Date: Sun, 26 Nov 2000 10:46:37 -0600
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: "Christmas at Seven"

			   "Christmas at Seven"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


 It was my seventh Christmas when our parents, mom who
had always seemed cold and efficient, and dad who had always
seemed like a vague unseeing almost unseen water coloring, had
the most blood in their voices. It had been building up for some
time. Choked with each other and themselves. That terrible violent
quietness that was between them. So I clutched closely to my 12
year old brother Joshua especially then. In the season of snow and
arms that held me when everything was awry. They separated the
next spring, our parents, and went their perplexed though relieved
way. But this is about my seventh Christmas when there was no
love, or a most curious kind, in the house, that big gabled empty
shadowy house. Or there wouldn't have been the love that should
have been, save for Josh.
 Who was always looking out for me and seeing that my
weaknesses were my strengths. It was especially cold that
Christmas. The floor held in the coldness and our bedroom was
separate and frozen because we had money only to heat the living
room. So beneath my grandmothers' heavy quilts, she made them
long before I was born, I slept uneasily. Half in ill delight for the
coming of Christmas morning, two nights from now. And Joshua
slept with me and he was me in many respects.
 A small boy, light of bone and dark of hair, whose hands
were small little human paws, as soft and warm as those of  our
puppy dog. Joshua, whose body was free of insolence and teasing
that other boys made round me. Like there were circles in which I
continually stood, towheaded and remarkably nothing at all, but
someone the other boys taunted, and one time more than taunted,
me sexually. But it would have all been far worse, had Joshua not
protected me.
 It was a curious world back then, and brother sleeping with
brother, and brother kissing brother awake in the middle of the
snow filled dreams of night seemed the right thing to do. His hands
that were warm moments on my flesh, as he put them inside my
woolen heavy pajamas and held me as though he knew there were
all those Christmases to come. The ones with only mom or dad. Or
the desperate crush of both of them, together only for moments
like those.
 And Joshua had his bed on the other side of the room,
though he seldom slept there. But always in my narrow little bed.
A Child's Bed. While he told me of pilgrimages to the true
Christmas tree, a little hard one that had poetry in it, that was mine
that only he could touch, save for me. The boys did not love me in
those climes. Where there were birdsongs in the dead of gray night
skies in the colder than colder weather of winter.
 And Joshua who had come to me like a ministering angel,
for Joshua had seen me naked in the bathtub when I was five and
he had knelt down to me in that claw footed old tub, where I was
embarrassed to see him see me. He took my reflex actioned hands
from my tiny penis and he put his warm soft mouth on it and it
stood up so sweetly hard. And it was the way everything feels for
me now, I believe, when the packages are opened on Christmas
morning.
 When you are there before the bedecked Christmas tree,
green and Spruce, and the packages lay in mazy hazy content all
torn open and the ribbons undone and the surprises taken out and
to be played with and worn and made into oneself.
 Joshua made me, my rubbery feeling self, into him that
night, while mom and dad were in the beginning of their arguing
throes. And he knelt on the soft pink bathmat and he put his tongue
to me and he made of me a Christmas tree. Just a little boy, not
much at all, but too soft, too feminine, too obvious.
 He was my headlights in those years and what an extra
ordinary thing to feel my penis in his mouth which seemed so adult
to me. So wise and adult. And I put my hands on his head, on his
hair that was shaggy because he wished it that way, and he tickled
my baby fat tummy with his fingers and he said everything that
was said, wordlessly.
 And when I came in a little soft pow of a feeling, he put his
little face, which seemed much bigger then, much bigger then than
it does now these adult years later, he made me feel as though I
was a part of Christmas, like I counted as much as the red and
green and yellow and orange lights on the tree, that like them, he
had encircled me, decamped from himself, and had woven his
texture through mine. And I held him then with my child hands
and I offered myself to him and lay back in the water and showed
him everything I had. And he stroked all of me and said I was most
lovely.
