Human for a Day (9781101552391) (26 page)

“It is about your editorial,” Santa said, producing the newspaper.

Mr. Church looked amused. “Yes, I assumed that was so. What about it?”

“Well, to be straightforward, it seems to have brought me into existence. Your words moved me deeply. I assume that they moved thousands of your fellow New Yorkers to belief, and for that I thank you. So many people feeling the truth of your eloquent plea has caused me to appear in their midst. I rather like it, and want to continue to
be
. I have come to ask for your help.”

Frank nodded. “So you want me to believe that you are the true Santa Claus. Who sent you? Haley at the
Times
? It'd be just like him.”

Santa found his skepticism to be perfectly natural. Frank was a grown man who had seen tragedy and horror in his life, yet he felt Frank's desperate hope to believe in the fairy tale that he had written about just the other day. He had grown to be an adult, yet a spark of faith and wonder remained.

“Mr. Haley did not send me. I am Santa Claus,” Santa said, reassuringly. “You should know what to look for. You expressed it most beautifully in your column.”

“I . . .” Frank did not know what to say. “It was for the sake of that child, you know. She ought to be allowed to remain a child as long as possible.”

“I do understand that,” Santa said. “But I should not have to explain to you how important it is for science and simplicity to coexist. One must not fear to be a little child again, when times of wonder are at hand.”

“You are not a simple thing, Mr. Claus,” Frank said. “You seem to be well-educated and a philosopher to boot, but I think I have to decline. I'm not equal to the task.” Frank's defenses were growing. Santa felt logic and science teaming up to push him out of the world.

“I can prove my reality to you, but that would defeat the purpose, would it not?” He searched Frank's face. “I think that I have my answer.”

The pains spread across his whole body now. His back and sides ached. His nerves were exposed, and his soul was starting to spread out again across the universe. How sad that he should not be able to enjoy this world a little longer. He fetched a breath, but it caught on the pain.

“Shall I call for the nurse?” Frank asked. He was not a heartless man, merely mortal and conflicted, as any human being was.

“No, it will pass, as I will. I thought you could help me to live longer.” Santa smiled. “I should be grateful for the day—and I am. It's a gift I never knew. When one is an ideal, one's feet never really touch the pavement, you see. I have seen electric lights, and liberty, and the joy in little children's faces. It is enough.”

“There isn't a touch of irony in you, is there?” Frank said, his brow drawn into a furrow. “How I wish I could be that way.”

“You have been, at times. As you were when you wrote that lovely piece. It is oblique suggestion, not proof, but I could sense your whole heart in it. You have always been that idealist. I admire that in you. That is why you chose journalism as your career. You believe in truth. You'd rather be honest than liked.”

“You were briefed very thoroughly about me,” Frank said. “Was it my wife told you my story? My brother?”

Santa smiled. “One of the things that I discovered today that people know about me is that I can see into their hearts. It is true. I . . . I was not going to do this, because it will spoil your natural faith, but it will quell your skepticism.” He reached into his pocket and took from it a carved wooden lamb. He set it on Frank Church's desk. It was painted white and had a blue ribbon around its neck.

“You wanted this when you were very small, when you saw it in the Christ Child's crèche. Your mother told you that it was not right for you to take it. I couldn't give it to you then, but you shall have it now.”

Frank's face went through a rainbow's worth of expressions, from outrage to astonishment to grief to outright wonder. He took the lamb and ran a finger on its knobbly head. “No one knew that. No one could have remembered that.” He stood up. “I shall do whatever you wish, Santa. But come with me now! I shall take you to visit little Virginia. She's the one who precipitated me into writing my piece. She will be delighted beyond reason to see that she was not wrong to believe.”

Santa held up a hand. “Oh, no, Frank. She's the one person that does not need to meet me. You convinced her very thoroughly indeed with your poetry. Her friends are a trifle embarrassed that they doubted, as are their parents. It's you who needed to be reassured. And me.”

Church's eyes widened. “Why you? You are Santa Claus.”

“I am what all of you have made me. If you cease to believe, and you just proved how easy a thing that is to do, then I do not exist. I celebrate the birth of the Christ Child. How I do that and what people expect of me differs from person to person. Some resent me. Some hate me. What you wrote will help me be in this world for a little longer. I want to exist.”

“You shall,” Church said, his thin face passionate. “You live forever.”

“So you said in your lovely letter, sir. But these are New Yorkers. I feel as if I am fading already. No matter what we do here today, I cannot last. The shared belief that you caused is passing away. By tomorrow, I shall be a memory again, though a cherished one, I hope.”

Frank looked aghast. “No! I believe in you.”

Santa shook his head. It hurt a little to move. “But you doubt what you see. You cannot help it. It's a natural thing. We cast aside that which does not allow us to walk freely, to explore, to make our own decisions, right or wrong. It is . . . human. They have to be free to say there is no Santa Claus. But wonder, magic and love must always be allowed in children's lives. If you help to give them that, and you have, I will always live a little. That will satisfy me. I did not think it would, but it does, because it is what children need. It is better for me to be a dream, to live in that unseen world you spoke of.”

“I will always assert the truth of your existence,” Frank Church assured him. “The veil to the unseen world is torn asunder, and I see the glory I wished was there.”

Santa felt the twinge of doubt that lessened the force of the statement. “Ah, no. You are already wondering if I am making a fool of you. You know the Santa you believed in would not do so. Your Santa keeps your letters, dreams and wishes to himself. But you needn't believe me completely. Keep being a cynic, so you can prevent others being fooled. The moment you don't doubt, then you stop being of use as a newsman, and I would not ruin a distinguished career such as the one you have built for yourself.”

