by Finnian Burnett
Geist
I’ve been alive for 76 percent of my life, Jake tells me, and he lies on the living room floor, hands crossed over his chest. The collar of his shirt grazes his razor-reddened chin. He shaves every day, Jake, whether we leave the house or not. I don’t know that I can last another 24 percent. His hands rest on a wrapped package, red bows, plaid wrapping paper, a gift from a greeting card company advertisement—I’d had them wrap it at the store since my corners always come out awkward and misshapen.
I’m pulling ornaments from a cardboard box, vestiges of my childhood. The chipped porcelain ballerina I’d begged and begged my mom to buy. The scuffed wooden train. The Santa-on-the-beach series I got the year we went to the Virgin Islands for a family holiday. I hook them onto the branches of our Christmas tree, along with the set of cross-stitch pictures my mother made—angels with glowing halos and god bless this season in block print over their heads. She sends a box every year, no matter how many times I tell her we have enough. God bless you, she always writes in the card. You and even Jake. Even Jake, she writes. We’re atheists now, or we try to be, though belief still chokes us, wraps itself around our throats, our hearts. I want to call my mother and tell her that I’m an atheist, and even Jake, that miserable sinner, but I don’t because we only see her every other year when we go back East and it’s not worth giving her one more thing to pray about on our behalf.
Jake hates the angels, hates anything from our families, but I put them on the tree anyway, bury them toward the back. I touch the stitching on an angel’s face and wonder how many she has left, how long we’ll keep getting ornaments in the mail though her hands can’t do fine needlework anymore. How many does she have in boxes, ready to pull out every year, to pray over, to put in the mail and carefully label with Jake’s name, and Sarah’s? Every year, Jake shreds the envelope, tears it into careful pieces until Sarah becomes arah, then rah, then nothing.
I hang them all, even the handmade snowman with Sarah on his scarf, the ornament my mother made years after I came out, changed my name, started taking T. Sarah, she wrote on the card. Sarah, she hand-lettered on the envelope in careful script and Sarah, Sarah, Sarah she wrote repeatedly in her Christmas letter to family, as if cementing it in everyone’s minds. How dare you, she’d said when I told her to start calling me Jayden. How dare you, I hear every year when I see Sarah’s name on the envelope. How dare I?
Throw that one away, Jake says when I pull the snowman out, but every year I don’t. He’s never known me as Sarah, never had to stumble over the S, worry about my pronouns. I touch the snowman to my cheek for a moment before I hang it on a bough next to an angel, facing the wall, knowing I’ll compulsively pull the ornament out and stare at the tiny scarf every time I walk past the tree. Sarah, the snowman whispers from the back branches.
I can’t figure out what 24 percent of the rest of Jake’s life is but he’s here now and I want to ask him how he knows. Does he plan to die at a certain age, like his father who was fifty-six when he dropped dead at the front of the church, kneeling in prayer, perhaps asking forgiveness from god rather than his wife and children?
I smiled when he died, Jake told me once. Laughed, actually. A woman in the front row said Jake was in shock because he howled with laughter as his father clutched his chest and dropped to the floor. Jake told me that, later, he sobbed and then hated himself for grieving his father. In that moment though, when his dad fell over at the altar, Jake felt nothing but relief. For our heart is glad in him because we trust in his holy name. That’s what Jake said after he told me the story, which was probably a psalm. He’s always quoting from Psalms.
I’m trying to do math in my head. Jake is forty so if he has already lived 50 percent of his life, he’ll die at eighty. That would give us forty more years
together. But Jake says he’s lived 76 percent which is oddly specific and probably means he’s going to die at sixty or fifty-seven or something and dammit, why I am so bad at percentages? Seventeen more years isn’t enough time when we’ve only been lovers five. When sometimes after making love, we both still curl into ourselves. When lust has conceived, it brings forth sin, Jake told me the first time we kissed, hands gripped, stubble rubbing rashes on each other’s skin.
Jake hides pictures of us when his mother comes to visit though she knows we’re together, knows we married last year without inviting anyone but my sister, Emily, who was kicked out of the church after getting pregnant by a married man who asked forgiveness and was granted it. He, the man, still goes to the church. I see his face smiling from the news section when I stalk the church’s website looking for crumbs of information about my father or the rest of the family.
Why 24 percent? I ask, and he rolls over on his side to look at me. I’m holding an angel ornament, the cherubic face smiling at me from the canvas square, gold ribbons festooning the edges, the eyes somehow sinister. For the wage of sin is death, it says, and I fold it into the branches of the tree. Kevin and Aadi come for cocktails, loaded with cedar simple syrup and fresh basil and non-alcoholic wine in solidarity with their surrogate, who promised not to drink until after the birth of the baby. They kiss in our kitchen as they unload gifts. They call me Jayden like I was never anyone else and they tease Jake over his Christmas sweater. We don’t talk about dying or our parents or god.
Kevin makes virgin spiced sangria and I put out shrimp cocktail and Nanaimo bars from the bakery down the street where we go every Sunday morning because the owner sells rainbow cupcakes and has a sticker in the window that says hate has no home here.
Kevin and Aadi touch hands and feed each other shrimp and Jake turns away. But I can’t stop staring, can’t stop wondering how it feels to love someone without hating that you love them. They can’t stay long because Kevin’s parents are hosting dinner. All the family is coming, even Aadi’s eighty-six-year-old grandmother who made them a quilt for their shared bed. Next year, they’ll bring their baby to family Christmas, and no one will say the lord told me to love you and hate your sin or I’ll pray for you, and Kevin’s dad will hold the baby, and everyone will take pictures of Grandpa and his first grandchild and no one will care that the parents are two men. Come with us, they say, but we shrink back, terrified of a family whose love knows no conditions.
Kevin and Aadi hug us goodbye, kiss us on our cheeks, hold hands as they
tumble back onto the street, laugh and raise their faces to the sky to catch lightly falling snowflakes on their tongues. We both hold our breath until they’re in their car, watch as they pull away, brush the backs of our hands together as we shut the door and retreat to the safety of our living room.
That night, Jake lies on the floor again, under the Christmas tree. I curl next to him, graze his face with my fingers, marvel at the soft spaces of skin between sharp edges of stubble. What do you want for Christmas? I ask him, ignoring the stack of presents on the floor. What do you really want?
And he presses his face against my chest, but he doesn’t answer. He never does.
Dr. Finnian Burnett is a writer, educator, and champion of creative chaos. Their work explores human identity, gender, bodies, mental health. Finnian’s work appears in Writer’s Digest, Geist, CBC Books, and Pulp Literature. Their first novella-in-flash, The Clothes Make the Man, was shortlisted for the Bath NIF prize, and subsequent novellas-in-flash, The Price of Cookies and Redshirts Sometimes Survive, are available from Off Topic Publishing. When not writing or teaching, Finnian can be found collecting rocks, watching Star Trek, or enjoying cat memes with ridiculous devotion.