 He knew, without me telling him, about the other boys, my
age and a bit older. He knew even though he was so far ahead of
me, his mind filled with books and longings that were seriously
and suddenly satisfied. And there was never one, not one minute,
in which I felt guilty about having sex, making love with him. We
were clocks always at each other's bedsides. We ran in our dreams
together. And this night, two before Christmas morning, there was
the tree in the living room, what an odd custom. What a wonderful
custom.
 And we left our bedroom door open into the living room,
so we could see, like a guardian of us, those tree lights and the
circular light palette that shoved light on it over and again in great
tender waves of fantasies that were left on all night. And we
reveled in them, in our own hillocks of worlds, in our own bodies
that were one. I have never envied single children. I have never
envied those children who have to take walks by themselves. Feel
love, alone. Feel, especially, happiness alone. And though my
brother was not the first person to blow me (that honor was taken
by a teenage baby sitter when I was four and it was such a
vacuuming giving lingering pulling all the feathers out of me
experience, but it was transitory, it was done maybe on a dare, on a
whim that didn't really have me as the centerpiece at all, so in a
way, though it was earthy and fine and made me skinned to the
core of me, it didn't count. My brother loved me, and that made
him count.)
 It was a ritual that each winter afternoon when we got
home from school, mom had hot chocolate waiting on the kitchen
table for us.  She made us sit and drink the steamy mugs and eat
sugar cookies and talk about our day, made us tell her what grades
we made, but more and more as there was less and less of her and
dad, it seemed the pieces were coming unglued, for Joshua and
me. And I was eager and raw from the cold and restless glass eyes
she turned on us, as though she were mutely asking our help,
mutely asking us what she should do about a situation she and dad
pretended we knew nothing about.
 And after chocolate, we, my brother and I, would virtually
bolt to our room, be certain and be quiet to lock our door, and we
would snuggle down on his bed or mine and we would boy talk
and he would hold me. He would hold me and tickle my nipples
and unbutton my shirt and he would speak the silent speech that
said I was only a bauble and not much considering that. And I
would speak my own silent words that it was not so, for I saw
myself in your dream last night and I was the Christmas tree, not
just the v there. But all of me. And you were giving me presents
and you were bedecking me and adorning me with holly and
berries and silver snow rings.
 And he would silently, companionably, as he turned and
dug his mouth into my exposed lower belly not acknowledge and
tell me without words that, little brother, there was nothing I could
do for him that girls could not do better and he would lick my belly
and tongue my navel and he would rush his hands over me as
though he were so terribly cold in the frosted windows and the
bitter blue cutting air and I was the only campfire in all that
snowfield distance, and there would be like a Christmas tree
barber pole with the choked blood of our parents in the center of
our thoughts, revolving, and make all those candy cane shadows
that hurt so much and he would leave me and he would go from
this huge unhappy house and he would never linger a memory here
for me and that would scare me and if I didn't have his memories
to live in, how could I live at all?
 So my tears would come, salty and light with little tree
white light bulbs in them, little magnets that flowed and he kissed
them away and he let me know we were just teasing each other and
his cock, so much larger than mine, would be so strong, and so
hard as he placed my hands on it and I rubbed him through the
thick fabric of his jeans. And we were never naked completely
with each other, and I only completely naked in his presence that
time when he blew me in the tub. I don't know why, oh because if
we were caught, it would be easier to come up with a cover story if
only our flies were open, and yet, more than that. Like this night as
we watched the Christmas tree, and kneaded each other, he my
shoulder blades, and I his mid section.
