December, 2013

    The snow fell in small ghosts of flakes over the street busy with Christmas shoppers. It collected in white tufts beneath insulated boots on the sidewalks, and turned to murky slush that would freeze in a short while beneath the tires on the crowded streets. The flakes soaked into the blurs of thick coats and ear muffs as the winds they rode in on nipped at any exposed flesh. It was the first snow of December in Chicago.

    Throngs of shoppers bustled this way and that into and out of the network of shops on either side of Main Street as if they were not shopping at all, but instead had some place more important to go. Only one of them moved between the shops with the self-possession of having time to spare. That one was Ever Eberhardt.

    Ever resembled the inside of a kaleidoscope in her bright red peacoat with a white geometric pattern of sharp angles that looked as fragmentary as broken glass. She stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the monotone blur of the other shoppers, but she would not have had it any other way.

    Shopping bags printed with enough store names to cover the New Year Blimp grazed against Ever as she moved through the crowds. She was always so curious, and couldn't help sneaking a peak in a passing bag every once in awhile: the burly logger standing on the corner carried a black bag filled with Victoria's Secret lingerie (of which Ever conjured the thought of him sauntering down the street with an axe over his shoulder and nothing on, save for a pair of those pink lace panties), and the woman who looked like she belonged in a Victoria's Secret advertisement carried an assortment of ugly Santa Claus neckties in a bag from Christmart, the resident holiday store that specialized exclusively in Christmas merchandise. Ever had gone into Christmart once before and bought her fiance, Reese, a gag gift of Rudolph boxer shorts. One could only imagine where Rudolph's nose was placed.

    Across the street, Christmart sat proudly with a fresh coat of regal white, nestled in between Priscilla's Purse Shop and The Fragrance Center. Christmart was a narrow, three-story building whose every inch of floor plan was crammed with some ridiculously large Christmas decoration, wrapping paper "autographed" by Santa himself, coolers full of variously-flavored eggnog, or some other holiday fanatic's must-have. Christmas trees ornamented with glass bulbs as big as one's head were perched in every display window. Their blinking string lights cast a glow on the snow-laden coats of passerbys.

    On one of the many advertisement banners strung to the outside of Christmart, Ever saw a pair of Rudolph socks whose nose dangled from the big toe as a red ball of fluff. She thought they would go great with Reese's box shorts, but only to disguise the real gift she bought for him: A replica of his late grandfather's pocket compass. It took six months for her to find, and when she finally did she nearly had a coronary at the price. It took her two whole paychecks and a lifetime of washing her father's car every month as compensation for the money she had to plead out of him in order for her to finish the payments, but she resolved  to being content getting soap bubbles up her nose for the rest of her life if it meant that Reese could have one of the few things that he had ever made a fuss about.

    Plus, it made her feel accomplished knowing that she had finally outdone Reese. Since they met in their freshman year of college, every birthday, anniversary and Christmas gift she got from him were perfect compliments to who she was. On their first anniversary, during one of the rare moments when he actually expressed himself, he told her that she was his forever, and bought her a golden hourglass that he never forgot to turn over when the top was almost empty. In the five years they had been together, the top never emptied.

    Her favorite gift had to have been after he proposed to her on her twenty-second birthday; he whisked her away from work to go on a two-month vacation in Alaska where she got to fall in love with the nature of existence in the Alaskan wilderness. Unlike Ever, Reese was never the outdoorsy type, nor did he take a liking to animals, and so her favorite moment of their Alaskan excursion was when Reese was swarmed by a brigade of otters. A blur of furry heads popping up out of the water chased Reese around the lake as Ever stood back with her video camera capturing every one of Reese's horrified expressions. She played the video at every get-together they hosted, like a mother displaying her children's naked baby pictures. Reese always turned as red as a tomato. Then he would give Ever the silent treatment for awhile, but their was no denying how much he loved her when she batted those bright hazel eyes at him.

    Thinking of him, she smiled as brightly as Christmart's lights before fishing her phone out of her purse. She had to take off her snow-soaked gloves to dial his number. It rang awhile before he answered, but when he did, his voice was thick with the unawareness of having just woken from a nap.

    "Hey, babe."

    "Hello," she laughed. "I'm across the street from Christmart-"

    "Don't you dare," he hissed with a bright shock of alertness and a joshing edge in his tone, "or I'll throw your cat out the window!"

    "You wouldn't. Even if you tried, Mittens hates you, so good luck trying to catch him."

    Reese breathed heavily. He was flustered.

    She laughed as loudly as the Santa Claus animation projecting on the side of Christmart's building. "Oh, calm down! It's just a pair of Rudolph socks to match the boxers. They have these little red balls on the toes-"

    "Ever, I swear to god, I'll burn 'em."

    "But you'll look so cute! Even cuter than when you tried to out-swim a gang of otters!"

    He gave another flustered sigh, but she could hear the faint rumble of a laugh beneath it.

    "I know you're smiling," she teased, her own smile growing three times as big, like the Grinch's heart on Christmas day.

    There was another quiet chuckle. If she knew him at all, which she did very well, she knew he was shaking his head at that moment and his hair was falling in his eyes the way it would always do.

    Ever waited for the traffic lights to beam red, reflecting like rubies in her pupils, and then she began to make her way across the slippery street to where those Rudolph socks were practically calling her name.

    "Is there anything I could say to talk you out of buying me those godforsaken socks?"

    "No."

    "Not even if I told you how much I love you?"

    "Of course you love me, Reese, or you wouldn't put up with me and my ridiculous presents," she said. "But I can promise that I bought you an amazing gift that you'll absolutely love. It's in a box on the bookshelf next to the photo of you and your grandfather. Once you open it, you'll forget all about the fact that you'll have two red noses hanging from your toes."

    "All right, all right, I give up," he laughed. "Just hurry up and come back home so I can open this box. I don't wanna do it without you."

    Ever smiled in triumph before uttering an I love you and ending the call.

    She was halfway across the street, her heeled boots having difficulty gaining any traction on the slush that had frozen over the cement. The shop lights shone on the ice like a million stars. It was beautiful. Ever thought that maybe there were actually stars trapped in the ice, like the glaciers she read about that preserved the remains of once magnificent beings. Then she imagined the ice melting and the stars shooting back up to the sky and dangling like loose baby teeth beside the moon whose face had just begun to peak over the canary horizon.

    She was enthralled with the ice and the possibility of a millions stars living their lives trapped in the frozen clarity that she did not notice the large, white SUV that tried to brake at the red light but continued to slide through the intersection at break-neck speed. All she saw was the starstruck ice and all she heard was the laughter of the Santa Claus animation coming from Christmart. No one else seemed to notice, either. All of the shoppers bustling from store to store could not fathom anything beyond all of their materialistic motives. Ever would have thought it was unbearably sad that none of them realized their existences and how they existed in the individually fleeting moments that were their lives. Their clockwork lives continued on unfazed, even for the split second of a moment that it took for the SUV to collide into Ever, sending her up and over the vehicle like one of those stars breaking free from the ice and going back up to where it belonged.

    Just like that, Ever was gone. But in that last moment of her existence, she imagined that she was going back to where she belonged... and she hoped it was beautiful.

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