A Christmas Piece

 Christmas is when people recognise something seasonal is happening, all good cheer and other nonsense, but Gloria found nothing in it, except the soft candlelight competing with the carollers singing about angels upon the snowy slopes outside, and the stairs upstairs inviting her to walk, in their direction, underward to the mansion’s newly mended roof. Have you ever heard of stairs talking, making themselves heard through the clogging fibre of stair-carpet and the bracketing of stair-rods? Even the wicked candle-sticks blanched, being already fitted tightly into their own candelabra’s version of rods. And the lounge ceiling grew as pale as the flat ghostliness that prevailed even when the day’s diurnal light vaguely pervaded from outside. Gloria tipped the rest of her bedtime tea back into the pot whence it came, with a gurgle fit to indicate the coming of the Christmas imp. She rose from her lounge chaise-longue and stepped stairwards, herself eager for where she could rediscover the beauty of sleep. Yet the stairs were unaccountably missing, having left an empty and dark stairwell, and she felt she were about to grapple with the scaling of an impossible mountain. At least, before the men mended her mansion’s roof (or it had itself simply healed?), she could depend on corralled moonlight to help her on her way, a would-be benefit when the wind had also escaped indoors with the roof having gone missing, too, prior to its recent replacement, a wind that had once blown Gloria’s candles well and truly out. The gusts of ghosts would ever airbrush the stair-slopes as well as the sound of angels now variously crimped and cramped within hidden horns of horror. Hark! A silent night.