myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume breathes a life of gathering gloom.
Who: Chuck Shurley (and YOU??)
When: Christmas Day
Where: his apartment and Purgatory
Summary: Being away from home on your kid's birthday is rough.
Warnings: Depends on who comments in but probably language and listen, let's not even pretend that this won't be heavy on religious content. Chuck has a lot of feelings.
In a ramshackle house in southern Maryland, there is a cabinet in a wall. It's nothing special at all: one of four cabinets in a seemingly pointless piece of furniture in an appallingly messy dining room populated by old TV Guides and a lone bowling pin. The cabinets are filled with strings of tacky Halloween lights, photo albums from high school, a pile of vinyl records, sheets for the fold-out couch, and a set of anomalously nice gold-rimmed china that somehow wound up in a box in a car after some great-aunt or another died.
Every year on December 24th, Chuck Shurley opens that cabinet. He digs behind the tangles of blinking pumpkin lights, shoves past the photo albums, and gently shifts aside the dusty china to pull out a small, fake table-top Christmas tree, pre-decorated with tiny lights and ornaments, topped with an angel who appears to be in pain. Every year he sets it on his coffee table and lights another candle on the menorah. Then he settles into the couch and watches them burn.
He did this every year for decades, since the year he bought that same tree with his bar mitzvah money and snuck it into his room- quietly, so his parents wouldn't see and wonder what their son was doing with Christmas decorations. The other 363 days of the year it lived in a secret place in his bedroom. But every year after his parents went to bed, he would go into the back of his closet, lift up that floorboard, and pull it out. He used to huddle in a far corner and turn off all the nights so he could watch the tree light up, throwing thick golden light on everything in his room- his matchbox cars, the Wrath of Khan calendar, the box of Victoria's Secret catalogs behind his bed just visible from that corner. All in deep shadow.
He would stare into that lone glow of warm light and wonder, trying so hard to wrap his young mind around the Everything slowly emerging inside Him. Sometimes he'd stay up all night, touching the synthetic branches lightly and wondering when He would start feeling like a Father instead of just a kid with a mind four sizes too small.
This year, he had to buy a new tree for the first time since 1984 and before that, 1952. That's counting Chuck's little life and the other name tag He wore on his last trip around the block. He snuck it into the HoA when everyone else was busy, not wanting to answer odd questions about a Jew celebrating Christmas.
Celebrating would've been the wrong word for it, though. There was little celebratory about cracking open a fresh beer and silently watching light dance off the ornaments as the menorah candles kept burning down. He long since stopped celebrating this day, chosen arbitrarily to co-opt filthy pagan holidays from the same gods He used to violently strike out against. Zeus, Tiamat, Baal- the Father shared their days now. It still made Him a little sick on a level not quantifiable with logic.
There was the TV adverts, and the tacky mall sales. The holiday parades and disturbing blinking electric icicles; those bricks in a massive temple of materialism. The commercialism of Christmas disgusted him so deeply that some years He wanted to scream until the sky itself caved in.
Instead, He bought a cupcake and lit a single birthday candle.
This year was His first year away from home. Chuck had never celebrated the day (or the real birthday, in April) away from home - if "home" meant His known and Created universe - and this year was at enough of a loss that it felt like a new beginning. So yes, there was the secret tree and the booze, the incongruous menorah and the quiet contemplation the next day. The customary thought of the Son, still languishing alone in Heaven, waiting for a Father to be seated at the right hand of (in fulfillment of the Scriptures). There was that, but there also was the long strands of pale lion hair on His jacket, the claw marks in His jeans from that terrible night with the Darkness creature that tried to murder the angels. The constant ever-presence of the Lion on the fringes of His awareness.
There was Aslan, but there was the memory of the same Son from His own world. They both merited their own time, their own honor, their own attention from the five-foot-six alcoholic in His tiny apartment.
The day passed but slowly, a slow swirl of alcohol and birthday cupcakes, slow contemplation and the deliberate, studious avoidance of guilt. It felt so wrong, to be utterly disconnected from the world and the Heaven He designed. He felt a little like a fish twisting on a line.
