A Little Hot Chocolate
Chapter 9 of Black Coffee, where this week we have a Christmas Story.
Read the previous chapter by clicking below (You’ll now find the Table of Contents at the bottom of this chapter, since it was getting pretty long!)
Snow fell for hours, the kind that didn’t glitter magically so much as erase the world angrily. It pressed itself against the diner windows in soft, persistent sheets, turning the outside into an unfinished page. The neon sign still worked, though the N in OPEN buzzed and hissed as if it had a grievance with the weather. Inside, the air was warm and inviting, holding in the heat and the smell of slightly burning sugar. Butter, vanilla, something clean and bright. The smell of sugar cookies permeated the diner like a pleasant memory.
Kat stood behind the counter with her hands flat on the laminate, feeling the faint vibration of the refrigerator motor through her palms. The place was slower than usual, but it wasn’t completely quiet. The grill sighed. The coffee pot clicked as it reheated again. Her dogs were asleep on the floor by her feet, and one of them snorted loudly before rolling over. In the kitchen, someone was working in steady intervals, a rhythm of trays and timers and the scrape of a spatula against metal.
At the far end of the diner, the woman with the crossword had a pencil tucked into her hair like a pin. She never asked for coffee, never asked for a refill, never seemed to finish the puzzle. She simply sat with her book spread like a map, moving slowly through blank squares as if each answer cost her something. A mug sat empty beside her.
Kat didn’t ask questions about the woman, though he knew the basic facts of why she was there. Questions weren’t really how this place worked. People arrived when they arrived. They stayed as long as they stayed. Some sat in booths and stared at the condensation on their water glasses. Some took the counter because they needed to be seen. Some never spoke. Some spoke too much.
The bell above the door rang. For a second the sound was ordinary, but each time it rang a wave of anxiety rolled through her. She never felt ready for those who came in, but she had to pretend she was.
A man entered the room, trailing snow that fell off of him in a cascade of flakes. He wore a red suit with white trim, and his red Santa hat was pulled low. The beard was thick and too bright under the lights, and for a moment he looked less like a man and more like a puppet in some very cheap carnival. The suit was damp at the cuffs, darker along the shoulders, where snow had melted into fabric. His boots left wet crescents on the tile. He paused just past the threshold, as if he expected to be told the place was closed, or worse, that he didn’t belong there.
The man didn’t look around the way people usually did. There was no scanning for exits, no quick inventory of other customers. He moved with the careful certainty of someone who’d been there before, even if he hadn’t, like a man following a route. He went straight to the counter and took a stool two seats down from Kat’s usual spot. He sat facing forward, elbows on the laminate, hands folded. For a moment he stared at the napkin dispenser like it might tell him what came next.
Kat didn’t rush him. You didn’t rush a thing like this.
“What can I get you?” she asked.
His voice, when it came, wasn’t jolly. It wasn’t even performative. It was tired and precise, like someone reading aloud from a page he’d read too many times. “Hot chocolate,” he said. Then, after a beat, as if he’d remembered a rule: “Please.”
Kat nodded, turned, and reached for the cocoa mix they kept behind the counter for the occasional kid dragged in late by parents who didn’t know where else to go. She could have asked if he wanted coffee instead, could have offered it as the natural order of things, but she didn’t. Hot chocolate was its own kind of confession.
She filled a mug halfway with milk, set it in the microwave, and watched the spinning slow circle behind the glass. The snow outside thickened, and the flakes catching in the streetlight glowed like a string of Christmas lights. When the microwave beeped, she stirred in cocoa, and watched it darken.
Behind her, the kitchen timer went off with a small, insistent chirp. A door opened. Heat and steam rolled out. A tray slid onto a rack. The sound was domestic in a way that felt almost comforting, if she hadn’t known better.
Kat set the mug down in front of the man. He wrapped both hands around it immediately. He must have been cold for a long time and only just remembered warmth existed. He didn’t sip. He held it and stared at the surface as if expecting to see his face looking back at him.
She looked at his gloves. They were black and neatly fitted. They weren’t costume gloves. They were real, expensive-looking gloves. The suit was a costume, but parts of him weren’t pretending.
“Cookies,” Kat called toward the kitchen, not raising her voice much. “You got any sugar cookies ready?”