 And we knew this was the last Christmas we would spend
as a family, and in retrospect it was the last Christmas of sledding
on our old brown sled and climbing the snow hills out where the
Goodyear plant now squats in slaked abandonment as though our
ghosts from long ago came back and got retribution and caused
lost jobs and the closing of the town almost, so there was just
squandering left. Because we were already choosing up sides and
he came in my hand, my Joshua, and it was the first time he hadn't
squirted on a piece of Kleenex instead and I looked down at the
cum in the room that only had lights provided by the moon rays
that entered through the window wood slats, and the Christmas
tree lights, so I couldn't see it well, but I felt the stickiness, the
little puddle of Joshua cream, as he held me closer than he ever
had before.
 And I think at that moment a place at the Rubicund had
been crossed. Nothing like the Silver River a mile away from
where we lived, where in winter we put on silver skates of shiny
points and rudders and broached the ice and cut lives out of it in
the form of figure eights and silver keys and where the golden sun
had gone while the moon cast iron shadings on the trees without
leaves round the pond, as this night I imagined how it would be to
skate on Joshua's frozen cum, that had been made specially for
me, for it made me giddy and made me feel that green cobalt fear
and excitement I have always felt toward Christmas, toward
Christmas past and to come when we celebrated it together and
that and summer vacations were the only times Joshua and I were
to see each other after the next spring, for as long as we were
children.
 They did not split us up, our parents, we did, we did
because we had to, because one or the other, they would have died
without us, one or the other, and it seems there was snow and ice
skaters out there on our final, truly final, tree together, and Joshua
held me close and he put his face on my unbuttoned pajamas
naked chest, and he asked me to tell him again about the baby
sitter who had blown me when I was little, and as he listened, he
turned away from me, rubbing his penis, so we were both facing
the tree as though it would lead us home when we already were
home, before home became pieces of mercury, little circular
leadings of them, like the pieces of crumbs that led to and away
from the witches house for Hansel and Gretel, we, like they, then,
not knowing that it really was a two way street. And good then and
now and for always that it was. I stroked his head, his shaggy hair
and he reached behind and cuddled, cupped, inside my pajamas
opening, my balls.
 The five foot spruce tree was on the opposite side of the
living room, in front of a full length mirror with a gilded golden
frame around it that had bas relief curlicues on it, though Joshua
liked to think they were really impressions of Greek satyrs. And on
so many of these recent snowy Christmasy nights, when it was the
worst between our parents, often dad would leave the house after
another sore throat silent argument with mom and she would go
across the street to stay the night with her best friend, a woman she
knew from high school on, knowing that we would be all right
with ourselves, we would, so daringly, make love on the living
room floor in front of the tree. To see ourselves through its
branches. My brother smiling laying his smiling body on me. I on
him. Kisses on each other's mouths. Tongues penetrating. To each,
one at a time, kneel in front of the branch mazed mirror, with a
penis exposed or our flanks and pretend, sometimes, Joshua did, to
fuck me between the legs of my pajamas.
 To model the precious child flesh and form that was
ourselves, to hold each other's legs over the other's heads while
looking at what came partially through those green branches of
mirror, and maybe I at least wanted to be forever inside that
mirror, those green branches that I dreamed some times were our
penises and that we were of worlds that only Christmas lived in
and that if I could wish it so, it was so.
 That night when Joshua came for the first time in my hand,
I wished to turn it into the icy Silver River and we would skate our
never ending skates down it, under sheltering protective blue stars,
and away from the other girls and boys in their coats and mufflers,
away from the stand where they served steaming hot chocolate and
the snowy banks where adults and teenagers walked pretending
that they were lovers though they didn't know the half of it, and
could never know love as deeply as Joshua and I did. We would
skate fast and furious with the wind at our backs, and we would
hold our mittened hands together and know that Tom Sawyer and
Huck Finn waited us down the long snaky length of the Silver
River.
 And to wish then, that night, as I took my hand of cum and
licked it off and Joshua groaned and said that was gross even
though he was turned away from me, as he giggled, knowing that
was exactly what I would do, for he had wanted me to and I knew,
for it made our talisman more real, it made his beginning  soft
black lovely pubic hair and my lack of pubic hair a kind of
permission that we could lodge in each other as we dreamed
sometimes fairies lodged in Christmas trees in a far away part of
the world, and it would be needing those packages, what there
were of them, for we were not wealthy, but our parents did their
best to make us a good Christmas, even this one, and the ones to
follow.
