home for the holidays

An iciness that nestles into your bones, a frigidity that sets your teeth chattering, a briskness that alights your eyes and the blood vessels dilating in your cheeks. The cold, an old friend, a sworn enemy; a reminder of better times, a bringer of the worse that came, and the reason that Hannah whisks herself away to the sweltering heat and the open, welcoming arms of her curiously accepting ex-boyfriend every year for an unabashed celebration of pointedly forgetting the past, whatever that may entail.

Being your own boss has its advantages when it comes to vacation time and just how much of it one truly needs. For Hannah, that means exactly twelve days of the year dedicated to fucking off entirely—in more ways than one—from December the twenty-second to January the second. Pure bliss derived from losing herself in someone else somewhere else. Anywhere else would do, really. Anywhere but her podunk hometown in wintry Maryland, an algid, weeping excuse for a civilized area of society that prides itself in its small mindedness and even smaller population. The familiar faces that she knows all too well give her the same piteous look every time she dares to step off her stoop: “Oh, look,” they must think to themselves, “there’s the poor girl whose family died at Christmastime. The poor thing, it must be terrible to be her.”

Terrible, indeed.

It had been an innocuous enough day. Hannah had been eight years old, and Father had cut a selected tree down from the backyard, as he did every year, and hauled it into the barn to trim it properly so that it would set in the base Mother had carefully placed in the living room, her own yearly ritual—one of many. She and Helen also liked to bake the holiday cookies together, and smelled of vanilla and fresh dough for days and days afterward. It was a scent that hurt Hannah to remember, and she often shook her head back and forth as if that would shoo away the sensory memory.

Hannah, being more outdoorsy than her twin, had taken a liking to sitting with Father as he sliced and diced with his chainsaw, evenly splitting the wood at the base of the tree to get it perfectly flat, allowing Hannah the very important appointed duty of checking to make sure that the base was truly level by eyesight alone, a practice which surely never failed. Her Father, scotch in hand, always took her for her word, and Hannah hadn’t been wrong in all the years they had done it. It would never be nearly enough years.

The firemen had said it was a common occurrence around this time, but the thought didn’t help Hannah much as she watched her childhood home go up in flames. She had been numb, wholly, from her head to her toes, everything in between frozen as she sat dumbly on the street curb across the way, watching embers flutter to the ground rather than keep her eyes trained on the blaze ahead. A kind someone had wrapped her in a blanket at one point, as she’d only had her pajamas on when she’d dropped onto the snow-covered concrete, but she couldn’t feel the scratchiness of the wool against her skin nor the weight of it pressing upon her in a poor attempt at comfort. She just stared, silent, the world around her screeching and hissing and crackling and wailing. And she sat. She sat for hours, possibly. She’d never asked how long she had been out there before the neighbors drew her in for a cup of cocoa. As if that could ever help what she’d lost.

It hadn’t been long after that before Aunt and Uncle had shown up looking worse for wear, and that was saying something, considering the ash that stained Hannah’s skin and hair and clothes. They plied the neighbors with questions of what happened and how, never once daring to look at Hannah, the eight year old that had survived a house fire; a miracle, by the firemen’s standards, now the lone heir to her parent’s estate and all that came with it. She figured they worried that one harrowed glance would shatter her into pieces, a fragile being to be dealt with delicately. Hannah hadn’t wanted to be fragile, hadn’t meant to be. All she wanted was for the roaring in her head to cease. And her sister.

Now grown, Hannah had learned that the only way to escape the torment of replaying that night for weeks on end at Christmastime was to run from it at its anniversary each year, and so she obeyed that primal urge to flee, using the money from her family’s passing to retreat into herself at the expense of a chartered plane and a two-week hotel stay at whatever destination she could get to the fastest. Sometimes it was across the sea, sometimes up in the mountains, sometimes only a few hours away. Anywhere else was perfect for her. Anywhere but home.

She’d only discovered that the comfort of another person helped further obtund her feelings after she’d turned eighteen, and she’d never looked back. She could never quite bring herself to move away, though, at the risk of leaving the charred remains of her family and her youth to the elements and the prying, meddlesome eyes of nosy neighbors.

This year, however, reports of a record-breaking snowstorm on the horizon have threatened that annual sanctity. The very night her plane is to leave, Hannah finds herself cursing the frost and kicking the several feet of snow coating the walkway leading to her car, hoping that her pure ire and the fire from her gaze will melt a path to the airport with no such luck. She relents after an hour or two of stalking back and forth across her porch, which has a purposeful front-row seat to the ashes that are left of her family’s home, stomping back into her home and slamming the front door, left standing in the foyer with the ringing of the door frame and the shuddering of the house in response.

