Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups (4 page)

At last he consented ("But no funny business!"). She led him down the hall to Rachel's room, passing hand in hand with him through the closed door. In her oversized bed, the sleeping child was dwarfed by the stuffed animals that shared her dreams. It had been her gramma and grampa's bed, but they had bought a new one, and, knowing how Rachel loved it so, had given her the giant bed for her own. Now she lay on a thin sliver of mattress at the rightmost edge, one arm around the neck of a large teddy bear.

"There's the little dear," the Tooth Fairy whispered, closer to Santa's ear than she really needed to be. "Wait here. I'll only be a moment."

She glided to the bed. Rachel's head lolled toward her, her mouth open in the innocence of sleep. The Tooth Fairy ran a greedy finger over the exposed enamel of her bottom teeth. There was something menacing, something perverse, in her movements. Santa made an instinctive feint toward the child. Then the Tooth Fairy's hand slid beneath the pillow and found Rachel's tooth.

Turning to Santa, she opened her mouth and placed it, like a small white pill, provocatively on the tip of her tongue. Hunger flared in her eyes.

Oh dear God, it begins again.

As she chewed, the sharp crunch of bone grinding bone sang in Santa's ears.

And it feels so undeniably good.

Deftly she peeled off the red panties and tossed them his way. He caught and pocketed them without taking his eyes from her, fearful lest she vanish as before.

And what is Anya?

She squatted, legs spread wide, and shat dimes.

Anya is but a being torn from her lifespring, denying the undeniable surge.

Dimes dropped like tight silver turds from her anus, shiny in moonlight, ringing upon the bare wooden floor, spinning and rolling hither and yon.

And what is the Tooth Fairy?

With a practiced hand she retrieved them and slid them beneath the pillow.

Pure body, pure need, pure demand. That which must be caressed and covered and filled.

Then she lay down amongst the stuffed animals and harshly ordered Santa to make love to her.

Her skin shone flawless as a stone madonna's.

When he ran halfheartedly through his poor litany of objections, she stretched most provocatively, her body the body of a cat. And when he protested further, she merely smiled upon him, opened wide her thighs, and massaged with slow fingers the blushing wound of her love. Her breasts, mounded by the narrowing V of her downthrust arms, nippled into the night air. At the sight of them, Santa fell speechless. There were no more words in him. They had played out like line shooting madly off the spool of a fishing rod before a high-spirited bonefish that refuses to be landed.

Now there was only heat in Rachel's room. Heat that made Santa's suit a heavy obscenity, heat rising from the Tooth Fairy's splayed body, heat churning deep in Santa's groin where Santa and not-Santa conjoined most inseparably together. As quick as a nod, he unbooted and unsocked his feet, uncapped his head, unbelted, unsuited, and un-red-flannel-underweared his demanding flesh.

Feels right. Right? By God, it feels perfect!

Massive, all-giving, and generously endowed, Santa Claus went to the Tooth Fairy and lay with her for hour after hour of magic time, sharing the delights of illicit love.

*****

Magic time allows beings benevolent and malevolent to move unseen among humanity, distributing gifts to billions of children in one night, for example, or bartering coins for teeth. Without magic time, the pale hand that guides the planchette would become disquietingly visible. Without magic time, scoffers at superstition would sniff the vile shades that hover beneath ladders and know better than to defy the ancient wisdom. Without magic time, the limitless vistas hidden in the mirror's depths would leap into view, as would the Sandman's wizened visage and the cottontailed hindquarters of a departing Easter Bunny.

For a short while, this same magic time kept what passed between Santa and his lover from Rachel's senses. But then, as sometimes happens, there was a seepage, a commingling of their world with hers. Her brain tingling still with the numbing touch of sleep, Rachel opened wide her eyes and ears and let come to her what would, out of the tremulous darkness of her bedroom.

What came to her were two unclothed grown-ups moving against one another beyond her teddy bear, their heads pillowed on Elmer the Elephant. The glow that outlined them, as well as the numbness that held sway in her body, meant of course that she was dreaming.

Of that she was sure.