 Joshua listened as I described the baby sitter who "snarked
me up" and we thought of those two boys  who went after me,
Jimmy and Tommy especially, in the school rest room when I had
to pee at the urinal and I remembered what he did to them when I
had told him without telling him somehow. And we were quiet in
each other and we needed Christmas at a moment when there were
no motives other than the needing forever of mirrors to reflect
mirrors and to believe in Silver River and what the taste of my
brother's cum was in my throat, as he asked, and I said, like runny
salted eggs with winter sunshine in them for breakfast and could I
please have some more sometime? He obliged many times
afterwards.
 He laughed silkily as I held him and was him and his body
was so much larger than mine, and yet, not, for he had been going
off with other boys and the occasional man for some months now,
for he needed that kind of furious affection that he did not get from
his little brother who knew even littler, and he told me he was
sorry that he had hurt me by having sex, making love, with me, and
I put my breath in his ear and I closed my eyes and I hoped that my
breath would stay in his ear canal, that it would roam through out
that ear and the dreams he heard in it for the rest of his days, and
he would never forget me and never forget himself and the river
inside that was to take us back to those days again.
 And if we two were puzzle pieces taken apart and put
together again, then Joshua was my rock, my savior at whose open
heart I worshipped, for I would not tell him this, never in that
silver circle with the heavy snow outside, that one night, as he had
drifted to sleep with my then soft penis in his mouth and I almost
asleep, I had jumped when our bedroom door opened, our mother,
standing there. Fear bleeding through me, her Irish eyes of anger
that she had when we did something wrong, when we failed her
and failed her often we did, even her knit together well and strong
and reasonable and realistic 12 year old son as opposed to her
dreamy scatterbrained falling often seven year old, and though
Josh did not awake, and I saw only her shadow there in the door
with the Christmas tree lights bathing her in a kind of gaudy
carnival color, I did not push Joshua away or do anything but
freeze in terror and sudden shame.
 She saw, this severe otherworldly woman, I know, my
brother's face at my crotch, and though I could not know what this
shadow's expression on that was, (it would be fury, I thought then,
hell on earth on its way) when she came to me, short distance away
and (this made me truly shiver) bent down and kissed me tenderly
on my forehead and put her hand only momentarily and more
tenderly on the back of Joshua's head, then quietly left and closed
the door. I knew we had somehow attained a glittering prize,
because, for the first time I could remember, she kissed me and
touched my brother and I in a soft gentle way, not like a robot who
was forced to do these things grudgingly and with distaste. And
that glittering prize I would hold within me like those spinning
Christmas tree lights that had turned giddy in my fear and then
giddier when I knew it was all right with her, that she knew and
saw and it was to change her, make her kinder and friendlier and
closer to us both than she had ever been before. Though I never
told Joshua the reason for her transformation, for I never knew
how to tell him, not even to this day. Little brothers always have to
have something as an upper hand, don't they?
 All those years until that fateful spring of the next year
seemed Christmas to me. All of it was mounded white sifted snow
we ran home from in one of those glass snow bubbles each
afternoon after school with the light all glowy in the leaded sky,
and the cold cutting gales made our blood freeze deep in our veins,
and boys knew Joshua, for he had kissed them and he had had sex
with them and he was forever gay but when he told me, and only
when I asked, what they did together, he did it with kindness and
respect and such delicacy and always stroking me and despite the
kidding around and the mock good bye forever you could never
please me like a girl stuff, I knew what he meant and how difficult
it was even then even for Joshua, who was so very brave, to tell me
how he felt, to tell me he loved me.
