New Flash Fiction: A Wishbook Christmas

I really do like Christmas, but like I said, some part of my right brain must be channeling a little Ebeneezer Scrooge.

A Wishbook Christmas

Deirdre and Frannie must have been bad, very bad, that day in December, because even when they came out of their room ready to say, "We're sorry," their mom said, "No you're not." She said they weren?t going to have any Christmas and she was going to call Sears and cancel the orders from the Sears catalog, the special one with all the toys called the Sears Wishbook. Deirdre and Frannie cried while she dialed the number. The whole phone vibrated as she put her finger in the holes and twisted them around hard. And after each fateful dial, they heard the click-click-click as the round telephone face circled back to the beginning, inexorably, inescapably ready for the next digit. "Yes, hello, I have some orders I want to cancel," their mother said crisply into the phone. Her nose was in the air. They were on their stomachs, they kicked the floor, they pounded their fists on the carpet, they wailed, they tore their clothes. She paused and covered the mouthpiece with her hand. "Are you sorry? Really sorry?" Their heads went down, down, their faces screwed into the floor. "We're sorry, we're sorry, we're sorry," they cried into the carpet. "Really, really sorry?" They pressed their noses deeper into the fibers. They were beyond wailing now, they only nodded. Their mother said in the same crisp voice into the phone, "Never mind." Their heads never quite went up all the way again.

On Christmas morning the presents were knee deep around the tree, they reached to the very walls of the living room. Frannie looked at Deirdre, who was older, but Deirdre didn't know how to look or what to say. Their mother beamed.