That’s Why Everyone Red Christmas

Rachel

That’s Why

Rodman and Ellen Saunders

“I don’t get passive aggressiveness,” I said to her—to the world—with a stupefied howl. “I just don’t understand.” “Oh,” she said, “I guess that’s why you think I like you.”

Everyone

Rachel Rodman

“How can everyone be faking it?” I protested. “Everyone else cannot possibly feel like this—like I do—all of the time.” Her eyes crinkled in a way that, at first, I could not read. But then she blinked and I apprehended it: the misery—the coldness—so that, even at this faint intimation, lidded and brief, I wondered if I would ever again be warm. “Fake harder,” she advised me.

Red Christmas

Rachel Rodman

She had wanted, six years before—just six years—her two front teeth. And now this. (Hadn’t she wanted this?) And to have it, really—and so much—so that it had bled, that morning, through her reindeer pajamas, and into the sheets. “Thanks,” she said dutifully, directing her whisper to the near-empty cookie plate on the mantelpiece, just crumbs. But it was oddly like weeping.

Rachel Rodman’s work has appeared in Analog, Fireside, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and elsewhere.