Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups (29 page)

The elves gazed along the bright chute of light, up into the firmament, and their deepest pain fell from them like a mere mood, as the hand of God swept aside a thick batting of cloud: Pure love beamed down upon them from the beatitude that was the Creator's face.

15. A Time to Rejoice

And God carried on many conversations in that hour, as many as there were creatures to hear and be heard. Every deer and elf He took aside, off from the others, addressing his inmost hopes and fears and refreshing his parched soul with the waters of divinity.

And each of them felt singled out and loved for his unique qualities.

And so it was.

But Santa and his wife, kneeling naked in foot-deep snow, He held in thrall. For He wanted all to witness the wonders in store for them.

And when the elves had been newly dressed, inside and out, God unbound the beloved pair and spake thus to them: "Santa, Anya, do you not know how precious to Me is the least mote of your being? Can you not feel within you the pulse of My continuous creation? Does your faith falter so, is your charity turned so inward, are your hopes so blighted by misfortune, that you have grown insensible to truth?"

Santa took Anya's hand in his. "Forgive us, Lord, our unfaith," said he. "Though immortal by Your grace, we share with all humanity feelings of love and loss, the—"

With a flick of His fingernail, God silenced him. Then, though it was barely dawn, He suffered the sun to top the sky, moving like a mole behind the clouds. When it reached its zenith, a precise circle of cumulus irised open. Golden light coned down around Santa and his wife, so that the snow cover melted away in a wide radius about them. Beneath their knees thick grass sprouted. Around them the earth turned verdant. Soft breezes warmed their bodies. Beyond that radius, all remained ice and snow and rapt elves, and a fresh descent of snowflakes, large and clumped and fragile as puffs of dandelion.

Now there rose up four saplings, reaching toward the heavens and thickening as they reached, resolving at last into palm trees stretched thin as Chinese handcuffs and arching out, broad-leafed, thirty feet overhead. Beneath the unclothed couple the earth rumbled and warped. Like bread rising in a rectangular tin, it plumped up and out. And the grass upon this uplifted bed, with its bedposts of palm, split and twisted into moss, luxuriant and spongy to the touch.

Then God stretched forth His hand and beckoned past the gingerbread house into the woods. A faint snap was heard by all. Then they saw the coin, thick and clean and solid gold, rolling through the trees. Out of the hills it came, leaving a deep milled track of snow in its wake. Heinrich split apart to let it pass, and it rolled through him as feathers of snow fell and melted upon it. Onto the bed of moss it rolled, coming to rest against the palm tree at Santa's left. Rachel's face agonized out of sun-gleamed gold.

And God said, "Though you hate the means by which it was made, love the coin. Only love the coin and all will be well."

And He began to withdraw behind the cloud cover.

"But Lord," Santa said, "what will become of the Tooth Fairy?"

Anya chimed in, "And the Easter Bunny?"

Their hearts thrilled to see God smile. And He said unto them, "Leave those two to Me."

"But our dear Wendy—" Santa said.

And God's smile turned enigmatic and He repeated, as He faded, His injunction: "Only love the coin." But they could scarcely hear His last word, and then He was gone.

*****

Fritz was struck heart-sore at God's disappearance. To judge from the groans that rose from his brethren, he was not alone. But the Father, as He had done at their first creation, inlaid His healing hand and toyed with their emotions, turning wretchedness to regret and, by degrees, to blessedness.

God's departure drew all eyes to Santa's bower, where divine love infused the brilliant cone of light, the bed of moss it fell upon, the gleaming coin upon that bed, and the immortal pair who now laid hands upon that coin.

*****

Santa rolled the golden disc between them and set his hands at ten and two o'clock. Below him were Rachel's nether parts, down to the sculpted soles of her feet. "Only love the coin," he said.

Anya placed her hands between his. "Oh, Claus, she seems in such agony." Rachel's face howled, twisted rivulets of hair streaming past her ears, her neck bent sharply back, her nipples thrust forward. The arms, mere suggestion, resolved into hands taut with vain rebuff.

