Copyright © 2024 Alby Stone
A bitterly cold dark night. Stars like tiny fireflies on a black velvet cloth, telling photon-borne tales of things that happened an incomprehensibly long time ago, untold ages before In the Beginning or Once upon a Time or When on High. In truth, we haven’t been here very long at all. A fraction of a second on the cosmic clock. We are infants, and most of the time we behave like it. Maybe one day we might be equal to the sad majesty of the stellar deep. Until then… Well, our gifts to the universe are tantrums in the kindergarten, food and spoons flung spitefully from one high chair to another, scuffles in the playground, and lessons that are never learned. But we can hope. This is the season for peace on earth, after all.
Yes, we can hope, though we don’t hold our breath.
It’s a full moon tonight, a rare thing for a Christmas Eve, though really it’s the early hours of Christmas Day. The metonic cycle dictates that there will be a full moon at Christmas-time every nineteen years, but the calendar causes slippage, thanks to the insertion of leap-days, so the moon doesn’t often reach maximum fullness on Christmas Day itself. But it is full tonight – this morning – and it is bright and glorious. There is no jolly fat man on a reindeer-drawn sleigh interrupting the sun’s reflected rays, ET-like, but it is magical nonetheless. Enchanting in every sense of the word.
It may no longer be the Feast of Stephen, but if the legendary Wenceslas did happen to glance out of his hypothetical palace window while padding barefoot along a chilly floor on his way to the throne room – even kings have bladders and bowels – he might chance to see a man, neither poor nor gathering winter fuel, nor trudging through deep, crisp and even snow, meandering along a street.
This man has already had his seasonal flesh and wine, and he has no need for pine logs, thanks to the miracle of modern central heating. Actually, he’s had a little too much wine – well, several beers and quite a few tequila shots – so he’s rather unsteady, blearily content, and in his intoxication has no fear of the dangers that lurk in this urban neighbourhood even at Christmas. He’s drunk, blissfully oblivious to danger, and careless, which goes with the territory. You can’t really blame him. We’ve all done that Christmas Eve at the pub, haven’t we?
In his blurry mind’s eye, he sees his home. Out of the biting wind. Onto a comfortable sofa. A hot drink before turning in. Or maybe a nightcap. A warm bed. In the morning, a hearty breakfast, coffee, a couple of painkillers. An hour on the phone to family and close friends, verbal season’s greetings to supplement the cards. Opening the few presents other people have given him, getting stuck into the ones he got for himself. He’s not a selfish man, just self-contained. Not lonely, but alone. Not a misanthrope. An island, no matter what John Donne might have to say about it. Home. That’s all he wants, all he sees.
But he is not the only one out and about at this time on a cold Christmas Morning. There are others, less drunk, much less drunk, for whom Christmas cheer means filling their hungry pockets with other people’s money. Men who have no goodwill toward anyone but themselves. Men who don’t care who gets hurt or how badly, just as long as they get what they want. Three of them are behind our merry gentleman right now, and they will catch up with him…
Don’t look, whatever you do. Turn away now. This is going to be bad.
And it is bad.
Very bad.
When they’ve finished their callous business and disappeared into the night, he tries to stand, but falls down again, a marionette sabotaged by Edward Scissorhands. He crawls to the nearest street light and tries to assess the damage. Seeing the crimson stain blossoming across his white shirt, he thinks for a befuddled moment that he’s wearing a Father Christmas costume. The liquid dripping from his scalp is also crimson. There’s a crimson trail where he has dragged himself along the pavement. The red, red robin comes bob-bob-bobbing… He shakes his head, crimson droplets flying everywhere, but his mind does not clear.
Then the pain kicks in, and it is dreadful, white-hot explosions in his skull and belly. He can’t see out of one eye, and when he opens his mouth to call for help all that emerges is a gurgling moan. The pool of blood grows. This, he is dimly aware, will not be a merry Christmas. There will be no tidings of comfort or joy. No radiant beams from a heavenly face, no dawn of redeeming grace. The street light dims, and there’s a ringing in his ears, but it’s not the song of an angelic host. God and his staff are looking elsewhere this morning. They probably have vast hangovers to nurse and a very large Christmas dinner to prepare.
As one light darkens, another sparks into being, a tiny firefly on a black velvet cloth, as impossibly distant as the star Earendel, the faraway flame – a blaze which, in truth, was extinguished long ago, so far in the past that all we can now see of it is a decaying ghost – that brings news already 12.9 billion years old, a cosmic gospel that renders In the Beginning or Once upon a Time or When on High utterly meaningless. This firefly of the mind is not a ball of radiant gas, but it is light. The cold street recedes and the ancient photons expand. After an eternity that in actuality is only the blink of a dying eye, pictures form in the light, and stutter and glide into focus, into motion. There is sound and smell and taste and touch, all blending into one another, an omnidirectional spectrum of sensation. And…
And something else, something that cannot be expressed in the language he knows. Not a presence or a place, more an idea or feeling, or perhaps a process, a thing that is both breathtakingly ancient and achingly new, happening somewhere that has no broken body sprawled still and silent on a filthy pavement in a cold street, no opportunistic thugs laughing and gloating over their windfall, their pockets filled with a dead man’s cash. No brutal, sordid end to an ordinary, blameless life. An existence of a different kind, where all is calm, all is bright.
At last, he sleeps in heavenly peace, and dreams in starlight.