The Little Christmas Shop on Nutcracker Lane. Jaimie Admans

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СКАЧАТЬ earth is this person? The nutcracker made such a crash when it fell that I’m surprised someone from the UK’s seismology team hasn’t turned up to investigate the unexplained earthquake that just registered on their scales, and yet there’s still no one in sight. This is getting weird now. I suppose I should pick the nutcracker up and wait with it until someone gets back …

      I round the corner of the aisle where the nutcracker was, but the giant wooden soldier has gone, along with the broken bit of his arm, his sceptre and every splinter of wood, and lying on the floor in his place is a man. I scream.

      The man is lying on his back and his head and right arm are under a shelf, looking like he’s trying to reach for something. His left arm is in a plaster cast and held across his chest by a sling.

      He yelps in surprise at my noise and jumps so much that he clonks his forehead on the shelf hard enough to make the whole thing shake, causing such a reverberation that the rows of fifteen-centimetre-tall nutcrackers wobble and fall off, pelting down at him as he tries to curl in on himself and makes a noise of pain.

      ‘What are you doing there?’ I snap, the shock of seeing him making all logical thought fly out the window.

      ‘I work here. You?’ he snaps back as he wriggles himself out from under the shelf, every movement slow and stilted and followed by a noise of pain that he’s probably not aware he’s making out loud. He crunches the nutcrackers under his legs as he moves, until eventually he’s fully free of the shelf and is lying on the aisle floor, surrounded by a sea of little wooden nutcrackers, and squinting up at me in the brightness of the shop.

      My heart is still pounding from the shock of his unexpected appearance and I’m sure he must be able to see it bouncing in and out of my chest like a cartoon character’s.

      He’s got something clutched in the hand of his unbroken arm and he rubs his forehead with his free fingers. ‘Is your jumper flashing or is this the festive equivalent of seeing stars?’

      It makes me snort with laughter. ‘It’s flashing.’

      ‘I thought you worked in the decoration shop opposite?’

      ‘I do.’ I can’t hide my surprise that he knows that.

      ‘Not the jumper shop?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘So you’re wearing that without contractual obligation?’

      ‘It’s Christmas,’ I say when I finally fall in to where his line of questioning was going.

      ‘And that makes it socially acceptable to wear a set of traffic lights?’

      ‘Ah, traffic lights only have three colours. This jumper has many more.’

      ‘Believe me, I can see that.’ He groans and clonks his head back onto the floor. ‘So, my arm breaker. You came back.’

      ‘I had to. I’m so sor— Wait, your arm breaker?’ The music playing in the background of the shop is now “The Waltz of the Snowflakes” from The Nutcracker and the ballet pops into my head. The nutcracker soldier given as a gift on Christmas Eve, who gets broken and then turns into a prince at the stroke of midnight and takes the young ballerina on a magical journey through a land of sweets and snowflakes.

      He mutters something about the nutcracker, but all I can think about is the ballet and the nineteenth-century story behind it. About the nutcracker who turns into a real-life prince after being broken …

      He’s just lying there, trying to catch his breath, pain obvious in every line that flashes across his face when he winces.

      ‘Are you okay?’

      ‘I did not think this through at all. Getting down here was hard enough, but I have absolutely no idea how to get up. I regret this decision.’ His face is still pinched but there’s a jokey tone in his voice that makes me smile.

      ‘Do you need a hand?’

      ‘No, I need a crane. Or a forklift truck.’

      His tone makes me giggle again and when I look back at him, he’s smiling for the first time and his smile is so much like Flynn Rider’s that it stops me in my tracks. In that moment, he looks so much like the Disney prince that it’s almost like the animated version has stepped out of the screen and into real life. Wait … A Disney prince. A nutcracker prince. A prince … I wished for last night?

      No, it couldn’t be. Like I’ve somehow developed the ability to see through walls, I look in the direction of the magical nutcracker. I wished for a prince. A prince like the nutcracker himself. And they say nutcrackers grant wishes if the wish is made at the moment a nut is being cracked, and the stars were twinkling just right and the wind did whisper in his beard. This man is even wearing a dark blue shirt with threads of green running through it, not unlike the nutcracker’s navy cuffs and green-trimmed coat.

      It couldn’t be, could it? He couldn’t be … he couldn’t actually be the nutcracker I knocked over … could he?

      No. Of course he couldn’t. What am I thinking? Maybe I’m the one who’s fallen over and hit my head. In the real world, outside of much-loved festive ballets, broken nutcracker soldiers don’t magically turn into real men. I think. Hope. I mean, it would be nice, but …

      ‘Can you take this?’ He’s holding his good hand up to me and sounding like it’s not the first time he’s said it. I put my hand out and his warm fingers touch my palm as he drops something into it.

      I go to offer help again but the look he gives me makes me cut off the sentence, and I look down instead, trying to give him some privacy as he starts moving.

      In my hand is an amber gemstone that I recognise from the front of the nutcracker’s gold crown, one of the many that must’ve fallen off and skidded under the shelf when I knocked it over, which explains what he was doing down there. I’m trying to look away, but he’s making so many grunts of pain that I can’t help watching him worriedly, hovering like I might be able to help even though he’s made it obvious that he doesn’t want any assistance. His legs move against the smooth laminate wood flooring, the fallen nutcrackers scattering around him as he tries to get upright.

      He seems to be hurting more than a broken arm would cause, but I’ve never broken anything, so I wouldn’t know.

      Eventually he gets onto his knees and has to stop. His good arm is laid along a low shelf and his forehead is resting against it, his chest heaving as he pants for breath.

      I go to ask if he’s okay, but it’s obvious he isn’t. ‘What happened to your arm?’ I ask instead.

      ‘I got knocked over,’ he says without looking up.

      I freeze again. My fingers tighten on the amber stone I was fiddling with, hoping he’s going to elaborate, but he doesn’t. No. No … it can’t be. Obviously he doesn’t mean by me. Just now. When I knocked over the nutcracker and happened to break the exact same arm. That’s ridiculous. Even though I wished for a prince last night and the more I look at him, the more strongly he resembles a Disney prince. He’s like Aladdin, Prince Eric, and Flynn Rider got together and had all the best parts of themselves put into one person. He’s got Eric’s floppy dark hair, Aladdin’s wide-set brown eyes, and Flynn’s СКАЧАТЬ