The Glowing Child

“Did I see you in the streets, perhaps, in a winter long ago?” asked the man with the rumpled hair, his cane clutched close, his eyes squinched tight in myopic contemplation.

“Perhaps,” the girl echoed, taking him by the hand. “That is not imperative for you to know, though, so I would suggest simply forgetting it.”

Impertinent girl, he thought, but quite possibly not. Quite possibly not a girl, he meant, not that there was any doubt she was impertinent. The creature, indeed, was all too white and fluttery to be much of anything customarily called human, and rather too small in his opinion to be so blithely commanding him about. Much was amiss here, but he took her hand anyway, mainly through exhaustion. It had been that sort of day.

“Where are we going?” he inquired, after a stumble through the unlit parlor. “Mr. S--- said it wouldn’t be long – walking has always been something of a difficulty and it would be highly unaccommodating of you to drag me about without a notion of how far we might be going.”

“You needn’t worry about that,” said the girl-thing in her gently dismissive way.

He noticed an increasing lightness about his feet.

“You are an awful lot more polite about it than he was, though,” she reflected. “No kicking or screeching yet. And I doubt there will be any of that, hmm?”

She had, at this point, quite lifted him off the hearth rug and drifted him sideways across the sooty aperture of the fireplace toward the window that opened out onto the street. This should have come as a shock. Indeed, it did come as a bit of a shock, for perhaps three seconds, before he rearranged his thoughts in order to suspect it all a dream and made the transition from firmly rooted to cheerfully thumbing his nose at the laws of gravity with astonishingly little distress.

He saw the streets of London lower beneath him, and it felt rather as though they were actively dropping and he merely hung suspended in space as the world swung about him. Noticing his slightly dismayed expression, the spirit squeezed his hand tightly in her own small fingers as the air grew colder; a fringe of ice rimmed his lashes, but he scarcely sensed it beyond the faint illusion of aurora borealis it gave to his vision, and why should he? For it was only a peculiar dream, brought on perhaps by melancholy.

Melancholy, he pondered as he rose – what had he been doing when the first ghost appeared? The ghost of his benefactor, the kindly S--- who shamefacedly had to remind everyone that he had not always been so kindly, as a sort of personal penance. S--- had told him that there would be much to learn tonight, but he had already been drifting to sleep beside the embers of the fire he felt too lethargic to stoke, and so paid the old man’s admonitions little heed. Indeed, it was only in retrospect he realized that S--- had been either a ghost or a half-slumbered vision; in his utter weariness he had mistaken the past for the present and believed the old man simply visiting –  if what he had said was odd, it was only the fault of Christmas brandy.

But what he had been doing, he realized, was holding a bottle of port in one hand – or, more precisely, an empty bottle in which port had once been – and the broken top of the bottle in the other, for he had just dropped it upon the hardwood floor as he was dozing and rendered it twain. That, in itself, would not have seemed extraordinary – for why should he not pick the pieces up separately? And certainly he might stare in surprise as long as he liked and wonder if any fragments of glass had scattered to the corners of the room, there to startle an unwary foot. None of those were of any consequence, though, for what mattered was that as he held the broken bottle between his tired hands, he had been strongly compelled to thrust the sharpest edge into his neck and have done with it all.

(The port was rather close in color to the sanguine humor coursing just beneath his wrinkling flesh, after all – should someone unexpectedly enter the room, perhaps they would only see an oldish man with a withered leg who had clumsily spilled his nightcap all over his shirt.)

S---’s entrance had stopped that, however; he had lost track of the route his melancholy was taking at that particular moment and reflected, instead, on why.

The little spirit’s head glowed in the night sky like the Star of Bethlehem or like a Saint Lucia’s crown. He imagined a trio of gentleman below squinting past the shade of their beaver hats under a street lamp, speculating upon the second birth of a boy in a manger somewhere in the moors of the North Country. Ah, thought he, how amused they would be to find that it was only me, asleep in my armchair yet floating over the city with this glowing youth.

Nevertheless, why?

“Why?” he asked the glistening creature that clung to his hand like a hot tongue sticking to a cold windowpane. “I don’t need any reminding of the spirit of Christmas. I have given half my earnings to the poor this year – I need little. I do not horde coin or grouse ‘Bah! Humbug!’ at the carolers outside the door. I love, too deeply sometimes.”

“What sort of words do they put up this time of year, sir? What virtues do they wish upon one another?” piped the little spirit, casting him a glance both pitying and sharp.

“Why, surely, I suppose, expressions of faith and love and mercy and charity . . .”