Nor was there any question who these grown-ups were. She felt blessed by their presence in her dream, looming large as gods in her bed, even though they seemed to be fighting about something or other. All their grunting and groaning seemed strange to her, hardly what one would expect from Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. But then it looked less like fighting than wrestling. Every so often, they would stop and take up a new position, then move and rub against one another again, just like the junior high kids in that boring wrestling match Daddy had dragged her and Billy to the week before.

She couldn't get over how wonderful Santa looked, how kind his face shone even through his sweat. She loved the vastness of him and the soft sweep of his pure white hair, playing about his face. Santa was white-haired too, she noticed, below his astounding belly. And out of that wild riot of white curls, he had grown an extra finger, long and fat and upright. Santa kept hiding it inside the Tooth Fairy, sometimes in her mouth, sometimes down where she went tinkle. The Tooth Fairy seemed to like having it hidden in her.

Rachel was awestruck by the fury of the Tooth Fairy's thrashings, how hungrily she feasted upon Santa's aura of kindness, taking in more and more yet never depleting his stock, then flinging it back into his face, her passion as tossed and distressed as a thunderstorm. She was ghastly. And yet there was something extremely beautiful about her, something that made Rachel want to kiss her.

On occasion, Santa would match the sounds his partner made deep in her throat, savage guttural noises which were transformed, by his echoing voice, into psalms of wisdom and benevolence. It thrilled Rachel's ears to hear the two of them like that. She felt she might almost explode with the joy of it. Her breath quickened but she kept as quiet as she could, lest she be noticed and denied further witness.

Hour after hour it went on, as dreams often do. She pleaded with God to let her remember every bit of it when she awoke the next morning.

Her prayers, however, went unanswered. For Rachel tumbled out of magic time and into normal sleep long before Santa uncoupled from the Tooth Fairy, grabbed his clothes, and staggered spent from her room. And though brief snatches of that night's witnessing flashed before her as she grew to womanhood, not for twenty years or more did the entire scene come rushing back full-bore into Rachel's memory.

And that would occur precisely one year before the Tooth Fairy devoured her at the North Pole.

2. Santa's First Lie

Anya's knitting lay limp upon her lap. Resting her elbows on the curved arms of her rocker, she halted for a moment its mindless movement.

Outside her sewing room window, freshly fallen snow glinted like shattered glass where the sunlight splashed across it. At the edge of the woods, clusters of elves were at play. Some built elaborate snow creatures. Some flung themselves down and made angels. Others leaped and whirled, singly or in pairs, on the skating pond.

It was their day off. The final gift had winked from the workshop shelves, the last home had been graced with a nocturnal visit from Santa Claus, and he was winging his way home. One day each year,
this
day, his helpers got to frolic and cavort to their heart's content. Santa would enjoy a private Christmas celebration with Anya in the morning, followed by the afternoon festivities in and around the elves' quarters. Then it was back to the industrious joy of creating playthings for the world's children.

Anya winced. Pain took a bite out of her left thigh. "Damned sciatica," she muttered, shifting in the rocker and readjusting her skirts.

A face popped up at the window.

Anya started, then she relaxed into a smile.

It was Fritz, her favorite elf: red-haired, gap-toothed, and ageless. Just yesterday he had run up to her, panicked, cradling a squirrel with a broken and bloody leg. It lay still in her hands as she healed its hurts with her tongue. Then it licked her cheek once in gratitude, leaped out of her grasp, and bounded off good as new into the woods. Now Fritz, rapping sharply on the glass, shouted something incomprehensible and beckoned to her. Shaking her head in a play of sadness, she held up her half-finished sweater. Fritz gave her a little-boy grimace and dashed off to join the rest, his cap jouncing this way and that like a buffeted leaf.

Such exuberance, such energy these little men showed. One would hardly guess that they were centuries old. Anya sighed.

Kindhearted though she was, she resented it sometimes that God had waited to grant her immortality until she had grown white-haired, bespectacled, and well past sixty. On those rare occasions when she opened herself to bitterness and regret, it struck Anya as grossly unfair that no rollback clause had been written into the bargain—no divine afflatus that would pull the skin tight over her bones, blow away her aches and pains, and breathe the buoyant winds of rejuvenation through her limbs.

