Photo by Unsplash+
by Claudia Monpere
Ten days before Christmas Eve and Santa’ s eyes look vacant too often, and he snickers when Mrs. Claus sees the letter he nearly mails to Liam calling the boy a greedy little prick for wanting 10 video games for Christmas when he should be happy to get tangerines in his stocking instead of coal.
After Santa nearly burns down the toy workshop attempting to make hot cocoa, after he destroys the winning gingerbread house, furious he didn’t win the elves’ annual competition, well, the elves tell Mrs. Claus that Santa’s dementia makes his annual sleigh flight too dangerous, and she should go instead. But she’s steeped in grief about her husband’s deterioration, that kind, vibrant man she loves vanishing, much like what’s happened to Christmas, how it’s all about accumulating more stuff, how even Santa has countless sleds, piles of unopened boxes from online retailers filled with sleigh bells.
She retreats to the kitchen, baking more peppermint pinwheels—Santa’s favorite— but her tears can’t be stopped, and Elsie Elf finds her crouched in the kitchen, sobbing, wiping her eyes with her apron, Elsie who’s often in trouble, her dreamy ways irritating the elves obsessed with productivity, Elsie who now helps Mrs. Claus up and says they should bundle up and go outside where Elsie points and names the constellations slowly, and by the time she points to The Andromeda Galaxy, that giant glittering spiral, Mrs. Claus is calmer.
“Each star,” Elsie says, “is a glowing opportunity because there are billions of ways to make this world better, and billions of things the world needs more than toys: a sleigh full of mosquito nets, barrels to harvest rainwater, vaccines.
“I always wanted to do more than bake,” Mrs. Claus says.
Claudia Monpere’s flash fiction and flash CNF appear in such journals as Craft, Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Trampset, Atlas and Alice, Milk Candy Review. She received the 2023 SmokeLong Workshop Prize and will appear in Best Small Fictions 2024.
