Halfway through Father MacIntyre's sermon, with the thick weight of my father's arm on the pewback behind me and my mother leaning forward over her stubby white candle, I couldn't help but think of boning my wife. Perhaps an inappropriate moment for such a thing, but in church I was, at base, inappropriate. Kels knew not to come with us, mostly because of the looks we would get, but even without her there they still stared—all the elderly couples who had seen me turn from a bow-covered cupcake of a toddler into something else entirely. Kels had driven over to her great aunt's house instead, with that gingerbread loaf in hand. Hands she had let me lick the batter from only an hour before. I imagined that: her palms upturned like the Father's, and my tongue taking her offering. Around me, I counted twelve felted hats cocked on white curls, five green sweater vests, four red. Someone coughed daintily into their sleeve.

"—because what could be more innocent, more helpless, and more holy, than an infant child?"

I looked up at the ceiling, where the once rainbow frescoes had been painted over in white to seal the cracks, and spread my knees just barely. I imagined the weight of Kels in my lap, the sharp points of her spine pressed to my chest. She would pretend to listen at least, always better at a poker face than me.

"—swaddled in the dark, under the light of that great star, He waits for us—"

The lights in the cathedral were still dimmed, even after all the candles had been blown out. The room smelled faintly of smoke, black wicks, fir sap.

My mother had insisted on the candlelight service. "For the children," she said. "They'll love all the lights." But the boys were crouched on the kneeler, scribbling pictures of Rudolph and Christmas trees onto Post-its, while my sister bent towards them, feigning attentiveness as she texted discreetly under the lump of her coat. The candles were amusing for about two minutes, until the novelty wore off, and the boys had realized it was still just church. I heard them whisper-singing Jingle Bells as they plastered the pew with their pictures. My sister's husband, on the other side of the boys, caught my eye and winked, shrugged, unruffled by any of it.

"—the youngest among us—"

I bent my head and closed my eyes, the assumed posture of private prayer. My fingers, strung together tightly between my knees, could each still feel Kels' skin, the resistance of it ghosting there like a phantom limb. Which would be worse—the bathroom at her great aunt's house, with the green doily on the toilet tank, or one of these confessionals, locked tight, no one on the other side of the screen but god. I'd stand her up on the lip of the tub, or the wooden bench, take her hips in my hands, time her to the crescendo of the organ music.

"Let us pray..."

The bodies rose around me, Pavlovian, the dark wool of their coats closing me in. My mother glanced down at me quickly, but I stayed seated, leaned my elbows onto my knees, watched the boys still at their oblivious drawings. My sister had hidden her phone away, and held her hand out to her husband over their kids' bowed heads.

The littler one began to sing, softly at first, but once the music got going around us, his voice rose to meet the drone of it. It was the wrong song, the very wrong key, but he knew the words he had to sing.

"The first noel... the second noel... the third noel... the fourth noel..."

Under the loose arc of his crayon, Santa Claus was emerging, holding a candy cane in one hand, a little blue baby in the other. His voice careened through all the noels until the heads around us began to turn, but it was a special night, it was a child singing, so all the faces only smiled.

Sionnain Buckley has work in or coming from Pidgeonholes, Hobart, Cheap Pop and others.

Read her postcard.

Read more of her work in the archive.

Detail of art on main page courtesy of qthomasbower.





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