Trapped. Here. Of all of the times in the world to be stuck in this tiny town, this had to be quite possibly the worst. She knows the waking nightmares that are going to come for her in these next few days, and she wraps her hands around herself defensively in silent protest and desperate comfort. This. This is why she hates the holidays.

As Hannah stands rooted in place, the roaring coming back to life in her ears, she lifts her head at an odd scent. She sniffs once, twice. It’s sharp, thick with maple, coating the insides of her nostrils and her throat. The denser it gets, the more it fills her lungs, a soupy fog collecting where her breath should be, and then she hears the crackling. Coughing, she ducks her head down, trying to focus on the floorboards beneath her, the tapestry rug with frayed ends and bright, jarring colors—one of the only things saved from her family home that wasn’t charred beyond recognition—anything to ground her as another cough wracks her body. She whips her head up at the snap of timber above her head, jumping out of the way as a beam from the roof comes crashing down where she’d just been standing.

The world around her sputters as she stares, gaping, at the flames licking at her heels, just as it had all those years ago. Is this karma? Is this revenge? Is this destiny, the workings of a jilted god that didn’t get to claim her when the rest of her family left this world?

Whatever it is, it’s hot.

Black clouds dive down toward her in succession, one after another as they gather and snicker in the rafters at their wisped efforts in scooping the oxygen out of her lungs, each attempt more successful. Hannah’s breaths become raspy, begging for water, as each intake of air stings the battered tissue of her throat. Her feet slipping against the floorboards, she works to right herself, get on her feet and run to the door, until she realizes that she’s lost track of it. Another beam crashes somewhere in the house, flames crawling up the drapes, across the mantel of the fireplace, up and up the banister of the stairwell, a hungry beast that can’t get its fill fast enough. She scoots herself along the floor until her toes can find purchase and she lurches forward, rushing to clear spots without fire, using what decoration she can make out to orient herself in her home, now so foreign that she can’t make heads or tails of the way out of it.

The front door bursts inward; the flames are stoked to new heights, the heat becoming unbearable as the icy winds tear through the house, fraying with the smoldering ash in a sizzling, torrid dance. Hannah squints against the thickening smoke to no avail. Taking no more than a second to survey the path to her freedom, she staggers forward, sights set on the way out. She leaps over low walls of flame, twisting to avoid the leaping fire reaching out for her, desperate to keep her inside with them, where she’s meant to be. A guttural scream tears itself from her as she leaps across the threshold, tumbling down the stairs of her porch in a graceless launch of her body, sticking the landing face down in the mounting snow.

She takes a moment to breathe. Just breathe. The clean air burns in its own way, a whetted blade sliding along the inside of her throat, but at least she can breathe. She made it out safely. Again.

“Hey there, stranger! Everything okay?”

Hannah jolts at the sound. “Joel?” was all she could think to say.

“Long time no see, eh? Not exactly how I saw our reuniting going. It’s the first time I’ve seen the lights on in your house around this time in years, and I was just coming over to say hello since I’m home for the holidays. I’ve even got hot chocolate.” He pauses for a beat, then tilts his head. “Why are you on your stomach? Some kind of reverse snow angel thing?” Joel’s eyes sparkle, bemused, as he asks the question. Hannah bristles.

“What do you mean what am I doing, don’t you see—” Hannah turns to gesture at her untouched, pristine house and freezes.

“What I see is you getting hypothermia in no time flat. You do realize we’re in a blizzard, right? Or did that slip your mind?” Joel inquires, raising an eyebrow and lowering a hand to help Hannah up as he balances two mugs of hot cocoa in the other. Hannah frowns but takes hold, pulling herself from the pile of wintry fluff into which she’d face-planted.

And awkward silence settles between the two of them, Hannah trying to process what she just experienced and Joel trying to understand why the childhood friend he hasn’t seen in over a decade decided to dive headfirst into a snowdrift on one of the coldest nights of the year.

After an unsubtle clear of his throat, Joel suggests, “Why don’t we get you warmed up before we both catch our deaths out here?” With that, he takes her gently by the elbow, leading her away from her house and into the shelter of his parents’ own just across the way, as it had been all those years ago when she’d sat on the curb, weeping silently. He’d brought her hot chocolate then, too. A small, silent offering of solace in the worst time of her life. She hadn’t drank a sip of it then.

Hannah glances back at her home, still perfectly fine with nary a scorch mark to be seen, though something in one of the second-story windows catches her eye. It looks like the faint flicker of the tip of a candle, like the one she and Helen had kept on the window sill of their bedroom when they were younger. The glow winks out, and Hannah shivers as she turns back, gripping Joel’s elbow just a little bit tighter.