And winter wonderland is full of holy terrors.
Winter solstice. Christmas Eve. Orbs of emerald; ice in crystal pink. Stars fall out of the sky, raining on rosy, dangling lampshades. Fake snowflakes looped to streetlamps buzz through the windows, illumine an abandoned playground, a magic land of steel and stone. Life sleeps not indoors. Angels wing across my back; in excelsis deo. Trees grow out of the walls, fairy lights wrapped around each cloying arm.
Despite what the poets say, nestled snug is not synonymous to nestled safe. For tonight stands one of the special few with a reputation for ripping the veil between this world and that of all our sacred illusions. Amidst visions of pink-sugar snowflakes, a world of pirouetting fairies—marching men fight with swords to the death, epaulettes sparkling—gnashing their teeth, shell-rending at best. The Ghost of Christmas Present emerges from the stripped brick wall and glides across the floor, flickering the candle flames which glow in consistent reassurance from her wreath of a crown.
The world of this year merges longing with nostalgia to craft opulent, immaterial halls. They rise empirical, lavish, brutal in their dance of dreams—to blend and bleed like fractals in a kaleidoscope. Milky candlelight; golden sconces. Amber tile floor and deep blue walls. Women in cranberry dresses; men in snow white suits—sashay and sway; ebony swans and ivory bears. Stars explode in scarlet gold magnificence. The end and the beginning of the year. Great comets whiz in white fire streaks of centuries past. This is what happens when the tide of bubbles washes back the storm in my blood. Yes, there are ghosts here tonight; I can feel them.
§
Christmas Present sits here at my side—toasting the night with an offhanded smile. Holly and ivy tangles her wine-red hair, and poinsettia blossoms burn where her eyes should be. Christmas Past flits on a velvet green chair within the halo of rosy lamps. Silvery sheen, she gapes through this scene, harkened back to faraway times. Stockings spill out on the floor. Hillsides sleep in blankets of snow. A fire cackles in the hearth; candles melt on the sills of glass-stained windows; and a tree, winking with multicolored orbs which rotate in the light, cradles memory. They weave like moving pictures in the silvery threads of her dress and in the strands of her candle-yellow hair. Last but unmistakable—Christmas Yet-to-Come. She rustles silent and cloaked in the violet shadows of the corner, a gentle, pearl-white finger pointing ever onward—perhaps toward a tombstone, perhaps toward a dream. A solemn reminder to live in good cheer, if for no other reason than the uncertainty of her bearing; yet she too comforts me.
Christmas Present sets her wineglass down. She leans forward and whispers against my cheek. Live for today, she tells me. Live for tonight. —Long as you live for love, my candle still burns bright.
§
There comes this season of reflection and bliss, of warmth and love—then you round the bend to face another turning of the wheel, another ringing of the bell, and scramble to understand all over again who you are and what you’ve done. I fall asleep with my teeth clenched, with my hands balled into fists. Another six months of this never-ending stream of word-strung consciousness; pages turned—going nowhere. And I race toward a destination which may or may not take shape. Is it a void or is it a road? —I sprint into the arms of both.
This world used to bloom in horror and wonder so fluidly. Now everything threatens to disintegrate with the slightest touch of fantasy. I have come to fear my own dreams. People frustrate me endlessly, rejoicing in tiny triumphs they only attain playing systems in the squares of a predetermined game. My rate of progression continues to fade—a chamber filling with steam when the great, relentless train charges into the station. Where does it go? And will it pass me by— Or will it run me down? Swans rustle in blue shafts of light. The engine screams. A pillar of golden air catches on the soldiers’ medals and twines in plumes of mist. Pages rustle in gales forced through the tunnels. Books and luggage stacked in haphazard piles—Is this a checkpoint or a hovel? —I kick them down into the tracks. One day I’ll wander different streets, and this will all feel like its own distant dream. And I’ll laugh and wonder why I prayed so desperately for some other city. Then I’ll remember, and remembering, I’ll return…
§
“What are you writing?” the bartender asks.
The currents shift. The world reshapes. The air clouds with a pleasant warmth, a sentimental detachment from my fellow man. Prophecies gleam in golden glass stars. Tonight this psychedelic art deco lounge is a palatial 1800s’ Christmas ball in disguise. Every guest asks a question with their eyes. Andrey wants to know what life is. Anna wants to know what is love. And the sugar plum fairy pirouettes into oblivion.
