Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.
It’s been a few years since I’ve reread Ken Scholes’ “If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear.” It was first published on Tor.com as their holiday story for 2011. It’s been newly released this year in a nice slim paperback edition from Fairwood Press, and as it is holiday-related, I thought it might be an appropriate final 2019 entry for Sunday Shorts.
This is the story of Melody Sheffleton-Farrelly (call her “Mel”), coping with the first Dragon’s Mass Eve without her father – which just so happens to also be the day of his death. Mel and her father lived on the outskirts of town, operating a dormant Hope mine. Neither were really believers anymore (Mel possibly never was) in the Santaman or the promise of Dragon’s Mass Eve. But they kept the traditions, minus going to church, going through Mel’s entire life.
The thing that struck me when I first read the story online and which still strikes me reading this print edition, is how well Scholes captures the effect a parent’s death has on the holidays. I lost my mother in 2005 (after spending her final Christmas with her, as Mel does with her father Drumm) and my father two years later, so the first time I read this story I had a few years’ remove from the loss. But I still recognized how Mel acts on that first Dragon’s Mass Eve without Drumm: at first, going through the motions, almost flying on autopilot reciting the Santaman Cycle (as she buries her father), then throwing traditions out as the emotional (and physical) exhaustion hits. A year later, she’s able to observe some of the traditions with fond memories of her father – and she’s also able to do things they never did on the holiday (I won’t spoil what those are here.) Healing from the loss of a parent happens at different speeds for all of us, and Scholes expertly shows that process over the course of the story.
Does it matter that Dragon’s Mass Eve is a holiday the author made up, with only winking nods to recognizable figures and stories? Not at all, because the effect is the same as if he were writing about Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, or Yule (or any non-Winter holiday that has adherent family traditions, for that matter). In fact, the effect may be stronger because the story doesn’t become bound up in one’s own experiences of any particular current holiday. We get a strong enough sense of the reason for the holiday and the historical/legendary underpinnings thanks to the sections of the Santaman Cycle interspersed throughout the story. The Cycle itself raises questions about the world Mel, her father, and their neighbors exist in: there’s enough we recognize (“Santaman,” and aspects of various Creation myths) to think this is possibly Earth long after some climate change cataclysm, but enough fantastical (Hope comes from mines; Love is a feral creature) to think it might be a completely fictional, or at the least alternate-Earth, world. Scholes has never weighed in conclusively on which it is, and ultimately it’s not as important a piece of knowledge as it might feel.
Mel has a really strong character arc, starting in grief/death and ending in hope/life. I don’t want to spoil any of the events that lead from the one to the other, so I won’t say much more. Just that the conclusion is satisfying and feels very true to the character we meet in the early pages and the child we meet through her own memories.
This story gives me so much to think about that I’m not sure why I haven’t long since made it a part of my Christmas reading tradition (which includes annual rereads of A Christmas Carol and others). I’ll rectify that going forward. I highly recommend seeking this one out. (I also hadn’t realized that Fairwood Press had started a Novelette Series, of which this is the latest volume. I’ve gone to their site and ordered all of the earlier entries and pre-ordered the next one, coming in 2020. I’ll do my best to do Sunday Shorts entries about all of them.)