Four Stories

CHRISTMAS MORNING (NATIVITY)

1.
EVERYTHING LOVELY
and eyes now and all.

2.
JOSEPH
stood in doorways.

3.
SHEPHERD’S PIE
At this rate, we will be late for german dinner.



WHO WAKES EARLY ON A CHRISTMAS MORNING?

Children and bakers, prisoners and priests, farmers and doctors and fathers of daughters and sons.



CHRISTMAS MORNINGS

1.
The shape of your mouth when you sleep, she says, and she says shape like sheep, the sheep of your mouth when you sleep, she says.

2.
There was no seeing clearly, it was Christmas. Everything was suspended in the weight and gravity of a Christmas morning, and holding her head on his lap, feeling the tip of her ear beneath her hair with the pads of his fingers, it was like holding the broad, sensitive head of a cow or it was like a painting he once saw at a museum in Naples, a painting in which a woman bent at the feet of a dead saint and touched her lips to his knee. It was impractical, and his heart stung with the piety of such impractical thinking and it was like bells and choirs singing, and through the window he watched a man in flannel pants stuffing cardboard boxes into big brown bins.

3.
It was Christmas morning! The draft in the house reached his warm shoulders and made his heart lively. Children somewhere were bowed beneath trees and old Mennonites were sitting teary-eyed with hands crossed. It was ginger pancakes and golden milk and peace on earth and joy to the world and unto us a child is born. Tucked away everywhere he was not looking, the generosity of the season was like a conspiracy working to make him glad. “We need to seal the windows,” she said as he stood from the bed. He looked down at her there. He looked at the two front teeth and the smaller teeth beside them. “Next year we will go away,” he said to her. “Next year,” he said, “we will go somewhere warm.”



CHRISTMAS MORNING

Lying where once we were a pile, all of us together, and the wish, this morning to be a pile again. Please be careful, someone says and the stool nearly tips. You are not in Peru, you are not in Milwaukee or knee-deep in the snow. Your hand is not on my back, not lost in the folds of a coat. You are decorating the mantle and ladies' voices curl between us, singing come, oh come, Emmanuel.

____
Stephen Mortland writes fiction and lives in Utah.