Read by Annalie Wilson
Maggie didn’t think the snowman would punch back. The others hadn’t. Their heads had just rolled off and landed with a thud that made her hate the night a little less. But he landed a hook on the jaw that sent her body to the ground.
‘Weren’t expecting that, were you?’
‘Jesus!’
‘Nope. Not Jesus.’
She stared up at two lumps of coal and clicked her jaw back into place.
Not long after the bells rang out, a message lit up the room.
‘I’m sorry’, it read. ‘I can’t do this any more.’
‘Do what?’ she thought.
When he hadn’t come home after a week she forgot the ‘what?’ and started to hunt for the ‘why?’
She stuck her hand down the back of the sofa but his reason for leaving wasn’t there. She lifted up the floorboards, chipped the plaster from the walls and pulled the tiles from the roof, but the answer wasn’t there. She dug up the tree in the garden and cut at its roots. The ‘why?’ did not spill out into the soil. There was no secret message left inside the cover of one of his books. Nothing stitched inside the soles of his shoes. She shook her insides up and leaned over the sink but the ‘why?’ never showed. It wasn’t under her nails, or in the cat’s shit, or corroding in the bottle of bleach under the sink.
Eventually, she asked God to help her. Nada. She Googled the saint of lost things and prayed to him.
‘Good Saint Anthony look around, something's lost and must be found. Please help me find the reason “why?”’
Still nothing. She lit a candle. She even talked to the man in the box but he couldn’t give her an answer.
But she was resilient. She woke up every day and never caused a scene. She didn’t stand outside his mother’s house where he was holed up, demanding an answer. She didn’t send him messages begging for a reason. She didn’t follow him home from work. Instead she accepted her friends’ consolations and bottles of wine. She let them cook her dinner and squeeze her hand. She knew when to cry and when to play the stoic. She siphoned off their pity and put it away for a rainier day. Banked it. She was philosophical.
She kept the cat. She watered the plants. She went to work. She made the bed and tucked the corners. She shaved her legs. She upgraded her phone. She averaged 11,383 steps a day. She grew from 32 to 33, and she was as she always had been – resolutely charming, accommodating, and his.
She’d given him a full year to come to his senses. Given him every second. Shook them up like a snow globe and when the last second fell it cracked through her like a fault line. Time was up.
‘What are you doing?’
She pulled out her fingers and whispered into the hole in the snowman’s head, ‘I’m going to burn a house down.’
‘Is that a good idea?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter any more. Are you coming?’
She expected him to hold her up but he moved swiftly, keeping her pace, growing taller as the fallen snow stuck to his feet. Her husband’s mother’s house was only two streets over, but the snowman was easily eight feet high by the time they reached 19 Endwell Street.
It was an end-of-terrace with a wreath on the door and a nice car in the drive. It had curtains in every window and was pebble-dashed. It was the picture every child makes when you hand them a crayon and say, ‘Draw me a house.’ Right down to the chimney puffing smoke out into the sky.
She kicked open the gate and ran the back of her hand along the nice car in the drive. Her ring caught the metal as she traced a beat along its body, amplifying the screech like a conductor guiding a clear perfect note out into the night.
There was a door key in her pocket but it didn’t feel right to use it. Not now. Instead she swung a fist, shattering glass onto a neat row of shoes that lined a familiar hallway filled with familiar pictures of familiar faces. She pulled off her boots and balled up the socks inside, placing them gently at the end of the row.
‘What’s the plan?’
He was leaning against the living room door. The heat from the fire had already taken its toll; he was her height now, give or take an inch.
She made her way to the mantel with its little nativity scene taking centre stage. The figures were arranged around the baby in his straw bed. She cupped each one in her palm, turning it over to check for imperfections. One of the three wise men was a little chipped around the chin but everyone else was intact. She set the donkey back down and grabbed the woman, snapping her head from her body before lobbing the pieces into the flames.
‘The Virgin Mary! You threw the Virgin Mary into the fire?!’
But she was gone. Something had heaved out of her. She threw squares of smiling faces into the flames. Shovelled in stockings and presents. It was too much for the fire to hold and so it spat it back onto the rug. Soon the curtains were ablaze and then the tree. She watched the faces of the little drummer boys strung from the branches melt away. When the star began to smoulder, she turned to leave but the snowman was already gone. She picked up the two lumps of coal from the carpet by the doorway and threw them behind her into the flames.
She cut through the back of the houses and made her way to the church. She needed to be where he was. Him in there with his mother and his father and his sister. Them clinging to their bibles. Him trying to remember the words to the final hymn.
She let the music that had started to play fill the empty parts of her, shaping her into something bright. Her bare feet began to turn in circles around the endless stream of o’s that poured out of ‘Gloooooooria’ before it hit the ‘in excelsis Deo!’
Then everything began to shake. The church and the trees and the streetlamps stayed stuck but she rose and fell through the air. The snow that carpeted the ground was thrown up into the sky and a judder of fat, docile flakes floated back to the earth.
For the first time, Maggie saw the curvature of her own world. She reached out to touch its edges and saw herself in its reflection. As the last flakes fell she held tight to the tiny baby Jesus in her fist, no longer sure if she was moving to the bells that had started to ring or the sirens that were calling for her.
(c) Emma Hutton, 2017
Emma Hutton is a reader, writer, lover and a fighter.
Annalie Wilson trained at Webber Douglas and is an actor, singer, songwriter, musician and voiceover artist. Roles include Kate in The Taming of the Shrew for Marlowe Theatre Canterbury and Garance in Les Enfants du Paradis at the Arcola. Annalie has produced 3 independent albums and won the UK national Rock the House award for her music in 2014. www.annalie.co.uk
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