"Close your eyes, Anya," Santa suggested, doing likewise. "Close your eyes and explore her features with your fingers." His right hand moved to Rachel's rump, tracing the familiar curves of her buttocks. Touching this mockery brought back at once the self-loathing he had felt making love to the doll he had created. But those feelings he now put by, bringing to the fore all his love for the mortal woman. As he caressed her hindquarters—the golden buttocks and the gaping labia of gold between them—their year together flashed before him and he almost fancied that the cold metal warmed beneath his touch.

"It's astonishing," Anya said, "how something made in such an awful way could capture so precisely the softness of Rachel's cheek."

Santa felt Anya's right hand beside his left, still clutching the striated edge of the coin. "Use both hands, Anya. I've got it." Anya's fingers slipped away.

"The breasts are simply breathtaking."

"Are your eyes closed?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Touch your face to hers," Santa said. "Make her suffering your own." He ran his index and middle fingers past the gold nub of her clitoris to the inverted V of private hair, fine and curly, etched in gold. Then, defying the coin's abrupt angle there, Santa strove to push further.

"Yes, I can feel it. Oh, Claus, she's so cold. And her mouth is stretched so wide."

"Press your mouth to hers, Anya. Lick about her lips. Breathe into her. I think I'm starting to sense some give back here."

"Yes. Her nipples seem to be softening. I can feel the tension leaving her hands."

"Her mouth, Anya. Look to her mouth." The coin edge beneath his left hand no longer curved hard about. When he opened his eyes, he saw that the edges all round were pulling inward little by little. His fingers inched along Rachel's right buttock as though he were a sculptor working tough clay. He felt resistance at his fingernails but pushed on until he rounded her hip. "It's yielding, Anya!"

"Mmmmm."

Now Santa brought his other hand down and pushed his way through gold until he had her other hip, bone-hard at its turn but covered now with something less than metal and more than skin. His belly pressed against her buttocks as he reached around her and, fighting the stubborn metal, felt his fingers meet at her navel. He ran his hands down the flat of her tummy and found a stiff yield of hair and the start of her thighs.

Her toes flexed against his legs.

And something of Santa's flexed too.

He was turned on by joy. His blood pulsed and he laughed as his growing member throbbed with love for the reviving Rachel. Into the golden gape of her vulva he eased, feeling her flesh yield and grow warm at his entry. Closing his eyes again, he leaned forcefully into the upper reaches of the coin, willing his powerful chest down along her back, willing with all his heart that his lips would not crush against flat hard metal but come to rest upon Rachel's soft neck, his beard pressed playfully into endless billows of blond hair.

*****

Anya's eyes were shut. Over her head, palm leaves rustled. Tropic breezes caressed her skin. Astonished murmurs came to her from some far-off dream world.

What was reality? Hands pilloried in gold, now flexing, now responding to her hands. Rigid ropes of hair that had begun as faint suggestion, passed into a cabled mass, and now frayed and separated under Anya's touch into fibrous strands. Stiff jaw relaxing shut. A tongue losing its metallic taste, softening at the lick of Anya's tongue. The flutter of golden eyelashes against her cheek.

Anya cried for joy. Into the moving taffy of the coin she sank her eager hands, finding there the dead woman's arms, straight down to the elbows. Her fingers explored the length of the softening torso, the ribs and midriff. Kissing her crimped lips, she sobbed along one gilt cheek.

When Anya opened her eyes, Rachel was kneeling upon the moss, but a Rachel gilded and trembling, twisting her neck like a wild mare. Santa had her by the flanks and was moving within her. "Claus, she's not breathing!"

"Keep loving her," he gasped, eyes on fire. "She's almost free."

Anya lay on her back and brought her lips to Rachel's left nipple. The right one she tormented with thumb and forefinger. Bringing her free hand to Rachel's sex, she found there the glistening gold nub of flesh and danced her fingertips over it.

Rachel arched up and stiffened.

"Anya, we've lost her!"

*****

Rage.

Bound across bedroom.

A sharp intake of breath.

Then pain everywhere, swift and slashing, a pain like the swift chill of a winter's dive.

She had dropped out at once, preferring the peace of the void. Now something coaxed her back. Hands of love pulled her toward pain.

Suddenly she had returned. The hands, though they adored her, coaxed her into cruelty and raw hurt. Yet she craved their touch. She knew them. Through the agony, she struggled to put faces to them, caught them, lost them, saw a little girl,
her
little girl. Wendy!

