The Christmas MEGAPACK ®. Nina Kiriki Hoffman

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СКАЧАТЬ things that didn’t even seem like they’d taste good. I didn’t have to eat them. I just wanted to make mountains of cookies that would sit around the house testifying to my worthiness, and if I made cookies nobody wanted to eat, that meant my monuments would last longer.

      Everybody wanted Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies, though, so first I made millions of those. Then I started frenzying my way through a bunch of recipes with foreign names like Berlinerkranzer, Krumkake, Pfeffernusse, and Sandkager. It was weird how big a difference the way you treat butter, sugar, flour, and eggs made. I loved that.

      It was like a spell, the ingredients the magic, the expression a result of how I shaped them.

      I was rolling pieces of Berlinerkranzer dough to form wreaths when Jasper came in from outside, taking off his motorcycle helmet and running a hand through his light hair.

      “You have something green on your forehead,” he said.

      “One of Flint’s lights. He decorated me by mistake—I think.”

      Jasper picked up a piece of dough and bit it. “Yum,” he said. Then he frowned. “Orange?”

      “Orange rind. I think baking will make it taste better.”

      “It’s pretty good now, just weird.”

      I watched him sample the dough again and thought, I wish we were children. Jasper and I were close before he went through transition. We got into so much trouble together Mama seriously considered sending one of us off to live with cousins, but Daddy talked her out of it. I worked the dough again, rolling it into pencil-thin lengths, then joining the ends. Jasper watched me load a baking sheet with cookies. I brushed their tops with meringue and added green and red candied fruit accents, then put the cookies in the oven, and he still stood there, a slight frown drawing a line between his brows, his hazel eyes shadowed.

      “What?” I said as I went to the fridge for more dough.

      “This stuff you’re doing is so picky. You’ve already made the dough. I could spell it into those little rings in half a minute.”

      “Don’t you dare,” I said, then clapped a hand over my mouth. I hadn’t said “no” to Jasper in a long time. It wasn’t safe.

      But he didn’t look mad. “Why not?”

      “Because, this is what I’m doing for our celebration,” I said. “You do your part, and I do mine.” It had been years since my heart was in the prayers we offered up on Christmas, because I thought the gods we honored had abandoned me; I was tired of petitioning them to take me back. I was normal, and I would make do with a normal lack of faith. Still, I said the prayers. And now, I discovered, I wanted to make my offering, too, whether there were gods to receive it or not. The people were here. They would receive.

      “This is a part of the job I like,” I said.

      “Cutting little leaves out of green fake fruit?”

      “It’s citron.”

      “Whatever it is, it’s taking you longer to make these things than it will take us to eat them. They’ll disappear, Gyp.”

      “That’s the way cooking always works.”

      “I could snap them out, and you could have the rest of the afternoon off, do something more important or interesting.”

      “I want to be right here, doing this right now.”

      His frown deepened. I was afraid I had gone too far. Suppose he spelled me into living in the kitchen, baking endlessly until he was tired of the joke? Suppose he ignored me and snapped my cookies done anyway? Jasper could outspell everybody in the house except Mama, and she almost never interfered; “let them fight it out” was the LaZelle philosophy of child-rearing.

      When Jasper didn’t say anything, I leaned across the table and took one of my finished wreaths from the cooling rack. I held it out. He reached for it, his gaze still on my face.

      “This is my spell,” I said. I dropped the cookie in his hand, and the little wreath broke.

      For an unbearable moment, we stared into each other’s eyes. At last Jasper blinked, then turned away. “Thanks,” he muttered. He stalked out of the kitchen, the broken cookie in one hand, his helmet in the other.

      I pinched a ball off the chilled dough and tried to roll it into a snake. My fingers trembled too much. I got out the kitchen stool and sat down, staring at the floured surface of the butcher-block table, the leftover morsels of dough, the big ball, the little bit I had tried to work. Was I lying to myself? Was this work silly? Worthless? A waste of time?

      “I smell something burning.”

      I turned. Helmetless, Jasper stood just inside the kitchen door, his face haunted. I jumped up and looked into the oven. “Damn,” I said, and pulled out the sheet of burnt-bottomed cookies. I turned the sheet over the trash can and shook it till all the cookies fell into the trash.

      “All that work,” said Jasper.

      “Yes, well,” I said.

      “Can I—”

      I wiped the burnt bits off the non-stick cookie sheet with a paper towel. When Jasper didn’t go on, I glanced at him.

      “Can I try it?”

      So many things to say jumped into my mind, but I let one after the other pass unsaid. I brought the cookie sheet to the table and reached for my abandoned dough, then glanced over my shoulder at Jasper. After a moment, he came to join me. I gave him a piece of dough. “You roll it out, like this,” I said, and thought, thanks.

      JASPER’S CAROL

      I find it hard to be thankful for something I’m still suspicious of. Thanks for the cake (are you sure it isn’t poisoned?). Thanks for the toy (I think it’s broken). Thanks for my powers. (How come they work this way? How come Gyp’s don’t work at all?). They work really well. (When are you going to make me pay for them? If I use them wrong, will you take them away?). Merry Christmas.

      Mama told me I was to write the carol this year, an expression of praise and thanksgiving for a whole year given us by the Powers, Elements and Spirits, Lord and Lady, the Source, and of course, I should toss in a verse about hope and thanks for the year to come. I said I’d rather do any other Christmas chore than this.

      She said everything else was too easy for me now.

      But what if the carol wasn’t good enough?

      “It will be,” she said, and smiled her “or else” smile.

      I noodled on the piano and brooded about this year, wondering what had been good about it, and how I could express that in music. Art wasn’t like magic; I couldn’t just say, okay, gifts, here’s some notes, give me back a meaningful song that’ll make everybody cry and feel good at the same time. I might be able to work backwards, though; start with the feelings, and say, please supply the notes to make these feelings happen. Of course, I’d need to have the feelings first. Not very likely.

      What did we have to be thankful for? Gyp got a job tutoring English at the community college. I had a new girlfriend. Flint СКАЧАТЬ