Season of Feasts: Advent Calendar

The old earth spins, heated up by cars, by the coal-fired incandescence of Christmas lights tracing roof lines, swung on branches like Mardi Gras beads.

    This mist, so warm for the season, is a warning, all fields melded with muddled sky, the traffic’s reflection red lacquer. When we arrive at my family’s gathering (the last for my aunt;     we can hear her in the other room), my cousin’s child is roundly pregnant, her softness starting in the softness of her hair and flowing to her haunches. She watches her grandmother the way she will soon watch her baby:

    reading need, reading thirst, the flicker of the other side in their eyes. Her husband is a guard in the city jail, young face rubbed tired by swing shifts. Over dinner, he tells the story of an inmate who tried to drown herself in the toilet. Later, in the secret language of presents, my mom and I walk outside to move gifts from Santa from her car to mine (a set of Choose Your Own Adventure books, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, a pogo stick my child won’t yet weigh enough to use). I light our way with my phone.

    Mud glistens. We slip. My uncle has not spread gravel this year. We do not speak about what it must be like to care for her sister’s body, her sister smiling only once, when Mom wiped her clean. Perhaps their girlhood and this deathbed overlap, here at the end or the beginning of an era.

    We who are alive never know. My aunt’s hands when a child, nails dirty, grasp a lead pencil and follow her mother’s lines on a Formica table, tracing chickens and houses with smoke coming out of their chimneys, her mother washing it all away with a dishrag before dinner. I slam my car door. The highway exhales a few feet away. Cars bear down in brightness before roaring by, leaving us with the whisper of dripping trees, the tearing sound of high water in the branch behind the house (water the reason why my aunt wanted this lot). Back in the sickroom, a room of windows her son built so she could watch the watchful deer eat, the slender trunks of southeastern trees rising, my aunt says something must pass over in the night to make her worry so, her breath

    a thing she just can’t catch. She says the morphine makes her mouth sore. On TV, Little Ricky is no longer in black and white. We all watch together as, sound way down, Desi Arnaz smokes a cigarette and explains to his son how Santa can be real.

    Little Ricky reaches up, all his questions answered, to hang his stocking. Lucy glides by, too beautiful to bear in color.