Feb 13, 10:15-10:30pm

My brother falls down a well in the hard light of Christmas morning while I roll across the empty left side of our bed and dream about oxen steaming through the night. Neither one of us can remember falling asleep the night before. In our stomachs spaghetti knots like a tangle of yarn and we viciously kick each other’s shins to warm up under our cold blankets.

“I can hear them wrapping things down there.”

“That’s not them, they’re not the ones who wrap the presents.”

“Shut up.”

“Listen! Really, that was a sleighbell.”

“That was somebody bumping against the tree.” At a certain point we tire out and go limp, each of us holding the other one like a stuffed animal.

He wakes up as the first razor of sun crests the far-off bumpy mountain range and quietly disengages from me. Down the stairs in his bare feet, right past the thermostat and into the immense holy presence of the tree which has burst up from our floorboards like a vital middle finger defiantly raised against the obstinately snowy world outside. We find the torn paper of his first gift, a green pair of rubber boots from Woolworth’s, near the rocking chair. He’s stepped on the ribbon and dragged it outside with him…it finally lets go of the boot’s sole halfway across the backyard, where it bleeds up at us from the inside of his footprint.

His trail traces a wild skirling path through the yard, around the stubble of the dead garden, into the trees at the edge of our property, to their final destination: the black eye staring up from the ground, the hole-in-one, the drain that we always tilt towards when we’re not watching.