Church laughed. “I feel sad, you know. You have given me the best Christmas gift of my life, and I do not mean the lamb. I wish I could give you what you want.”

Santa laid his finger beside his round little nose. “Ah, but you have. You gave me this day. To be manifested and see what I mean to people makes me wiser than I was. But let us smoke a pipe together and talk. Tell me about this wonderful city. Then, when the time is right, I shall depart, without regrets.”

Frank Church smiled. “Up the chimney?” he asked, with a nod toward the fireplace in the corner.

Santa laughed, his belly jiggling up and down with merriment. “Since that is what you wish for, it would be my pleasure.”

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

 

 

 

I
discovered the house during one of my last crazy full moons. Nestled in the trees at the very edge of my twenty-acre territory, the house was small, white, with big windows and a large porch. In the back, a barn no longer used by cows, but still smelling of them, and to the side, a garage for a single car that seemed to be the only vehicle which used the dirt road.

I collapsed in old straw in that barn, beneath rotting eaves, and slept off wounds from my inadvertent partying. I was terrified by my own lack of control; I knew if I didn't stop fighting over females, I would end up like the old black tom that I repeatedly chased off the hill. He had only one ear, no fur on that side of his head, and a white orb in place of his eye that occasionally oozed. He could still fight—and did, every full moon—but afterwards, he never seemed to recover.

He was in that barn too. Normally, just coming off the full-moon crazies, I would have killed him, but I was too tired. Besides, when I was myself, I rather liked him. That night, we actually talked like equals—alphas who worried about their prides. He confessed he had only seen two more summers than I had, that once he'd been as strong and powerful and terrifying as I was.

And then he said the thing which changed it all. He said, had he to do it again, he would take the Bargain.

The Bargain—offered, they say, only to what the humans call “feral” cats, not to the pampered indoor variety. Once a year, cats of a certain age—no less than two, no more than four—got to try being another creature for twenty-four hours. The easiest to become were the ones we knew: dogs, horses, cattle.

Human.

Only no feral cat chose human. Except the old black tom.

It scared him so badly, he said, that he hid in that very barn for twenty of his twenty-four hours. He felt big, and stupid, and different. Then at the moment when the gods let him choose between remaining human or reverting to feline, he reverted. And had the best six months of his life.

Until the following summer, when he lost his first fight. Then his second. And finally his third—to me—becoming instantly old, and a half-breath away from dying.

He was the one who told me about the Bargain, and he was the one who showed me the Others. He said if he had real choice, he would have become them.

Just before dawn, we snuck out of the barn and sat by those huge glass windows, watching the gray-haired human woman inside, her slim hands preparing dishes which she then gave to the Others.

They looked so wonderful then: the silver and gold female, tail high, the epitome of female beauty; the long-haired white male, so dainty that he seemed unreal ; the black-and-orange female with the asymmetric eyes, and the stunning gold male with the square leonine face, the one that the black tom said looked just like me.

I had a flashback at that moment to my kittenhood. I had seen that woman before. She had found my mother, my siblings, and me underneath an abandoned house. She had actually caught me, just before I could run to my family, and held me.

She called me a little ball of fluff. She called me cute. She called me precious. My heart pounded so hard I thought it would come out of my chest. My mother watched from behind a board, her eyes glittering, tail switching. The woman said I was too young to come with her without my mother, so she set me down and I ran for my life, my mother catching me with one strong paw and holding me down.

The woman said she would come back with help to “rescue” us.

But when she came back—if she came back—we were gone. Mother had moved us to an old-growth stump half an acre away. It was warmer and drier than that abandoned house, but much more cramped.

Mother warned us that we should never ever let the humans take us because we would disappear forever. She said the woman had taken her other kittens in the past and she never saw them again.

One early fall evening, Mother died horribly outside that stump, when she led a pack of coyotes away from us all. We were old enough then to survive on our own—barely—and we managed. All except my sister, who died in kittenbirth not six months later.

I'd like to say the old black tom taught me that my mother was wrong about humans, but the nice man on the hilltop was already changing my mind. He put out food every morning, and the neighborhood ferals ate there. Most of us avoided the humans entirely—I don't think they ever knew they were feeding up to ten cats a day.

But I began to watch the nice man. He felt safe. Safe in a way I hadn't felt since I came to consciousness under that house. I started to understand cats who lived with humans. I heard tell of domestic cats that lived for twenty summers, that spent their final years sleeping in the warm sun instead of hiding from coyotes or bear.

That morning, with the old black tom I should have hated, watching the woman and the other cats—the pampered ones, the tom called them—I felt something I had never felt before. Envy. They had daily food, a warm bed, no predators, and no full moon wars. The Others got along, and the woman took care of them.

I went back almost every day and watched, wishing I could go inside. Then I'd go up my hilltop and see the kind man. I ate his food and slowly—ever so slowly—I let him touch me.

The windows in the kind man's house weren't as big as the woman's, but when I climbed on his car, I could see inside. He too had pampered cats who received the same kind of treatment the Others got.

The man told me I could join his family. He ran his hand along my back and spoke soothingly to me. But I had so many bruises from the fights that he would inevitably brush one and then I couldn't help myself: I'd scratch him and run away. He had to trap me to take me to that frightening place, the one that stopped the full moon fights somehow. Only I didn't know that would happen. I figured it out later.

I figured a lot out later.

After everything changed.

The changes started in the house in the woods. Another car came up the dirt road, swerving and nearly hitting the old black tom. Then I thought it the old black tom's fault. Now I think it was intentional. The old black tom and I, we hid while a big man, soft like a pampered indoor cat, walked to the door and let himself in. He brought the woman bags of rich-smelling bags of food and other things.