My name is Ruth Collins and I’m 33 years old. I practice law for a living, which means the people who come to me expect clean lines, tidy arguments, and endings that look like closure. Real life never bothers with that.
It frays and snags in the places you don’t look. Sometimes it unravels under twinkle lights. Christmas at my brother’s house is a performance he puts on for the neighborhood.
Icicles along the porch gables. A plastic reindeer family grazing on the lawn. The kind of inflatable Santa that wheezes in and out like it’s struggling to breathe.
Inside, every surface is dressed. Garlands looped around the stair rail like velvet ropes at a nightclub. Candles that smell like the word holiday more than anything you could name.
A table so crowded with plates and ribbons and chargers that you have to negotiate with your elbows to set down a glass. I brought exactly three gifts for my niece Madison. A sketch set from a small art boutique downtown.
a hardcover collection she’d mentioned three months ago when she thought I wasn’t listening and a hoodie signed by the YouTuber she never stops talking about. None of it came cheap. None of it was the point.
Ruth, my sister-in-law, Vanessa, kissed my cheek with precision. Perfect lipstick, perfect smile. Mark, my brother, clapped me on the shoulder like a colleague he tolerated.
The house hummed with carols and clatter and the soft clink of dessert forks on china. I set the gifts near Madison and took the seat that always seems to be waiting for me. Corner of the table half-shadowed audience to the show.
Madison reached for the smallest gift first, tearing the paper with the same careless hunger you see in blockbuster heroes diffusing bombs. She held the signed hoodie up by two fingers, checking the tag, not the signature. She tossed it into her lap like it might catch.
Then she went for the hardcover collection, the set she’d mentioned on an afternoon in September when we’d crossed paths after school when she told me about a character who reminded her of someone in her class. She flipped the box open, shut it, shrugged. Finally, the sketch set.
I’d wrapped it carefully, the boutique logo tucked under the fold so she’d see it when she pulled the ribbon loose. She didn’t look for it. She didn’t look at me.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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