Epiphany

She has traded in her red mermaid dresses for sweats and, nearly two weeks after Christmas, swans mournfully around a house rapidly being stripped of its red and green. The housekeeper has just taken the final gold bauble off the limp tree and soon that tree will be out on the curb on the other side of the gates, more detritus of a holiday season that seemed so alive so recently. The gardener has just taken the lights down from the shrubs so now the house will glow plainly as it does in Ordinary Time. All the decorations—rare heirlooms and cheap trinkets valued only due to sentiment—have gone back in their boxes in the attic, only to be exhumed again in 10 or 11 months, after the smell of burning leaves fades.

 

In a sense, she’s going back into an attic of her own, unneeded until summoned again.

 

She spies a McDonald’s bag with her face on it, sitting out on the dining room table, and throws the bag away. Every January, that’s what she feels like. That song that brings people so much joy year after year … it’s gone now. It pops up in late December at #1 on the charts and then the next week, it’s nowhere to be seen. Back in a musical attic of its own. Denied even the dignity of a lost bullet and a slow downward slide. (She may be closer to tying a record every time that song hits #1 but it will always come with an asterisk. She will never be rid of that damned asterisk.)

 

That’s how she feels: A greatest hit to be hauled out for a little while and discarded once the novelty wears off. She’s been dining out on that song for 25 years. Does anyone want to hear anything new she has to say? She thinks of the storage units full of Caution and The Elusive Chanteuse and Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel and the thought of all that dust pains her.

 

Finally, the workmen carry the Christmas tree past her, out the door and to the curb for trash day. She turns the right side of her face to watch them leave. The slam of the door is final, and the silence quickly swallows up any echo. The house seems so empty now. She seems so empty now.

 

She pads over to the couch and sits without a sound, eyes out of focus and mind gone blank, ready to wait out the birth and death of the leaves on the trees until she is activated again.