It didn't help matters, she thought, to live with a man whose energies never flagged, who sacrificed sleep for toymaking, often disappearing for days into his workshop and emerging brimful of vitality, a sly hint of marital urgency lighting his eye.

It pained her to remove, night after night, Santa's speculative hand from her flannel thigh. But menopause had claimed Anya way back in the fourth century when they dwelt in Myra and had not yet become immortal. Since then, her carnal urges, never very strong even at their zenith, had dwindled to nearly nothing. It was a banner year if they made love a handful of times between one Christmas and the next.

He was a good man, Claus; the best of men. Sometimes it was a trial being married to him, feeling the need to prove herself worthy of his goodness. Among his many fine qualities, she counted his saint's measure of patience with her; the way he treated his helpers, paternal yet not patronizing; his wholehearted dedication to the children.

In the distance, a silent ruckus began. Flurries of snowballs flew in wide white arcs between two impromptu armies.

"Land sakes, where do they get all that energy?" With a shake of her head and a cluck of her tongue, she resumed her knitting and lost herself once more in the rhythm of the rocking and the clicking of the needles.

*****

Fritz dashed across the commons toward the skating pond, kicking up powdered snow as he went. He wished, just once, that Mrs. Claus would leave the cozy confines of her cottage and join in the festivities.

"Fritz! Look out!"

Knecht Rupert's high-pitched shout rang out too late. The
whoosh
of a snowball—the smack of it against his forehead like the blow of a frost giant's fist—came out of nowhere. Down he tumbled, backward into the snow, and the gleeful taunts of the others washed over him.

He felt his face redden. Johann the Elder and Gustav, Rupert's perennial sidekicks, gave Fritz resounding backslaps of encouragement and bent to the business of turning the gifts of nature into weapons. Then Rupert's strong arms helped him up and the battle was joined.

His allies loped about him, scooping up handfuls of snow and packing them tight, then letting fly toward the porcelain doll contingent which swooped in on the right. So many years had the dollmakers worked together at their specialty that they were almost identical sextuplets. Though their faces were blunt as bulls and they sported long black beards, their lips were bowed like the painted lips of the dolls they made and their voices strained high and tight in their throats.

Everyone called them Heinrich. It was the name they all answered to, and none of them had ever tried in any way to distinguish himself from the others.

Heinrich, then, a twelve-armed wonder, lobbed his battery of snowballs into Fritz's beleaguered group, downing Gustav and smacking Fritz on the ear. Fritz raised his fists to the skies, howling. He stooped and threw like a madman, shaming the restraint of Knecht Rupert and his companions. After an initial flurry of misses, Fritz's canny arm remembered trajectory, adjusting for wind speed, anticipating moving targets. The ensuing barrage turned Heinrich's unstoppable onslaught into first a standoff and then a rout.

"After them!" shouted Fritz, heading for the woods. But as he and his comrades-in-arms pounded closer to the snow-laden firs, reinforcements for Heinrich popped up from behind a great outcropping of rock. Fritz identified the two instigators of this new assault as his bunkmates: Karlheinz, he of the rolling-thunder snore, and Max, whose occasional bedwetting had consigned him, by a two-to-one vote, to the lower bunk. These turncoats descended upon him, flanked by elves from the rocking horse contingent, tubby little men with arms that flailed as they ran and wide eyes that flashed fire.

Now it was Fritz's turn to feel the brunt of attack everywhere on his body. First on face, chest, and arms. Then, as he fled, against his shoulders, hard upon his back, and dripping slow and cold down his neck. Elves swooped in from all directions to gang up on him and his cohorts.

At his heels, Gustav shouted, "For the love of God, Fritz, can't you run any faster?"

No time to answer. The attackers drew closer, their volley of snowballs filling the air like some giant ski shushing to a stop.

Ahead, Mrs. Claus bent to her knitting, framed by the wide rectangle of her sewing room window. How lovely she was. So kind and gentle a woman. The sort Fritz would be glad to spend his life with in holy matrimony, if God had intended elves to marry or entertain thoughts of intimacy.