was awfully skinny, and had a lot of dark curls, all messy with being tripped and tied up, and he had very dark eyes. His eyes looked nice. How could Santa look nice?
“I will not,” said Mike. He grabbed Santa’s snatcher-sack and reached into it.
“Don’t do that,” Santa said. He sounded depressed.
“Ouch!” yelled Mike. He jerked his hand out of the sack.
“There you go,” said Santa tonelessly. “Got a future now, young man.”
The back of Mike’s hand was smoking. Mike began to cry: no sound, but tears rolled down his cheeks.
“What happened?” asked Janie.
“He got the brand. He’s going to be a Santa when he grows up. What do you least want me to take this year?” Santa said.
Janie stared at him. Was he going to be nice, just this once, and let her keep what she most loved? After she had tied him up? Not likely. “My new doll,” she said, “Talk Back Jack.”
Santa sighed. He tensed his muscles. The cord broke and his hands were free. “I hate this job,” he said. He stood up, grabbed his snatcher-sack, and headed upstairs.
Janie went into the kitchen and got some ice for Mike’s hand. Tears were still welling up from his eyes. On the back of his hand, inflamed and red, was a jagged “S.” She gave him ice in a rag to press against it.
She poured milk, put some cookies on a plate, took cup and plate to the mantel.
Santa came back downstairs, his sack bulging. “Sorry about this, kids,” he said. He wandered into the living room and drank the milk and ate the cookies. “I hate this job.” He looked at Mike.
Mike sniffed. He said, “Do you get to play with the toys before you give them to someone else?”
“I guess you could, if you wanted to,” Santa said. He cocked his head, eyed Brewster, glanced at Janie. I hate that doll, she thought as hard as she could.
Santa picked up Brewster.
Hate him, Janie thought.
Santa put Brewster back down and sighed. “You’re not going to try this again next year, are you?”
Janie and Mike shook their heads.
“Good,” said Santa. He went out the front door. Janie and Mike watched as he climbed into his sleigh. The hyper-toads did a couple of limbering hops and then took off.
Janie watched until Santa was out of sight. Then she went and got Brewster, hugged him tight. She went up to her room. Not a single birthday present left—even the underwear Grandma had sent was gone. There was a note, though, in six different colors, on a page torn out of her sketch pad. “Write me in the pen,” it said, and gave the address of the state prison.
Janie sighed and slipped the note into her desk drawer.
LAZELLE FAMILY CHRISTMAS, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
BERYL’S TREE
At my house, we talk our trees down for Christmas. The youngest who’s gone through the transition sickness and has Earth skills does the tree talking, and this year, that was me. So, with Mama driving, I sat in the front seat of the van, where I hardly ever get to ride because my brothers, Flint and Jasper, and my sister Opal usually fight for it first (my sister Gypsum gave up scrambling for the front seat a while back). All alone, Mama and I drove up to the mountains above the Southern California town of Santa Tekla.
“I hate this,” I said, clutching my pouch with my left hand and the door handle with my right, as Mama negotiated the twists and turns of the narrow mountain road.
“You say that every year, Beryl.”
“Why do we need to kill a tree?” We were rising above the fog line. In winter, the fog drifts in off the sea in the mornings, usually burning away in the afternoons. For my tree day, Mama and I started early, driving through the gray. Now when I looked up past the tree branches tangling above the road, I saw blue sky with drifts of gray across it, cloud constellations and galaxies that shifted as I watched.
“It’s tradition,” said Mama above the purring labor of the engine. “It reminds us of important things.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. I had looked at trees for thirteen years, watched them die under the weight of Christmas, and I had never understood. “Maybe I can find a tree that’s already dead.”
“Beryl!”
“Then it won’t mind so much.”
“When you find the right tree, it will come of its own accord, because you persuade it.”
“How can I persuade it when I don’t believe in what I’m doing? Why couldn’t Flint do the tree? He liked doing it the last two years.”
“It’s a tradition for the youngest capable one to do it, and traditions don’t exist without a reason,” said Mama, in her “that’s final” voice. I’m the youngest, and I’ll stay the youngest for years. Even if my oldest sister Opal married and had babies, I’d have to wait until her kids went through transition, which usually happens at around thirteen. I hugged my pouch and frowned at my future as a tree killer.
A few more kinks in the road, and Mama pulled over into a wide space and said, “Here’s the place for you to start.” She gestured toward a narrow gap between shoulders of dusty, tree-clutched cliffs. I opened the door and dropped to the ground, slinging my pouch over my shoulder.
The air was chill, and quiet except for the chuckling of a little creek between the mountain flanks. I smelled something sharp and sweet and spicy, my favorite plant odor, though I didn’t know what made it. Sycamores had dropped leaf stars on the road, and beyond their dusty mosaic trunks I saw live oaks. I knelt and said the little star prayer that asks for guidance, then rose, picked my way down to the creek bed, and hopped rocks away from the road. I listened for tree talk. Great-Uncle Tobias had taught me how. For a little while I was deaf to anything but the brief murmur of leaf on leaf above and around me, and then I heard whispers: “Sun sun sun WATER bug sun sun sun carbon dioxide!” “Wind bring me bits of other to join with self, make seeds big and fat.” “Water, water, sun.”
“Seek,” I whispered, “I seek I seek.” I whispered and sang it as I walked, and after about half an hour, they realized there was something new in the conversational atmosphere.
“Seek what?”
“Seek one who desires to die.”
When that penetrated, they got louder, and talked faster. “Ax murderers!” “Fire hands!” “Teeth faces!”
They were so loud I felt scared they would fall on me. Great-Uncle Tobias told me trees had a stretchy sense of time. Usually people walked past so quickly the trees didn’t notice them, unless the people did something obnoxious. I wanted to run back to the car, slip out of the conversation and beneath their notice, forget all about the Christmas tree. But I remembered Mama saying that traditions existed for a reason. I waited, murmuring, “I seek one who desires to die, for tradition’s sake.”
Eventually
