A story for All Saints’ Day
I technically made it! In some time zones!
Anyway, some people told me on Twitter they might be interested in reading some original prose fiction from me. Welp, I hope you weren’t lying!
Here is a story I originally wrote as a comic script (that you may have heard me talk about) that I have adapted into a short story. This is only part one! I will be posting additional parts in the days to come, as this story is an appropriate one for these liminal days between the Halloween and Christmas seasons.
Please read and share! Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, I call my story
The Further Adventures of Santa Claus, chapter 1: The Saint Comes to Wallachia (part one)
“I’ve never been so bored and excited at the same time in my entire life,” the child said. Her nose was pressed against the frosty window pane, where her breath created a ghostly fog on the glass. It was only late afternoon, but the darkness stretched out its inky fingers pretty early in these days around the solstice, giving the child a sense that it was much later than it actually was.
“Hmm?” The child’s tutor cocked up an eyebrow, not even looking up from the stack of papers he was correcting. The child’s facility for boredom extended such that she was sufficiently behind on schoolwork that her tutor had to come out deep into what would normally be a winter break for both of them.
The child turned from the window, wiping the condensation of her own breath off the tip of her nose. “Well, you know. I’m really excited that it’s Christmas Eve and everything, but I don’t have anything to do to kill time until it gets here!” She slumped down into a chair, but rather than stopping at chair’s edge such as a person intent on sitting comfortably might do, she let her forward momentum cause her to continue sliding past the edge of her seat and onto the floor until she pooled there languidly, as if the sheer presence of boredom had leeched all the calcium from her bones and only a puddle of girl remained. “I wish I could watch TV. The new Shelfy Elf Christmas special is coming on tonight!”
“First of all,” the tutor said, finally looking up from the pile of risibly incorrect math assignments and glowering somewhat over the rims of his glasses, “I would rather watch a YouTube video from the future inerrantly predicting my own death than Shelfy Elf. But more importantly, you know you’re not allowed to watch TV until we finish getting through all this schoolwork.” He smirked a little, noticing the child had stopped listening somewhere mid-sentence, instead staring at the ceiling and blowing bubbles with her own spit. “I hope you asked Santa for even one ounce of attention span for Christmas.”
The spit bubble popped silently. “What?”
“Don’t worry about it. Just sit still until I get through these papers. The more you squirm and the more you change the subject, the longer this takes.” The tutor turned back to the paper and briskly circled a series of unreduced fractions. Something like a shadow seemed to cross his brow and he paused, pen mid-stroke. “Although…”
