Fruitcake Season

He waited for her in the theatre seats; her theatre company opted for Capote’s Southern nostalgia this season instead of ghosts and Dickens.  It made him yearn for astral visitations that might point out the exact moments of his failures, the origin of emptiness. Behind the curtain, maybe she whispered to the guest actor, a joke maybe, about Santa answering her letters, and they’d emerge from their dressing rooms with him no longer in the seats, perhaps having been turned into a snowman or maybe just poof! and gone. Santa wrinkled his nose, like Samantha from Bewitched, to make his magic, and he pictured the two of them, her and the guest actor, wrinkling their noses, making their wishes.

He did a silly thing then. He got up and climbed up onto the stage. He thought of a transformational moment to get into character: when he raced after her in that Chicago snowstorm, slipping, falling into her. The Valentine’s Day Massacre she called it, he a myth then, like the uniqueness of snowflakes.  Then, front-stage, he looked out at the world as Scrooge on Christmas morning, and the giggles from the dressing rooms were carolers and wonder glistened everywhere, as if it had always been there, waiting.

Randall Brown teaches at and directs Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. He has been published widely, both online and in print, and blogs regularly at FlashFiction.Net. He is also the founder and managing editor of Matter Press and its Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.