“And hope,” said the spirit. “Do not forget hope.”

He grew silent at that.

They wound about a clock-tower and were suddenly captured in a wind about its spire, as though they were as light as feathers in a drift – and perhaps they were. Several times they wound about the spire, then it spat them back out into the night air.

There was a perceptible difference in the taste of it, he noted. Perhaps an increase in the atmospheric frost, a faint touch of Christmas turkey knocking at his nose to augment the flavor of a winter too many years ago to properly count. Oh, but rubbish, he said to himself, scent is made of memory, and I’ve only smelt the neighbors’ dinner through my window while I’m sleeping.

And yet, ah, what was that? His nostrils quivered restlessly, expanding and contracting. His mother. The soft warm odor of her skin, homemade soap and nutmeg (he could never quite determine where the nutmeg came from – it was there even on Midsummer’s Day) and now the roast turkey stronger than before, and he recalled the vast one that S--- had arrived with that one year, the year everything had changed.

Impossible, though, or so it should have been, but there he was by the dining table in the old house, looking down upon the bent head of a little boy bowed in prayer, a crutch at his side. And there was S--- at the doorway, and – he had never noticed this before, because of the bent head – but a tear glimmered at the edge of the old man’s eye, threatening to outline every wrinkle of his shrunken-apple cheek.

There, too, was his father, at the head of the table, and his mother to one side, a plum-colored eye peeking up at the smiles on her family’s faces. She had reverence, certainly, but earthly delight was something divine to her, too.

“Why are you showing me this?” he asked of the spirit, who was restlessly swaying to and fro on her pointy little toes of light. “This is rather lovely, yes, but I’d also like to wake up now, please.”

“Oh goodness, if you want to wake up now, you’ll hardly get a thing out of it,” said the creature with a squeak of annoyance. “No, you must stay for it all, and I’m only the first.”

“I worry . . .” he said softly. He laid a hand upon his own young self’s head, but it passed straight through the lank blonde hair and slid onto the table and through an inch of that as well.

“Am I dead, then?” he asked. “Or merely dreaming?”

“Neither,” said the spirit. “But you are crying.”

He began to stride around the room, circling the family as they said grace and prepared to consume their first proper meal. Thanks to S--, though, not the last of such meals, but rather the start of a whole regimen of joy and merry eating and going to doctors who cured him of the death part of the crutch, but not the need for it entirely.

“Oh, God.”

“Yes?” inquired the glowing child, leaning forward on her very tippy-toes, candle-flame arms crossed behind her back.

“I have an inkling of what you might be showing me in the next things to come, and I have no desire to see them.”

She shook her head at him, and he began to beg.

“Please, do not, fair child. It is in my head, anyhow. There is no need to dwell.”

Her hand sought his in the fire-lit room, and they brushed past the radiant S--- in the doorway. The next room, improbably (but then again, what wasn’t improbable on this bitter night?), contained a young woman with blushing red hair and bright blue eyes that sidled sideways to a young man like a cat eyeing a cream dish.

The young man was nice enough, perhaps a bit too freckled, the blonde hair a bit mussed, the gap between his front teeth a bit too noticeable when he smiled, which he bashfully did often. Crooked dimple, crooked limbs – crooked and gapped everywhere, it seemed to the oldish man, from the straggly nature of his bangs, to the difference in length from one leg to the other, the slight curl as of a grimace that the knee gave when it moved.

The spirit held his hand tightly while he placed a hand to his heart and squeezed the tissue of his breast, as though he would squeeze the heart itself and stop it hurting. “She accepts. Of course she does,” he told her.

The woman smiled so small and pretty it would spur jealousy in a china doll, then clasped her tiny hands to her décolletage and let out a little gasp of delight.

“But then she says, once she has told her family, that she really cannot marry a cripple, it would not do, and she marries a lord the very next summer,” he told the spirit in a flat voice like an unleavened loaf sinking into the fire.

“But you should not dwell on that!” exclaimed the glowing child merrily. “You have been loved once, and you can be again, if only you had not given up.”

“I did not – and do not – want anyone else.”

“You’re supposed to have hope!” cried the spirit, and wrenched him into yet another room in the impossible house. An uncanny cat rubbed against his legs with a purr and he scratched it briefly between its tufted ears, until it became distracted and ran through a door.

“Must you continue?” he pleaded. “I suppose you are trying to remind me of the good of the past, but all that you show has a saddened part un-shown. Concealment is not fair – I have a memory, too, an eerily good one, and I can see all of this when I close my eyes.”