So He asked Himself, asked them- how do they do it? The overwhelming response and the instant answer He provided Himself was all one: it pointed the same way. Normally He would've dismissed that answer and gone to drown Himself in booze and sink in a slow spiral of .2 BAC until everything blurred and nothing mattered anymore.
Normally. But nothing was really normal here, was it? Here, almighty archangels could spread their wings and seed and somewhere, an unborn baby cried. Here there was a sorceress teenager with the heart of a god in her front pocket and no idea of the power she held. Here, a man could get to know His own children, and field nary a question about His decisions, because nobody expected him to know.
Here, he knew there was a child sitting alone, being curmudgeonly this Christmas and wondering about the Nephil that might have been.
Here, He could see His family. The thought was still (after eight long months) so foreign that it had the power to intrigue. The thought still made His heart hurt like a knife sliced clean through to His softest places.
Family. Children. Sons and daughters, all alone and nursing wounds from the shadow of their Father.
Sitting alone in that bachelor apartment, Chuck figured he at least owed them some humanity on Christmas. They were only so wounded from His own Darkness mirror coughed up by the Port. It fell well beyond the jurisdiction of His decision of non-interference.
And maybe it could be a present for Himself. Just maybe, this Christmas, he could be with his family.
The first step frightened: step outside His own small apartment, venture into the larger House. The second was even harder. That night, before Darkness fell, He braved the night to go to a certain club to see a certain angel. That one archangel, the four-wingéd baby who lost so much and deserved so much more, his trumpeter of everything good and terrifying.
More than once he had to remind himself of why. Why leave the nest, the cloistering cocoon of his own tiny apartment. Once the answer came, it was easy. Maybe he could see that baby this year, maybe he could feel the night air on His face.
Maybe He could even not be alone. The thought of humanity, of angels, of any human interaction at all sounded so sweet- that purest of joys only so beautiful because he was so long denied it. Maybe, he thought daringly, he could do something new, and for the first time in two thousand years, spend Christmas with his family.
Just maybe, He could sit at the bar in Purgatory on the birth of the new-born king, and maybe...
He could be happy.
When: Christmas Day
Where: his apartment and Purgatory
Summary: Being away from home on your kid's birthday is rough.
Warnings: Depends on who comments in but probably language and listen, let's not even pretend that this won't be heavy on religious content. Chuck has a lot of feelings.
In a ramshackle house in southern Maryland, there is a cabinet in a wall. It's nothing special at all: one of four cabinets in a seemingly pointless piece of furniture in an appallingly messy dining room populated by old TV Guides and a lone bowling pin. The cabinets are filled with strings of tacky Halloween lights, photo albums from high school, a pile of vinyl records, sheets for the fold-out couch, and a set of anomalously nice gold-rimmed china that somehow wound up in a box in a car after some great-aunt or another died.
Every year on December 24th, Chuck Shurley opens that cabinet. He digs behind the tangles of blinking pumpkin lights, shoves past the photo albums, and gently shifts aside the dusty china to pull out a small, fake table-top Christmas tree, pre-decorated with tiny lights and ornaments, topped with an angel who appears to be in pain. Every year he sets it on his coffee table and lights another candle on the menorah. Then he settles into the couch and watches them burn.
He did this every year for decades, since the year he bought that same tree with his bar mitzvah money and snuck it into his room- quietly, so his parents wouldn't see and wonder what their son was doing with Christmas decorations. The other 363 days of the year it lived in a secret place in his bedroom. But every year after his parents went to bed, he would go into the back of his closet, lift up that floorboard, and pull it out. He used to huddle in a far corner and turn off all the nights so he could watch the tree light up, throwing thick golden light on everything in his room- his matchbox cars, the Wrath of Khan calendar, the box of Victoria's Secret catalogs behind his bed just visible from that corner. All in deep shadow.
He would stare into that lone glow of warm light and wonder, trying so hard to wrap his young mind around the Everything slowly emerging inside Him. Sometimes he'd stay up all night, touching the synthetic branches lightly and wondering when He would start feeling like a Father instead of just a kid with a mind four sizes too small.