 Mom and dad's rueful, hurtful pain of a bedroom was to
the right side of the Christmas tree in the house with so many
shadows and thus then quelled by so much of Joshua. For he
became Christmas for me. He became everything about it, that
lovely sweet fear of the department store Santas of my youth, the
skating, the emerald dreams that unbuttoned on Christmas Eve for
me when my hand went restlessly desperately, for somehow the
cloth of childhood is the cloth of Christmas and it is a terribly
difficult thing for a child to deal with something that magnificent,
that almost painfully, monumentally delicate, far too so for my
clumsy fumbling self to be burdened with, so, my hand went to my
hard penis and his hand on mine then, suddenly, and he did me off
himself and he was Pooh and I was Tigger and sex and childhood
and dreams and love and a mother's gracious understanding,
perhaps because of what she and dad were going through, because
Joshua and I then had what they did not, perhaps never did have,
all blended into the snow of then. The snow cream she fixed for us.
When we came down with colds, the Vicks Vaporub that she
rubbed on our chests. And how later on Joshua and I would take
our shirts off and hold our chests, one with the Vaporub against the
one who did not have it, and blend the stuff between us, grinding it
between us, to make us forever cough and sneeze blood brothers
for a lifetime.
 On Christmas Eve night, Joshua and I, loggy and giggly and
stuffed with turkey and dressing and candy, curled up in our thick
pajamas and robes on the couch with our parents, in our warm
living room, brother and brother hugging each other in body and in
spirit, listening to our local radio station playing the old recording
of Lionel Barrymore reading "A Christmas Carol." This was a
ritual in our house. And that was Joshua too and if I was his
Christmas tree, if my penis was and the all of me was the sweetest
he would ever know, (he said once in an unguarded defenseless
moment, I believe that was right after the first time I sucked him
off and he came back then without shooting, ) then he was the
season of winter itself. He was the lambent lights of the tree that
guided us through the pain of separation and the memory of being
together, not memories, but one long trusted encircled memory of
us.
 We would sit on the sofa with mom, who was more
welcoming and kindly, who looked at her sons as though she was
really finally seeing them, and dad, who was uncomfortable and
guessing how to be a father and always not understanding anything
at all, listening to the Christmas Eve radio, waiting and hoping, I
think, all four of us for Santa to come and make the pain stop, our
parents even more than we, and they would hold us and we would
have hot buttered popcorn on the table in front of us and boiled
custard, for the whole family was nuts about boiled custard and we
would listen to a tale about a place that never was and people who
never existed and it was fairy tale and magic and it would just be
so good together.
 Though this Christmas Eve, there would be sadness as well,
for they knew what was coming and so did we. Though Joshua
chose to live with dad and I chose to live with mom, so they
wouldn't be lonely, we parted with good hearts and no anger at one
another, as mom and dad seemed to finally part with good hearts
and no anger at one another. We were broken Christmas tree lights
but we were still together in very important ways, though dad and
Joshua had to move across the country because of dad's job. We
talked on the phone occasionally and we wrote occasionally, but
life finally took Joshua and I into different directions. We would
see each other as often as we could, but love took Josh, other kinds
of love, in his directions, and other far less kind things took me in
mine.
 But the last Christmas Eve to come, when mom and dad
pretended it was as it should have always been, when we began to
understand just a little the ways of human emotions and how hurt
happens when one does not intend to hurt, my mom held me to her
breast as we listened to the telling of the Dickens story and I
couldn't help it. I cried my eyes out. Later Joshua told me that he
held to dad and cried his own eyes out but made me promise not to
tell anyone. So I haven't, until now. And I think, before I go, I
would like to say what I said at the end of the radio story each year
back then, because everything then seems a story to me now, when
Barrymore's narration ended and the church bells sounded
announcing the latest birthday of our Lord and Saviour, what I said
as tradition back in those days, because mom wanted me to, I say,
of my own accord, as I write this now:
 "Merry Christmas. And God bless us, everyone."