“Just a ghost story,” I say, swallowing the last of the stars. The stem of the glass makes a bell-like chime on the marble-top. Digging into my pocket, a crinkled mound of bills lands beside it with a sound of falling snow.
God bless us. Every one.
§
I stagger down the sidewalk, boots clacking on the stone. Train tracks, lighted posts, a sky of pollution-haze, colored rose, makes for some lost, surrealist runway. Makes for a lovely waste-land-scape. Coffee shop front rips through the darkness in unashamed neon. Water towers tilt beside crumbling warehouses, poised on spindlelegs like giant, sleeping scorpions. A mural painted in swaths of hypnotism gleams its gold-rimmed spectacles over the ever-encroaching rust of the city. A cathedral with a stately clump of bell towers commands the far corner. I’d expect to find it lit on a night like this—but the windows yawn dark. In some other world, perhaps. I’d wander inside to witness the sweet ministry of a choir, lifting praise in a lost-to-time tongue. Instead I stand at the edge of emptiness—my feet kiss the precipice—and listen to the stoplights, screeching in the waste-rich wind.
Hamlet’s night watchman claims “ever ’gainst that season comes wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated…no spirit dare stir abroad, the nights are wholesome, then no planet strike, no fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, so hallowed and so gracious is that time.” But a watchman in my own right, I know otherwise.
The cathedral glazes over, and statues sparkling as though crafted from steely ice spring like weeds in a churchyard, scattering the lanes with frost-driven, frozen-over eyes. Whether a girl with red-fire poise or a boy with flowers woven in his hair, now all gleam empty—hollow to perfection. A magnificent collection. I too have skipped in your rose-ribbon fields. I have danced upon your stone tables, clicked satyr hoofs and waltzed to the pan-flute festivals. But that was legends ago—years lost now to the idea of a memory. And if ever I wore my own crown, it has long since grown hollow as well.
The winter-blue sheen of their abandoned mythologies fades to gray, melts to nothing on organ-gusts of wind much too warm for this time of season. I click towards home at a resolute pace, though I feel those three following, shifting on the pavement. Back and forth their trains of fabric weave, lamplights casting halo-crowns upon their lowered heads.
Past, Future, Present.
Whispering their names like a charm, warding off the whistle-cry spiritual torments of the dark. These are the ghosts to live for, are they not? Standing at the threshold, perspective cast in quiet. But the night is far too silent for comfort, infused with their glorious horrors, their immaterial splendor—full of the padding of incorporeal feet. Spirits that were. Spirits that are. Spirits that will be.
From down the street, the three near formless shadows rustle in the gloom, each raising the palm of a scarred, luminescent hand—in warning, in benediction. I hardly pause at the porch, but shuffle up the stairs and throw back the bolt. Empty halls of home encroach in watchful shadows, old frames groaning about the doors, wind sighing through the windows. How now—one ghost to another? Shall I live a better man; shall I keep the spirit of the season? Tomes whisper on the shelves, moments strung out of time, stitched over old wounds; bitter truths, teeth clamped over tongue. Castles of ice, cathedrals of stone. Homes across the ocean, homes to rip up roots of blood.
The scratch of flint in the dark. The match flares; the lion roars. The train screams with a thrusting of brakes. Snowflakes dust the ancient church. The hillsides fill with candles. They twist like too-hot flowers, too unattainable stars. Glory streams in the dark. Peace, my child, peace. When the prophecy fulfills itself, you will dance again in time.
The lit wick flicks like a clock. Burns like poinsettia blossom eyes. Darkness clouds my vision. A much too silent night. I remember how it felt, years ago, running on the beach just a week before it snowed. To war against the wind, to hold unmoved between sea and sky. A chorus of winter waves echoes in my mind—a chorus of candles, dripping wax on ancient tile—a chorus of strings, lifting lace-clad dancers, gods of the arts—chorus upon chorus of deep magic and time—sung by the ghost of memory, the ghost of foretelling… I cast about for the third but find none, the candle burning on my own nightstand, set before my own mirror. Fractions of light gather, shatter—soldiers and sugar plums; princes and magic swans. I cup my hand beneath the flame, then with little more than an exhale cast the world in shadow. For a spark of a moment, the glass reflects the pale gleam of two green-flame eyes. —I am the ghost of today; I am the ghost of tonight. And I sleep in unworldly peace.
Sleep in unworldly peace.
§
// Featured Image: The Fairy Dance, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, 1895 //
a literary labyrinth 