GIFTS

published in Kalopsia Literary Journal, VI, 2021

 

They were miserable-seeming men, dressed as I still imagine thieves often are, in black clothes and gloves and rigid faces. Gloves! The house was cold, as bitter as outside, but I knew visitors should take their gloves off. They dropped the two plastic bags beside the Christmas tree and left as if our home might taint them.

 

'Do we have to wait till Christmas morning?' I asked my mother.

 

'No,' she said, 'it will be rubbish they've brought us. People only give rubbish.'

 

She was right. There were board games with counters and dice missing, grubby soft-toys that smelled of the bin bags, a paint set with the black used up, a plastic xylophone with no sign of the beater.

 

'They dig out trash for Bernardos,' my mother repeated, swallowing more of her coffee. She hadn't got up from the sofa when the men had knocked on the door.

 

But at the bottom of the second bag was something astounding. Two bars of chocolate, twelve rows long. I counted the rows, and re-counted them, three-and-six-and-nine-and-twelve. The pound bars were whole and perfect, there wasn't a tear in the wrappers, not a peek at the corners.

 

'Can I?' I said.

 

My mother nodded. I knew her shame would soon coagulate into rage so I crammed a diagonally broken piece into my mouth. Perhaps another child would have known by the way it fractured, but I'd never before had a bar, of any size, to myself. After some seconds of my mouth hurting with the sharp edges, the chocolate yielded and my tongue curved into the taste. Immediately I was back watching my brother put purple cellophane over the lightshade in the corridor. I'd ran in and out of the chilling and rousing, violet hall, with the same shudder and fascination I was soon to find in disused mine shafts or quarry ponds or leeches latched onto legs. It would be the tang of unsafe lovers and April gravesides, a sour-milk horror plied with dark sweetness, the flavour of years-out-of-date chocolate.

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