In last month’s newsletter, D. Z. and Janet discussed the tradition of sending Christmas cards. We commented that it seems fewer cards get mailed each year. Now comes our January newsletter, time for our 700-word short stories. We find that we’re not quite done with the holidays. So here are two different takes on those Christmas cards. Enjoy!
She found the envelope stuffed in the front door of her parents’ home, where the weatherstripping was torn. A bag filled with holiday goodies sat on the sill between the front and screen doors.
No colored lights wreathed the porch, nor was the wreath on the door.
She rattled the front door before placing her key in the lock. Her mother would be in the kitchen baking cookies for her grandchildren, and her father would be trimming the house.
“Mom?” she called from the foyer of her childhood home. Her parents had been here recently. Christmas cards hung from ribbons decorating the sides of the foyer’s four arches. She opened one.
It was years old, maybe twenty. Another and another, they were all old, some had tears from the tape used to hang them. So long ago, so lost in time, as though foretelling the future for her seventy-ish parents. One from long ago neighbors brought tears to her eyes.
“Dad?” She called, stepping around two boxes of decorations blocking the entrance to the living room. A strand of lights lay uncoiled with the plug near a crowded surge protector. A poinsettia drooped on the fireplace mantle, but where were the Advent angel chimes? She fingered their spot on the mantle.
Bliss, her parents’ white German shepherd-whatever, whimpered on the couch. They never left him.
The faint smell of cinnamon drifted from the kitchen. She trotted for the kitchen door, past the Christmas runner lumped on the dining table. In the kitchen, cooled cookies lined the island in ranks. Chocolate chip, cocoa haystacks, and pfeffernüsse.
She pivoted for the stairs and thundered to the second floor. “Mom? Dad?”
Bliss barreled up, sniffling under each of the bedroom doors, except one. Her parents’. She turned the knob, hesitated, called out again, then opened it.
No one.
After a peek in each room, she trotted down the stairs and out the kitchen door to the detached garage. Standing on her tiptoes, she peeked in the window. Wherever her parents were, whatever had happened, their SUV filled the garage.
She crossed the backyard to the neighbors’ house. The two families had lived side by side since her mother became pregnant with her. A string of exterior Christmas lights lay tangled on the porch, as though the hanger had rushed away. She knocked and waited.
She peered through the window, then rapped on it. Should she call the hospital? The police? Maybe it was time to have that conversation with her parents about the fact that they were aging, and then offer to help them create an aging-in-place plan. She and her brother often discussed it. Maybe it was too late. The sight of the foyer and all those cards rattled her; all hers came via social media now. No one mailed cards anymore.
She sat on the neighbor’s front stoop, looking up the telephone number for the nearest hospital. Snow began flurrying from puffy gray clouds, fluffing the snowfall from two days before.
As laughter drifted up the street, she stood, then raced toward the sound. Ice sent her flying, she windmilled her arms, flinging her phone into a drift and her flat on her back in newly fallen snow. She lay there winded, her father, mother, and the neighbors staring down at her.
“I’d make angels, if it were me,” her mother offered, striding down the sidewalk toward home. “Come on, I have a gingerbread house to construct. Dad has decorations to hang. And we all have yule glögg to down.”
Her father gave her a hand to her feet, then, dragging the old toboggan behind him, followed her mother. “We’ve been sledding Taylor’s Hill. Perfect day for it.”
“But the old cards, the card in the door, the package?”
“A card, a package? Great! Remember how it used to be. Oohing as we opened the cards. I loved hanging them, watching you kids tally them. So did Mom, so Mom dug through the chest where she stashed them. We picked through them, laughing and crying. We hung the ones we loved most. Doesn’t it make you grin?”
“It’s like you guys are clinging to the past. It’s unnerving.”
“Oh, grow up!”
The mailbox at the end of the porch held several envelopes, mostly appeals for money from charities. But one of them looked like it held a Christmas card.
There was no return address, though. The postmark said it had been mailed from San Diego. I didn’t know anyone there. But my name and address were written in red ink on the front of the white envelope.
Inside my cottage, I sat at my desk and grabbed the letter opener. I pulled an index card from the envelope and read what was written there, again in red ink.
COMING TO GET YOU.
Was this some kind of joke?
I almost tossed it into the recycling bin. Then I hesitated and left it on the corner of my desk.
The second card arrived the next day, addressed to me in red ink. It was postmarked Irvine, California, which was in the Los Angeles area. Again, I didn’t know anyone in Irvine. This time the card inside read:
SEE YOU SOON.
The following day, another card arrived, postmarked Bakersfield, located in the southern part of California’s great valley.
GETTING CLOSER, the card read.
The fourth card showed up the next day, postmarked Fresno.
YOU’LL BE SORRY.
I showed the cards to my friend and neighbor Elsie. “Check out the postmarks. I don’t know anyone in any of these places. Those messages are, well . . .”
She shuffled the cards. “Disconcerting.”
“Way past disconcerting,” I said. “I’m alarmed. Or am I overreacting?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “It bothers me, too.”
“Who could be sending these?”
“That guy you ghosted last year?”
I shook my head. “He didn’t care enough to do something like this.”
“What about Sam, the guy you’re dating now?”
Now I shrugged. “We started dating a couple of months ago. I like him and I enjoy his company. But we’re keeping it light for the time being. He just got out of another relationship that ended badly. Besides, he’s out of town for the holidays, visiting family in Arizona.”
Over the next few days I received four more envelopes, all containing index cards with menacing phrases written in red ink. They were postmarked from other towns in California—Merced, Modesto, Stockton, then Sacramento. It felt like whoever had sent the cards was working his—or her—way north up the central valley. Then the postmarks took a turn toward the Bay Area. The next cards were mailed from Vacaville, Fairfield and Concord. I lived in Berkeley, about 25 miles from Concord. Whoever was mailing the cards was a short drive away.
Elsie was all for turning the cards over to the police, but it wasn’t much to go on. The notes were menacing, all right, but not threatening. At least, not specific.
I spread the cards on my desk. So far, I’d received eleven. There must be a twelfth, I thought, recalling the Christmas carol. Only in this case, it was the twelve threats of Christmas. Tonight, Christmas Eve, was just the time to deliver the last card. I reached for my phone.
My mail came late in the day. At dusk, I went outside and crossed the porch to the mailbox. Another envelope, without a postmark. Hand-delivered. I looked around and saw someone standing under the oak tree at the edge of the yard.
I held up the envelope. “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”
A woman stepped out of the shadows. The streetlight glinted off the knife she held. “It’s because of Sam. You took him away from me. Now you’re going to pay.”
“You broke up with him.” At least that’s what Sam had told me.
“Liar!”
The woman lunged at me, the streetlight glinting off the knife she held. But I was ready for her. I’d left a spade from my garden propped up on the porch railing. Now I grabbed it and swung, feeling satisfied when it connected and she cried out. The knife clattered as it dropped to the sidewalk.
Then Elsie and her boyfriend appeared, flanking her. “Good swing,” he said as Elsie kicked away the knife.
“Thanks for the backup,” I said, phone out as I hit 9-1-1.