whisky sours.  Most nights, Mary moped around the house with her head hung so low that Kirk imagined her neck snapping off, head falling to the floor like a withered hydrangea.  And he couldn’t take it anymore.  For fuck’s sake, all she had to do was leave the heat on while he worked to keep this pretty roof over her head.  He looked behind the couch and saw her huddled against the wall in the fetal position, knees curled nearly up to her chin, rocking, mumbling.  Jesus.

Kirk leaned down and asked, half-kidding, “So how was your day?”  No response.  Sometimes, he envied that she could spend all day having a nervous breakdown while he had to break his brain at work.

“You’re not funny, Kirk.”

“I know.”  He knelt, elbows resting on top of his thighs, trousers becoming grass-stained from the variegated landscape carpet.  At least the pants were self-cleaning.

He reached to brush a strand of hair out of her face.  She pulled away.

“I’m cold,” she said. 

“Me too.  Maybe we could go in the bedroom and talk about how not funny I am.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Right,” he said.

Often, he remembered the way he held her after their first fights: Kirk raked his fingers through her long hair, and Mary squeezed him so tight he thought her tears would crush his chest.  Back then, she knew how to laugh, giggle, sigh, roll her eyes . . .  be human.  Back then, they knew how to take comfort in each other.  Back then, they loved each other. 

Kirk Miller pretended he hadn’t sat up all night crying, and that he had “snapped out of it”, but he couldn’t.  All he could see was empty space: where Brandon’s baseball cap might have been, where his rumpled jacket was once tossed carelessly onto the couch; and instead of his kind but spitfire voice, silence.  In the early mornings when he might have driven his son to school or had a heart-to-heart in the kitchen, Kirk now ducked behind a newspaper and ate his grapefruit slowly.  Soon, he would jog four blocks while monitoring his heart rate and usage of sweat, right after giving his wife a heartfelt peck on the cheek.  Not that it mattered; she jumped at his touch.  Brandon was a wound that grew between them.  She seemed so spellbound by the world that she had created for herself that reality must have been this frightening pest, a tarantula that kept crawling up her arm. 

Like most nights, they passed in the hall like two flies on the wall, each backed away from the other.  Like most nights, he stretched his neck to kiss her and mouthed, “I love you.”  Like most nights, he wanted to do more than that; he wanted to put her back together, to make her happy again.  But she stared at her hands folded in front of her.  She never looked at him and said, either by word or by action, that she loved him.  Met with constant rejection, he grew disinterested.  Occasionally, he pictured himself slapping her across the face just to see if she would react, but he wasn’t that kind of man.  At least not yet.

“Good night, Mary,” Kirk said loudly.

She ignored him and walked into Brandon’s room.  First, she dusted.  Then, she made his bed.  Afterwards, she vacuumed, turned out the light, and kissed the doorknob goodbye.  Kirk didn’t understand it.  It was as if she expected him to come home soon.

December 20, 2040 – There’s a movement among wealthy hipsters to modernize Christmas.  X-mas “trees” made from recycled cans, fringed into the shape of trees, were all the rage.  While a Budweiser-sponsored Christmas made a certain amount of sense, it just didn’t seem like real Christmas to Kirk.

He didn’t believe in religious hocus pocus or that some kind of all-knowing bogeyman lived in the sky who wanted him to be nice one day out of the year.  The Bible, to him, was just a book, a collection of myths.  But he believed in the ritual.  He believed in the familiar taste of eggnog, peanut butter cookies, and his aunt Cyndi’s fudge.  He believed in the pine smell inside his home, red cinnamon candles sparkling everywhere around the house, flickering with warmth, life.  Most of all, he believed in the power of the Christmas tree: bringing something alive into his home to adore.

With a heavy sigh, he prepared to move on.  In his own way.  He loaded up the airmobile with rope and his good laser saw.  For some reason, impulsively, he didn’t fly the Slickster G300 but hovered it along the road until he reached his parents’ property.  Before reaching the back edge where field met forest, he turned off his lights.  Then, he walked in circles until he found the right blue spruce,--a rare tree--and returned for his tools and vehicle.  The fully charged laser saw made short work of something he remembered as labor-intensive.  He loved these trees so much, especially their smell, that he couldn’t stand to completely kill them; what he took would be a trim.

“Who’s there?” his father’s aristocratic voice questioned.

“Hi, Dad,” he said.

“Oh.  Somebody remembered it’s almost Christmas, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, let me help you hoist her up.”

Kirk’s dad wore a shiny maroon bathrobe, held a shotgun under his left arm, and he said, “Don’t know why you can’t just ask permission like a normal person.”  The old geezer was like some farm-boy Hugh Hefner: rugged and good with a rifle, but attractive, smooth, could shoot you with a martini in one hand and a shotgun in the other.

“Where’s the fun in asking permission?”  Besides, it was illegal to so much as rake leaves without a permit.

They hoisted the tree to the roof and strapped it down with ropes and bungee cords.  Any vehicle would have been a tricky thing to drive with an unwieldy chunk of greenery on top, but if he had to drag it through ten feet of snow for thirty miles, he would have done it.  Somehow, Christmas would visit the Miller house.  He smacked his hands together, knocking them free of wood bits, and then slapped his dad on the back.  “Thanks.”

“Anything for my boy.  Hope you and the Missus are holding up ok.”

Kirk smiled and nodded, silent.  What a phony smile.  During the ride home, he thought of his father, a man he rarely visited but loved deeply.  Such fathers and sons—those who suck it up rather than cry, and slap each other’s backs instead of embrace-- have a special detached kind of closeness. 

This, Christmas, was the right thing to do: make an effort to move on.  Maybe doing normal things would make something, anything feel normal again. 

Later, he wrestled the blue spruce through the auto door, and began to decorate it in silver and white ornaments; he festooned it with noisy bits, bubble lights, and subtle amber colors that reminded him of a warm fire.  Like a child, he whirled and tossed icicles, wound the tinsel in time to Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, hummed to himself and kept moving.  Movement made his sadness almost bearable.  His wife should have done these things because she had always done them.  They were her specialty, but she lived in another part of the house.  She lived inside her mind now. 

December 21, 2040 – When Kirk woke up, he saw the tree’s tip smashed into the corner, horizontal on the floor with the skirt torn and its bits fluttered into the next room.  Mary forbade Christmas.  She ripped all the calendars off the walls, and covered all the mirrors in black.

December 24, 2040 – Kirk put up the holiday cards that evening, and saw them on the floor the next morning.  Maybe Mary wasn’t doing well with Brandon’s death; yet, she was so selfish about it.  She couldn’t seem to comprehend, no matter how often Kirk explained it to her, that these things helped him.  And it hurt to see Christmas constantly ruined.

December 25, 2040 – Mary glared at the presents under the tree.  Before dusk, she shredded their wrapping the way an animal might: with dents, fingernail scratches, and bitter smells.  As she did so, Kirk watched not in anger but sadness.  Slowly, she tore the family apart.  All his memories now converged into this one bestial moment when no one could have Christmas.  Mary stole time—she marked the days, weeks, and now a month, in denial.  Brandon would always be dead; and since he was dead, there was no way to be a family again.  They all had to die together.