There came suddenly a remembrance of stretch and pressure below: Wendy emerging, coated with vernix, milking her, sleeping, raising her head, turning over, crawling, toddling, struggling with words, waving forlornly from a pre-school window, learning to read and being read to, writing notes to Mommy and Daddy and Santa Claus, playing with elves in snow, standing with her mouth ravaged and the Tooth Fairy's arms grappled about her.

Rachel's body throbbed. Though her eyelids raised and lowered, she saw nothing. She needed to exhale, but her lungs burned at the impossible task.

Then the pain zoomed upward and peaked. Riding her scream, it paid out bit by bit until a divine point of inflection twisted it up into pure pleasure. And death tumbled away empty-fisted. A gush of immortality shot through her and held at her center.

Through her howls, she heard sobs upon her throat. Anya's sobs. Rachel's vision cleared and there was Anya's radiant face, and upon her shoulders Santa's kisses, and in her quim Santa's cock. And Anya was sobbing "You've come back to us, you've come back" over and over again. Rachel hugged the dear soul and kissed her, the memories flooding into her now.

Then Santa, disengaging, fell to the moss and clipped and cuddled her like a man starved for love.

A surge of green, shrieking with delight, descended upon them and a sweep of tiny hands lifted them into the air.

*****

Pandemonium broke out in the commons.

Fritz dove in with the others to touch the trio of lovers, to hoist them high and fling from his throat the joy that had built up as he watched God's miracle unfold. Green caps, skyrocketed above, were caught in midfall and catapulted back into the sky.

Then someone dashed into Santa's cottage and brought out three robes, red for Santa, green for Anya, and blue for Rachel. They put them on and stood beneath the palm trees, trading hug after hug with the elves until they felt their spines would never again straighten for stooping.

But the sun burrowed back down to the horizon and the clouds sealed up again. Moss became grass. The palm trees shrank into the earth. Fritz expected snow to reflocculate in the circle but that didn't happen. Even so, the ground seemed hungry for snowfall.

Then Fritz saw Rachel, radiant in immortality, turn toward the gingerbread house. In the midst of recinching her robe, her fingers froze. Fritz, tugging at Gregor's sleeve, nodded discreetly in her direction.

The crowd fell silent.

*****

Rachel sat on the edge of Wendy's bed, resting a hand upon her daughter's folded hands.

"How did it happen?" she asked.

Santa told her. She was spared the gruesome details of her late husband's resurrection. Santa felt it prudent as well to omit any mention of the Rachel doll, lest acts he had committed out of desperation be misconstrued.

As he spoke, her eyes remained fixed on Wendy. Santa and Anya glanced from mother and daughter to the drawn faces outside the picture window. New snow fell like somnolent feathers. It looked like midnight outside.

Rachel bent to her daughter and kissed her cheeks.

They were cold.

Bloodless as marble.

She pressed her lips to Wendy's lips. Held them there, remembering. Sobbed without breaking the seal, keening softly into Wendy's mouth. Her tears fell warm upon the little girl's face.

A jinglebell clattered to the carpet. Then another, and another.

Anya gasped.

Wendy's right hand fell to her side, sending a cascade of bells jangling to the floor.

Rachel, disbelieving, brought a hand to her mouth. Wendy's cheeks flushed out, turning from waxy white to carnation pink and at last to full fleshtones. She yawned and stretched, setting off splashes of tintinnabulation.

She blinked. "Mommy, why's it so noisy in here?" she asked.

Then Rachel hugged her fiercely and kissed her over and over, despite Wendy's protest. So tight were mother and daughter intertwined that Santa and Anya embraced them as a unit, kissing ear or cheek or wave of hair.

Wendy was smothered in bodies. Three pairs of feet waltzed her about the bedroom, skating gingerly over a floorful of jinglebells. Snowball and Nightwind, perched on the sill of the picture window, looked absolutely appalled.

In the commons, ecstatic elves leaped and pranced and hugged one another silly. Fritz shouted, "Look, she's got her teeth back!" but only Gregor, hugging him and breaking into an atypical grin, heard what he said.

The snowfall stopped and the black clouds turned pure white and dispersed and the fat round godlike flaring sun burst apart over all eternity, scattering rays of joy and sunshine everywhere.