“Cooling,” came a girl’s voice from the back, lightly annoyed but not unfriendly. “If you want them now, they’ll crumble.”
“In two minutes,” Kat said. She didn’t look back. She didn’t need to. She could picture hands dusted in flour, a towel over a shoulder, the practiced irritation of someone who kept the rules of baking because rules were how you made sweetness hold its shape. Kat reached into the register, took out a napkin, and set it down in front of the man anyway, an offering ahead of time.
“On the house, of course,” she added with a smile.
His fingers tightened on the mug. For a second, something moved behind his beard, an expression that might have been gratitude or something close to it. Then it was gone, replaced by that forward-facing stillness.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said.
“It’s cold out,” Kat shrugged. “And it’s Christmas.”
He let out a small breath through his nose, almost a laugh but without humor. “Yes,” he said. “It is.”
The woman with the crossword didn’t look up. Her pencil moved from square to square, as if what came in the door was none of her concern, but Kat noticed that the woman’s hand paused for half a second, hovering over the page before continuing. She was listening without turning her head.
Kat leaned her hip against the counter and waited.
After a minute, he said, “Do you… get many Santas?”
She looked at him. His eyes were visible above the beard, clearer than you’d expect. Pale, maybe; the kind of eyes that had once been kind before they learned to ration kindness.
“Not many,” Kat said with a laugh. “I’d remember if we did.”
A corner of his mouth twitched under the false beard. He reached up and brushed it with his hand. “Right,” he said. He swallowed, and the sound of it was louder than it should have been.
“My name’s Eliot,” he said abruptly, then softer, as if he regretted the bid for humanity: “Not…” He gestured at himself, the suit, the hat. “Not this.”
Kat held his gaze. She didn’t say I know. She didn’t say of course. “Eliot,” she said simply, filing it where it belonged.
He nodded once, as if that was all he needed, or all he could tolerate.
From the kitchen came the clink of a plate. A hand appeared in the pass-through window; just a hand and a forearm, skin pale under the fluorescent lights, the sleeve rolled up. The plate slid forward: sugar cookies, plain and slightly imperfect, their edges browned just enough to taste like toast, the kind of cookie made by someone who believed in doing things correctly even when no one was watching.
Kat took the plate and set it in front of Eliot.
He stared at the cookies. His gloved hands hovered over them, unsure. The suit made his movements look theatrical even when they weren’t.
“They’re for children,” he said, and it wasn’t a complaint. It was an observation.
“Most things are,” Kat said.
He looked at her then, really looked. Something in his eyes sharpened, as if he’d found the first thread he could pull.
“You believe that?” he asked.
Kat didn’t answer right away. The diner had its own patience. Outside, the snow continued to fall, indifferent and thorough. Inside, the grill hissed like a low warning.
Eliot’s fingers tapped once on the counter, a small, controlled rhythm. He said, quietly, “I used to.”
And in that sentence, Kat felt the shift, the moment when a man stopped being a customer and became a story that had already decided how it ended. She waited, letting him choose whether to keep walking toward it.
Eliot finally picked up one of the cookies. He held it above the plate for a second, studying the pale surface, the sugar crystals catching the light. Then he broke it cleanly in half. The snap was sharp in the warm air. He didn’t eat it. He just looked at the two pieces in his hands like evidence of a mystery he was only just now trying to unravel.
Kat watched him, and behind her ribs something old and watchful lifted its head.
Eliot set the broken cookie halves back on the plate with care, like he didn’t trust his hands to be casual anymore. He kept the mug between his palms, the steam fogging the bottom edge of his beard. The suit made every small movement look ceremonial. Kat had seen men hide inside uniforms before, but this was different. This was a man hiding inside an entire season.
“You don’t like sugar,” Kat said.
“I do,” he protested, and then amended it, precise as ever: “I liked it.”
Kat watched him take one slow sip of the hot chocolate. The sound of it was domestic, almost obscene against the way he sat, so upright and contained. He set the mug down and looked at her as if he was weighing whether she could bear what he was about to say.
She gave him nothing to push against. That was her way.
Eliot’s gaze dropped to the counter. He traced a wet ring the mug had left, following it with one gloved finger as if he could smooth it out, make it whole again. “My wife used to bake,” he said.
Kat didn’t turn her head toward the kitchen. She didn’t let her eyes flick. She kept her attention where it belonged: on his mouth beneath the beard, on the slight tightening around his eyes.