He turned as a rush of air darted by, chasing the cat. It was a little girl in a green pinafore, a hairless doll flung over one shoulder, porcelain chin hitting the child’s shoulder with every bound.

“Kitty, come back!” the little girl shrieked. She paused and looked about her, blonde curls bobbing. A man in his late twenties limped up to her and tousled her hair, and she rubbed against his leg like a contented kitten.

He closed his eyes and pretended not to see. He addressed the spirit. “You called yourself a ghost, and that might imply a number of things. And while I’ve had my doubts about the Holy Ghost in these last years, and perhaps you are a spirit of that sort, I should think the dead would make the most likely candidate for ghosthood.”

“And what of that?” said the glowing child, wrinkling her nose. “You should be watching, you know.”

“I think, since you are of the past, that perhaps you are the ghost of someone who might have died then. And that those who are to come are the spiritual remains of present and future deaths.” He smiled shyly, eyes still shut tight. “It is a notion I have had since S--- told me of his Christmas epiphany. Not to say that I believe it all, but it is worth knowing you, dream or not.”

“Well,” mused the spirit, biting a lip, “you are one of the nicest fellows I’ve had to deal with. Perhaps I am dead. I do not think it matters particularly, though.”

“She dies, you know,” said the man quietly. “The little girl, she dies.”

“Who was she?” inquired the spirit, but he could tell she already knew.

“My niece,” he obligingly responded. “The closest I ever came to having a child. I was her godfather.”

“Well, I am not your niece, if that is what you were beginning to suspect.”

“No,” sighed the man. “I never suspected that. Only I do wonder whose niece you are.”

The spirit did not say anything to that, merely grabbed once more at his hand and dragged him out onto the street and into another house altogether. When they entered the parlor, however, her mouth twisted with dismay and he found himself in an entirely unfamiliar room.

“You would suppose,” grumbled the glowing child, “that one would get accustomed to all this over time. But honestly, that is not the situation.”

A woman rocked to and fro in a chair by the hearth. Her skin was of a lambent translucency, her hair a peculiar shade of black that must, in better times, have been rather close to a poetical raven, but had now lost such a lot of its luster that it had begun to look grey. She gave the appearance, on the whole, of being profoundly happy yet extremely unhealthy.

“If I continue,” he said, “will the Ghost of Christmas Future tell me that there will be love still to come? I cannot imagine being treated like S---, for I do not have his penance to make. But yet, what good will it do? To show me a future . . .”

The spirit said nothing in reply, for she was staring at the pale woman – more precisely, at the baby with dark curls in the woman’s arms, laughing at her song and trying to snatch away the woman’s heart-shaped locket.

“There was a little girl,” recited the spirit, her lips in time with the woman’s, although the latter emitted no sound, “with a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. And when she was good, she was very, very good.” She paused and bit her shining lower lip. “But when she was bad, she was horrid.”

He looked at the woman, and back at the flame-headed spirit, and said nothing.

“Perhaps I was bad,” she said, “but not very. Just enough.”

“It’s silly to keep doing this,” he told her, and this time it was he who grabbed the little spirit’s flickering hand. “A man of fifty can still marry, have a child of his own. But does that mean he wants to? Even if he still wants the child. Just one to live.”

They walked out of the little house and back into the snow-strewn cobbles, through people passing by with cloaks and parcels, backs bent against the wind that neither he nor the little spirit felt.

“Falstaff was Ghost Present once, by the by,” piped the shining child, the lights of her head bouncing as she walked. “Of course I wasn’t there for that. But he’s the only one who’s had to repeat the performance so many times, not because he did poorly, but because they adored him so well.”

“I wish I could tell old S--- that,” said the man with a gap-toothed grin. “He was always one for Shakespeare.”

“I’ve still got three more things to show,” sighed the spirit.

“I’m inclined to think that doesn’t matter much.”

Between the two of them they somehow arrived at a cozy house with a wreath on its familiar door, with the man’s boots beside the entry, and his hat and coat dripping snow-melt upon a rag-rug made by his sister Martha two Christmases ago. He wiped his bare feet upon the rug, even though there was nothing on them, and the spirit followed suit.

“Do you think they’ll mind much?” asked the spirit, wrapping her wrists about her knees on the arm of his chair.

“I suppose we shall have to see. If the other ghosts come. If He gets mad.”

He closed his eyes, but he left his hand upon the little spirit’s head.

When he woke, there was a little girl with coal-black hair and a white smock sleeping half-curled over his leg.

“I suppose they did not mind, then,” he mused to himself, and re-lit the fire.