This year, he had to buy a new tree for the first time since 1984 and before that, 1952. That's counting Chuck's little life and the other name tag He wore on his last trip around the block. He snuck it into the HoA when everyone else was busy, not wanting to answer odd questions about a Jew celebrating Christmas.
Celebrating would've been the wrong word for it, though. There was little celebratory about cracking open a fresh beer and silently watching light dance off the ornaments as the menorah candles kept burning down. He long since stopped celebrating this day, chosen arbitrarily to co-opt filthy pagan holidays from the same gods He used to violently strike out against. Zeus, Tiamat, Baal- the Father shared their days now. It still made Him a little sick on a level not quantifiable with logic.
There was the TV adverts, and the tacky mall sales. The holiday parades and disturbing blinking electric icicles; those bricks in a massive temple of materialism. The commercialism of Christmas disgusted him so deeply that some years He wanted to scream until the sky itself caved in.
Instead, He bought a cupcake and lit a single birthday candle.
This year was His first year away from home. Chuck had never celebrated the day (or the real birthday, in April) away from home - if "home" meant His known and Created universe - and this year was at enough of a loss that it felt like a new beginning. So yes, there was the secret tree and the booze, the incongruous menorah and the quiet contemplation the next day. The customary thought of the Son, still languishing alone in Heaven, waiting for a Father to be seated at the right hand of (in fulfillment of the Scriptures). There was that, but there also was the long strands of pale lion hair on His jacket, the claw marks in His jeans from that terrible night with the Darkness creature that tried to murder the angels. The constant ever-presence of the Lion on the fringes of His awareness.
There was Aslan, but there was the memory of the same Son from His own world. They both merited their own time, their own honor, their own attention from the five-foot-six alcoholic in His tiny apartment.
The day passed but slowly, a slow swirl of alcohol and birthday cupcakes, slow contemplation and the deliberate, studious avoidance of guilt. It felt so wrong, to be utterly disconnected from the world and the Heaven He designed. He felt a little like a fish twisting on a line.
So He asked Himself, asked them- how do they do it? The overwhelming response and the instant answer He provided Himself was all one: it pointed the same way. Normally He would've dismissed that answer and gone to drown Himself in booze and sink in a slow spiral of .2 BAC until everything blurred and nothing mattered anymore.
Normally. But nothing was really normal here, was it? Here, almighty archangels could spread their wings and seed and somewhere, an unborn baby cried. Here there was a sorceress teenager with the heart of a god in her front pocket and no idea of the power she held. Here, a man could get to know His own children, and field nary a question about His decisions, because nobody expected him to know.
Here, he knew there was a child sitting alone, being curmudgeonly this Christmas and wondering about the Nephil that might have been.
Here, He could see His family. The thought was still (after eight long months) so foreign that it had the power to intrigue. The thought still made His heart hurt like a knife sliced clean through to His softest places.
Family. Children. Sons and daughters, all alone and nursing wounds from the shadow of their Father.
Sitting alone in that bachelor apartment, Chuck figured he at least owed them some humanity on Christmas. They were only so wounded from His own Darkness mirror coughed up by the Port. It fell well beyond the jurisdiction of His decision of non-interference.
And maybe it could be a present for Himself. Just maybe, this Christmas, he could be with his family.
The first step frightened: step outside His own small apartment, venture into the larger House. The second was even harder. That night, before Darkness fell, He braved the night to go to a certain club to see a certain angel. That one archangel, the four-wingéd baby who lost so much and deserved so much more, his trumpeter of everything good and terrifying.
More than once he had to remind himself of why. Why leave the nest, the cloistering cocoon of his own tiny apartment. Once the answer came, it was easy. Maybe he could see that baby this year, maybe he could feel the night air on His face.
Maybe He could even not be alone. The thought of humanity, of angels, of any human interaction at all sounded so sweet- that purest of joys only so beautiful because he was so long denied it. Maybe, he thought daringly, he could do something new, and for the first time in two thousand years, spend Christmas with his family.
Just maybe, He could sit at the bar in Purgatory on the birth of the new-born king, and maybe...
He could be happy.