“What’d she bake?” Kat asked.
“Everything.” He almost smiled when he said it, and the attempt at warmth made the coldness of the suit feel sharper. “She did these… cinnamon stars. German. Powdered sugar everywhere. The kitchen looked like it had been mugged by a blizzard.”
That got a real sound out of him then, one short, involuntary breath that might have been a laugh in another life. The moment hovered, fragile. Kat could feel it wanting to crack.
“And the kids,” Eliot continued, the warmth gone again. “They liked the decorating part. Not the eating. The eating was an afterthought. They liked… making the mess. Sprinkles in their hair. I’d find them in the couch for weeks.”
His hands tightened on the mug again. The gloves creaked softly. Kat said nothing, but her stillness made space. Eliot filled it, because he’d come here to do exactly this: put a story down where it could be read.
“It happened on the twenty-third,” he said. “Not even Christmas Eve. That’s what people don’t understand. They hear ‘Christmas’ and they imagine… the day. They imagine a tree. Lights. A hospital hallway with carols, if they want to be cruel about it.”
His eyes went unfocused. The diner light reflected in them like two small moons.
“It was just snow. The kind you have out there now. You can’t see the lines on the road. Everything’s white. Everything’s the same. You think you’re going slower than you are.”
The details came out like something he’d rehearsed, not for an audience but for himself. Each sentence a nail. Each nail keeping a door shut.
“My wife wanted to get out of the house. She said the kids were climbing the walls. She said if we didn’t go see the lights downtown, she’d lose her mind. I told her we could go tomorrow. Christmas Eve. The streets would be plowed.”
He looked up at Kat and for a second there was something close to appeal, as if he still needed someone to tell him the correct line to say next.
“My wife told me, ‘Tomorrow is always a story we tell ourselves.’” Eliot swallowed. “I didn’t like that. I remember not liking that.”
“So you went,” Kat said.
Eliot nodded once.
“Ten minutes from the house we hit black ice at an intersection I’d driven through a thousand times.” His jaw flexed. “I remember the sound more than anything. Metal. Glass. The way the tires… screamed.”
He stared at the plate of cookies, at the two broken halves, and Kat saw his brain trying to make a map out of the fragments.
“It wasn’t cinematic,” he said. “There wasn’t time to pray. There wasn’t time to understand, and then there wasn’t anything.”
Eliot’s eyes flicked toward the pass-through window and back.
“They died,” he said flatly, without being dramatic, without asking for sympathy. “All of them. My wife. My son. My daughter.”
Kat held his gaze without flinching. She let the sentence be as ugly and simple as it was.
Eliot’s shoulders rose and fell once, as if his body had tried to breathe around the fact and failed.
“But I didn’t,” he added. The words landed like an accusation he didn’t know who to aim at. A silence opened between them.
Kat could feel his next thought hovering at the edge of speech: That should have been me. It would have been cleaner. It would have made sense. But he didn’t say any of that. He had more pride than that. Or more fear.
Instead, he said, “We buried them the day after Christmas, so people could go do things…with their families…before coming to their funeral. And then the next Christmas? Somehow that was worse than the one that came and went right after they were gone… I didn’t know what to do with the day.”
Kat nodded. “It’s a long day,” she said.
Eliot’s mouth twitched again, the slightest acknowledgment of being understood.
“I didn’t decorate. I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t even eat. Not really.” He paused, then corrected himself as if truth mattered down to the molecule. “I ate toast. Dry.
“And then my sister called. She said they needed someone to cover at the mall. She said it would get me out of the house. It’s been a whole year. Might be good for me. All that. She said it might be good for me to hear children laughing.”
Kat leaned slightly forward. “So you put on the suit,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I put on the suit.”
The way he said it, Kat could hear both shame and devotion, like an addict talking about a substance he both despised and missed.
“It wasn’t… sacred,” he said. Then, after a beat, he added: “At first.” He looked down at himself, at the red fabric, the fake fur, the belt buckle that caught the fluorescent light. “It was a job. A chair. A line. A script. Kids sit, parents take pictures, I ask what they want, they leave. And I thought—” He stopped. The pause was thin. “I thought it would be noise. I thought it would be a distraction.”
“But,” Kat said.
