One Too Many Placemats

"Dear Santa," it started. The blank page stared up at me, meeting my eyes that would never grow. My small elbows dug into one of the three placemats from the table above, and I turned as I heard the tears in the next room, the soft droplets that no one believed I could detect. The sound bit into me, and drove me to keep writing in my shaky handwriting. I readjusted my hand around the pencil, feeling the small grooves where I bit the wood with my jagged fingers. I gripped it tightly as I wrote.

"Santa, please bring my mom some more money for Christmas." I knew that this was not half of the problems that my family had. Our family was alone again this year, with Brandon no longer around to make us laugh or cry. I laid on this stained floor, under the table, with words unknown on my lips and in my pen. I signed the paper with a backwards E in my name and pushed it away.

I stayed under the table, thinking of anything but the words I couldn't say. I tried to understand the feelings that permeated our house, and attempted to understand why I missed the presence of anyone else in the house. Suddenly, the desire for company was interrupted by an unwelcome guest. Pounding echoed through the house and I cowered, scrambling into the kitchen from my hiding spot. The sound continued until my mother's door opened. She crossed the small house, not noticing me in her attempts to wipe off her face.

She paused outside of the door, where the pounding continued. Words could barely be heard through the loud slams. When the loud squeak of the door told me it was open, the pounding stopped, but the speaking continued. The words were red. My mother's were blue. They bounced off of each other like a dance, like a fight, like oil and water, unable to mix into a harmony.

I crouched beside the refrigerator and shut my eyes. The colors continued at odds, darkening. Pounding began again until all that was left of the conflicting colors was the silence of black. I shook as the same tears that I had heard behind closed doors were on my face. When the loud squawk of the door sounded again, I dared to move.

I crawled slowly to where the piece of paper I had already signed was laying, and I ripped it up until snow drifted in bits around us. I curled up to my mother, where she was holding her head and shaking, just as I had been a few minutes ago. 

She reached out for me when I touched her, holding me and telling me that everything was going to be okay. She said that my life was going to be wonderful, and she said we were going to have a good Christmas. She promised that we would get some more money in the next couple of days and that Brandon would never be by again.

But I knew that our problems were more than money or men. I was small when I lost all belief in power beyond my own, but while my body would grow, I know my eyes never would. And I knew more than anything else in that moment that even Santa could not handle the tigers which tore at our two-placemat-family.