All I Want for Christmas (Excerpt)
By Joshua Harding
Ben had never slept well on Christmas Eve.
Never a wink. No visions of sugarplums; no long winter’s nap for Ben.
It wasn’t the giddy anticipation of a ten-year-old cataloging possible presents. For Ben, it was always the anxious cataloging of potential holiday hazards. Had he unplugged the Christmas tree? (Dry trees and mini lights accounted for approximately two hundred house fires each year.) Had he locked the front door? (Burglaries jumped more than eighteen percent over the holidays.) Had that Gingerbread Yankee Candle been left burning all night? (He hated that thing.)
Except for this year.
This year, for at least part of the night, Ben seemed to have slept like a manger full of baby Jesus.
He awoke sometime around 3:30 am. His head was fuzzy and he must have slept in a weird position because his face was completely numb. He sat up in the small twin bed and struck his forehead on the low hanging eave that he’d forgotten was above the headboard.
He rubbed his head and looked around, trying to remember where he was. Madness and Cutting Crew posters stared back at him from the yellow wallpaper of his old bedroom. As he reached over to switch on the bedside lamp he knocked his high school tennis trophy onto the floor.
He’d been dreaming he was back at dental school attending a class on oral tissues. The lecture hall was packed and he sat in the front row in only his boxer shorts. His professor said, “Ben, please tell the class about the inscribers of incisors.” Then he woke up.
The lamp didn’t work.
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