Eliot’s eyes lifted again. “But the first kid who looked at me…believed.”
He said it with contempt and longing tangled together so tightly Kat could almost see the knot.
“He looked at me like I was real. Like I mattered. Like what I said could change something.”
“And you liked that,” Kat said, not accusing. Naming.
“I needed it,” he replied. “There’s a difference.”
Kat let him have that, for now.
Eliot leaned closer to the counter, lowering his voice slightly, though there was no one nearby to overhear. He wasn’t afraid of being heard. He was afraid of being seen. “You know what kids do? They outsource reality. They hand it to you like a wrapped present and tell you not to open it until morning. They want you to promise the world makes sense. They want you to promise nothing bad will happen if they behave. And adults love it! Adults want the lie more than the kids do. Adults are desperate for it. They build entire houses out of it and call it tradition.”
Kat’s voice stayed even. “So you stopped telling the lie.”
Eliot’s mouth softened under the beard in something like satisfaction. “I started telling them the truth.”
Kat didn’t interrupt. She let him define what he meant by truth, because that was where the rot lived.
“I started small,” Eliot said. “Little things. ‘Santa doesn’t come to houses with cameras.’ ‘Santa doesn’t like kids who scream.’ ‘Santa doesn’t bring gifts if your parents are fighting.’” His eyes brightened faintly. “I watched their faces when the belief wavered. Just a flicker. Like a candle catching a draft.”
“And then?” she asked.
Eliot took another sip of hot chocolate. When he set the mug down, his hands shook once, just slightly, and he pressed them flat on the counter to still them. “And then I realized that the truth is kinder when it arrives early. And I’m not saying that to be cruel,” he added quickly, as if that mattered to him. “Cruelty is… messy. Cruelty is personal. This isn’t personal.”
Kat said softly, “Isn’t it?”
For the first time, Eliot hesitated, not because he didn’t have an answer—because he did. Because he didn’t want to say it out loud.
“I tried to make it stop” he said finally, voice quieter now, “to make the anger go away. It didn’t. So I decided to turn it into something useful.”
Kat watched him, and in the kitchen behind her, she could hear the baker rattling pans and bowls to make whatever else she had planned for Christmas. The faint, bitter clarity in Eliot’s expression hardened into something like doctrine.
“There is no Santa,” he said. “There’s no joy that lasts. There’s just… weather. And time. And death.”
He held Kat’s gaze, daring her to contradict him. But how could she really? She had almost been right there with him a long, long time ago.
She said, evenly, “And you came here to tell me that? Don’t you think I know there’s death? And time?”
“No,” he said. “I came here because I think you already know, and I needed to talk to someone who knows. Or, at least, can understand.”
Kat let the last sentence hang. I think you already know. People said things like that when they wanted absolution without asking for it, or when they wanted permission.
Eliot sat with his shoulders square, his hands flat on the counter now, as if he’d decided holding warmth was no longer necessary. The hot chocolate steamed untouched. The broken cookie halves remained where he’d left them, two pale crescents on the plate.
“You’re not wrong about death,” Kat said. “And believe me, I do understand. It’s that feeling you get when the happy Christmas music comes on in stores and coffee shops, and your life is falling apart, or when you see some homeless guy freezing to death on a bench while Andy Williams belts out It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year for the hundredth time in some city park.”
Eliot’s eyes narrowed a fraction, alert to the smallest opening. He wanted argument. Argument meant the lie still had enough life to be debated, but he was growing worried that she really wasn’t looking for an argument.
“But,” he said, almost eagerly.
Kat didn’t give him the word. She didn’t give him the structure. She let him sit with the silence long enough that his own certainty began to creak.
From the kitchen came the soft thud of a tray on the counter, the scrape of parchment. Someone hummed, faint and tuneless. Butter and sugar kept moving through the diner air like incense.
Eliot glanced toward the kitchen again. “You feed people,” he said, and there was a subtle accusation in it. “You keep doing that. As if it matters.”
Kat’s gaze stayed on him. “It does matter,” she said. “Just not the way you expect. You think people go to diners for the food?”
Eliot gave a humorless laugh. “I wanted life to matter the way it used to,” he said. “I wanted the world to behave. I wanted—” He stopped, and his jaw tightened. “I wanted my children to grow up.” He leaned forward, as if proximity could make his point sharper. “Do you know what it feels like to put on a suit that’s meant to be ridiculous, meant to be harmless, and have people treat you like you’re… a priest?
“They confess. Even some of the parents confess, and they don’t even realize they’re doing it. They tell you what they can’t tell anyone else. ‘We’re behind on rent.’ ‘My husband left.’ ‘My daughter won’t speak to me.’ They say it in front of the child like the child’s just a piece of furniture. And the children look at me like I can fix it, like I can rewrite the rules, like I can make things fair. And I can’t, so what’s the honest thing to do?”
Kat watched him carefully. This was the hinge. This was where grief stopped being grief and became a weapon he could wield without feeling it in his own hands.
“You tell them the truth,” Kat said, repeating his premise back to him.
“Yes.” The satisfaction in his voice was immediate. “Exactly.”
Kat waited.
Eliot’s smile thinned. He knew she was waiting for him to define truth, to commit to it. He obliged.
“I tell them that Santa’s a story. That their parents are paying for everything. That magic doesn’t exist. That good behavior doesn’t buy safety. That nothing they do can stop the world from taking what it wants. That love is just a social construct. That we’re all just meaningless biological entities with no real purpose, and even when we think it matters, that’s just because we’ve tragically evolved into animals that can grasp their own futility. And then we die.”
He spoke smoothly now, like someone reciting doctrine that had hardened over years. “And when they cry, I tell them it’s better to learn it now, while there’s still someone holding their hand, than later, when they learn it alone.”
Kat’s voice stayed even. “And when you say that, does it make you feel better?”
Eliot’s eyes flicked—just once—to the plate, to the broken cookie. Then back. “It makes me feel… clean.”
That word. Kat heard it like the click of a lock. Clean. As if bitterness were hygiene.
“As if,” Eliot went on, “I’ve stopped participating in a mass delusion. As if I’ve refused to be complicit.”
Kat nodded slowly. “So you’ve made yourself the antidote.”
Eliot’s posture lifted slightly. “Someone has to be.”
Kat looked at him, looked past the suit, past the beard, into the pale steadiness of his eyes. “And your children,” she said quietly, “would they thank you for that?”
For the first time, Eliot’s composure wavered. Something moved under the beard—pain, quick and sharp. He pressed it down immediately, like a thumb on a spark.
“Don’t,” he warned.
But Kat didn’t care, and she didn’t need to. “You’re using them. You’re wearing their death like a badge that gives you permission to destroy so many others. Don’t you realize that if what you say is true, then your children really are meaningless? They’re no better off than the spider you killed in your house the other day. But you don’t really believe that, do you? Something tells you this is not the way life was meant to be.”
“I didn’t ask for a sermon,” Eliot hissed, his hands clenched into fists.
“No,” Kat agreed. “You didn’t. And I don’t usually give them. But you’re different, Eliot. I like you. And you should be glad I do.”
Kat’s own confession took some of the air out of him. He blinked, as if he’d been bracing for a fight and now didn’t know where to put his weight.
Kat leaned in a fraction, just enough that he had to listen. “But I’m still supposed to do something,” she said quietly. “Not to destroy you, but to help you. This anger you have, the bitterness. You chose what you made of it.”
Eliot’s eyes hardened again. “I didn’t choose. I endured. I survived. I tried—” He stopped. The words snagged. He stared at the counter, at the wet ring from his mug, as if he could rub it out with pressure. “I tried to make it stop; the pain, the grief, the anger. But it felt good, I guess. It felt more real than the life I just lost.”
“And when it didn’t stop,” Kat said softly, “you found a way to live with it.”
Eliot’s laugh came again, harsher this time. “Living,” he repeated. “You think this is living?” He gestured at himself, the suit, the beard, the red sleeves bright as fresh blood against the diner’s worn light. “This is penance,” he said. “This is what I do so I don’t—” He cut himself off again, jaw clenched hard enough that Kat could see it in the muscles at his temples. “So I don’t become something worse.”
Kat held his gaze. “And do you believe you succeeded?”
“I’m not really hurting anyone,” he said quickly. “I’m not—” He stopped, because he could hear how defensive he sounded, how much that mattered to him. He swallowed and steadied. “I’m helping.”
“You’re helping them become like you,” Kat said evenly. “What’s that old saying? Misery loves company.”
Eliot sat back slightly, as if the words had struck him in the chest. He stared at Kat, and in his eyes she saw it: not malice, not joy, but a terrible conviction that spreading his bitterness was merciful and good. It would spare hundreds his own deep disappointment that the magic of life was a lie.
The bell over the diner door rang then.
Both of them turned and saw another man come in, shaking snow off his shoulders. He had on an ordinary coat, an ordinary face, with an ordinary air about him. He was an every-man, just another soul with cold hands and a tired posture. The stranger hesitated and scanned the room just as the crossword lady looked up and waved. The man’s gaze caught hers, and something in his shoulders loosened. He walked past the booths and slid into the seat across from her, as if he’d been expected.
And he was. The woman had done it before.
The two of them didn’t speak loudly. Kat couldn’t hear any words, only the soft cadence of conversation starting—two voices low, careful. The crossword lady pushed her book aside just enough to make room for the man’s hands on the table.
Eliot watched the scene with a stillness that felt predatory. “Who is she?”
“A woman who’s learning how to listen.”
Eliot’s mouth tightened. “To strangers,” he said, as if that was obscene.
“To whoever needs it,” Kat replied.
He stared at the woman, then at the man across from her, and something like disgust crossed his face. “That’s your answer,” Eliot said. “Talk. Comfort. Pretend it changes anything.”
Kat’s voice stayed calm. “It changes some things,” she said. “Not all.”
Eliot shook his head slightly, beard shifting. “No,” he said. “It delays. It softens. It—” He searched for the word, then found it, sharp and precise. “It sedates.”
Kat watched him, and she could see it now—beneath the bitterness, beneath the suit, beneath the doctrine—there was fear. Not fear of death. He’d made his peace with death in the way people did when they stopped believing peace was possible. It was fear of being seen without a costume. Fear of telling himself the truth that would actually undo him: his wife, his kids, this life—they really do mean something.
Kat’s voice dropped slightly, not intimate but exact. “You’re not ready.”
Eliot’s eyes narrowed. “For what?”
Kat nodded toward the table with the crossword lady, toward her new companion leaning in and talking, hands pressed down on the table as if it might keep him from shaking. “Ready to be like her, to be a person again.”
Kat turned to grab the coffee pot and walked away. She went over to the table and filled the woman’s mug. All the man wanted was some warm coffee to put his cold hands on, so she filled his, too.
Eliot stared after her, and when Kat returned to the counter, she thought he looked older. Plus the beard had begun to sag slightly with the moisture from his breath. His suit looked even more drab and was hanging off of him. The weight he carried was beginning to disappear. The illusion was failing in small, human ways.
“You think you can judge me,” he said. “Like you’re any better.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not any better. But I do think you already judged yourself, so I’m not here to pile on. I’m here to listen. It’s your only way forward.”
The words settled between them. Eliot’s eyes flicked, then stilled. He didn’t ask how she knew. He didn’t deny it. He only exhaled, slow and controlled, like someone managing a descent.
“You judged yourself,” Kat went on. “I know what happened. You thought if you stepped out of the story entirely, there’d be no grief after it all. There’d be no after. But here you are.”
Eliot’s mouth tightened. “Here I am.” He looked down at the counter, at the faint ring left behind by the mug. He rubbed at it with his sleeve, as if erasure were a skill that could be learned. “I couldn’t stay. After. I couldn’t stand there day after day knowing what the world takes.” His voice thinned. “I didn’t want to become someone worse.”
Kat studied him. “So you ended it. You destroyed yourself, because you had nothing left to live for. Just like you gave all those children nothing else to live for.”
Eliot let out a small, humorless sound. “Someone had to tell them the truth.”
“You told them your truth,” she said, leaning forward slightly, “and called it mercy.”
Eliot looked at her then, really looked, and something like fear crept into his expression. “So what now?” he asked. “You destroy me? That’s your job, isn’t it?”
Kat stood up straight. The movement was simple, but it changed the room. The air seemed to adjust itself around her.
“No,” she said. “That’s not my job. People destroyed here come in destroyed already. They do it to themselves. But you? I still see a little bit of light left.” She stepped out from behind the counter and came to his side. “But you don’t get to rehearse this anymore. You don’t get to make bitterness into a vocation.”
Eliot’s breath quickened. “Then what’s left?”
Kat considered him for a long moment: the suit, the man inside it, the grief that learned how to speak fluently and never shut up.
“Whatever comes after,” she said.
His eyes narrowed. “There is no after. There can’t be an after.”
Kat said his name, softly, only once. “Eliot.”
The sound of it stripped the suit of its authority. He flinched, just slightly.
“You wanted everyone ready for after,” she continued. “You wanted them braced against the after. ‘Don’t expect much in life.’ ‘If you lose anything, then what you lost wasn’t that special.’ That’s what you told yourself, too, how you thought you could survive. But you didn’t survive in the end, did you? The lies you told yourself didn’t really help.”
“But I tried,” said Eliot, shaking his head sadly. “I tried to survive.” A tear cascaded down his cheek. “But I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Well now you get to try again,” Kat said, meeting his gaze, steady and unblinking. “Now you get to live there, in the after.”
“I can’t survive that,” he stammered, rising from the bar stool. “I just can’t.”
“If I didn’t think you could,” she replied, “I wouldn’t send you back. But you can. I know it, Eliot. And not only that, you want to. You want to try again, because deep down inside, you know it means something. You mean something.”
For a moment, he looked like he might sit back down, like he might fold in on himself and refuse to move another inch. Instead, he reached up and removed the hat. He set it carefully on the counter, aligning it with the edge, as if order still mattered. The beard stayed on. He wasn’t quite ready to see his own face.
“When?” he asked quietly.
“Now.” She took a step toward the door, and then paused, waiting.
After a beat, Eliot stood. The stool legs scraped loudly against the tile, the sound too sharp for the room. He swayed once, disoriented, as if gravity had recalibrated without warning.
Kat moved then, not to catch him, but to walk beside him.
They crossed the diner together. Past the booths. Past the crossword lady, who didn’t look up from her conversation. Past the kitchen window, where the baker’s hands were busy shaping dough into small, careful rounds, each one nearly identical, each one imperfect in its own way.
At the door, Kat reached out and took hold of the handle. Snow pressed against the glass, eager.
Eliot stopped, wringing his hands in front of the door, suddenly unsure. “You’re wrong, you know,” he said quietly, not turning. “Out there. It’s cold. It’s always cold.”
“But even so, after all of it, the daffodils still come.”
She opened the door, and the cold rushed in, sharp and honest. Snow swirled at Eliot’s feet, already erasing the wet prints he’d left behind. He turned then, just enough to look at her. Their eyes met. Not adversarial. Not pleading. Simply human.
Kat nodded once.
Eliot took a deep breath, and then stepped through. The door closed behind him, and he disappeared in a swirl of white. Kat stood there for a moment longer looking out, hand still on the handle, until she finally turned around and went back to the counter.
Somehow this was even more difficult than the others, than the wrath and judgment she was coming to know. Destruction was final; it was easy. But mercy left the door open to disappointment. Maybe it would work out for him, but maybe it wouldn’t. Kat wasn’t sure if she would ever know.
From the kitchen, the baker came out, wiping her hands on a towel dusted with flour. The girl glanced at the untouched mug and broken cookies now stale and broken beyond repair. She leaned against the counter. “What,” she said, indignantly. “He didn’t like them?”
“It’s not that,” Kat said, smiling at her ego. “He just wasn’t ready for them.”
“So, what happens to him now?”
Kat gathered the plate and mug, holding them for a moment before turning toward the sink. “Now he has to live in whatever comes after joy. He’s got to find out how to hold on to meaning, how to fight for the light, no matter how dark it gets.”
The girl nodded. “That’s not easy, Kat. We both know that.”
“We certainly do, Abbey,” Kat said with a smile, as she walked into the kitchen. “We certainly do.” And even as the doors closed behind her, Kat thought, for the first time she could remember, that maybe this job wasn’t so bad after all.
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This was fantastic, I really enjoy how you zoom into characters and build them up!🙌✨️
Wow... this one made me reconsider what I thought I already knew about this story... I kept waiting for him to admit to something horrible and then be somehow destroyed by Christmas... which... I suppose he was. But I had to reconsider where I thought they were and how it actually worked... hmm...
I absolutely love this line: "Kat watched him, and behind her ribs something old and watchful lifted its head". Brilliant.