The Christmas MEGAPACK ®. Nina Kiriki Hoffman

same thing happened when I asked for the beloved images of Gypsum, Flint, and Beryl.

      I set the babies on the pink bedspread and studied them, and felt my heart melting. They looked wide-eyed, curious, wistful. Jasper reached up a chubby hand. Gypsum had her hands clasped over her belly. Flint was curled on his side, leaning on his fist. Beryl’s hands lay open at her sides. I loved them all.

      I took some more woodchips and asked for the beloved image of Opal, please. For a moment a tiny haze clouded my hands; when it cleared, I found the figure of a little blonde girl with wide violet eyes. She was sitting back on her heels, her hands flat on her thighs, and looking down. She wore a flannel nightgown with teddy bears on it. She looked about four. I felt like crying and didn’t know why.

      I set her among the others.

      I took a stick and asked for the image of the beloved Daddy. He looked just like he always does, shy, smiling, his hair a little mussed. The image of the beloved Mama made her look different: she wore a smile I couldn’t ever remember seeing on her face, so that she looked soft and pleased. The image of the beloved Tobias came out just like him, tense and relaxed at the same time, his smile broad.

      I thanked my gifts for their help. I set everybody on the bedspread and spent time arranging them, seeing who they’d be next to, logically. Mama and Daddy together, of course, standing to the rear, looking down at the children. After a hesitation, I put Gypsum and Jasper next to each other, because when they were babies, they were inseparable, though since transition it’s another story. I put Beryl on Gypsum’s other side, and Flint on Jasper’s other side. That left Great-Uncle Tobias and me as loose pieces. We didn’t fit together. I knew Great-Uncle Tobias loved Jasper and Gypsum the best. I asked my gifts to change him from a standing to a sitting position, and my gifts obliged. I set Tobias at Jasper and Gypsum’s heads, just in front of Mama and Daddy.

      And was left with me.

      I held my image in my hand and cried.

      After a while I rearranged everybody into a chronological spiral, Great-Uncle Tobias at the outer edge, Beryl in the middle. It satisfied my desire for order, but it looked stupid. I put everybody back the way they had been the first time, and then put me, kneeling at the babies’ feet, facing toward Great-Uncle Tobias and my parents. That, at last, felt right. I was a little outside, a little beyond, looking back at them. They were absorbed in each other.

      I gripped a stick of wood and asked my gift for a solid cloud big enough to hold my little beloveds, and a cloud formed in my hands, puffy and pearl-gray and strong enough to support a whole family. I set everybody on it the way I had planned. I hung it in the air and stared at it for a long time. Maybe everybody would laugh at it. They had all said they liked my earlier ornaments, but maybe that was the Christmas talking and not them. Maybe Jasper would hate being a baby. I listened to all these thoughts, and wondered if there was something better I could make, and decided there wasn’t. I took my ornament downstairs to the living room, where Beryl’s tree stood, garlanded with Flint’s lights. The music of Jasper’s carol was playing, coming from everywhere, not from the stereo. A big plate of Gypsum’s cookies sat on the piano.

      Daddy was alone in the room with all these things; he was sitting in his armchair, just looking. I walked over to him and held out my ornament. He accepted it. He studied it slowly, the way he looks at everything, turned it this way and that, looked at it from below and above, and at last he glanced up at me with bright eyes and said, “Oh, Opal.”

      He put my ornament on a side table and got up and then he hugged me so hard I almost squeaked. Then I knew everything would be all right, no matter what everybody else said.

      THE CHRISTMAS CRAZIES: A GRIFF & FATS STORY, by Gary Lovisi

      For most people Christmas is the best time of the year. For Fats and me, on the job back in the old days—it was the worst. Christmas Eve, Christmas Day—a time of peace, joy, happiness, and love. It’s also a time when more people kill themselves, shoot their fathers, stab their mothers, beat their brother to death, or go out on some damn killing spree and murder their entire family. We called it the Christmas Crazies. It was true back then, it’s truer today.

      Fats and I had our strangest case of the Christmas Crazies back on Christmas Eve in 1962.

      It all began when the kid came over to our car. We were parked. The engine off. It was mid-morning, Christmas Eve. A slow time. I figured, okay it’s cool, we’ll have an early night. Boy, was I wrong.

      I was sitting in the driver’s seat, trying to sip some of Jackie’s killer coffee. Fats was beside me, chomping down on a handful of donuts, guzzling a quart of real coffee from, of all things, a Thermos. I don’t know where he got a Thermos, I thought he loved Jackie’s old rot-gut brew. Meanwhile, my partner worked on his food like a bulldozer digging a trench. The donuts were soon gone and Fats began looking around with that hungry look upon his fat puss like he still had room in that big gut of his for more stuff to eat. Which I am sure that he did.

      I don’t know how he could eat an entire box of those damn greasy things but I figured he was just about to ask me to take another trip to the donut shop when the kid came over to the car. He was a real little guy, just four or five years old. I figured he must have been lost, couldn’t find his mommy or something, but he wasn’t crying and then I noticed some woman standing behind him. Patient, and obviously his mom, but not in real great control of the boy just then. I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew I’d find out before too long.

      The kid tugged on my partner’s sleeve. Fats’ great ham of an arm rested on the open car window sill. The kid tried hard to get the Fatman’s attention.

      I was certain that whatever the kid had to say, it did not concern food, which I knew at that point was uppermost in Fats’ mind, so I gently gave my large partner a sharp shot to the ribs with my right elbow saying, “Hey, you big lug, I think the kid’s trying to tell you something.”

      Fats looked over at the kid with a blank look.

      The kid looked at Fats hard.

      It was stare for stare now.

      I thought, now this might be interesting.

      “You’re a cop?” the kid asked my partner. It wasn’t exactly a question. More like a statement of utter disbelief or astonishment. I couldn’t help laughing.

      Fats laughed too, said, “Sure, kid. I’m a cop. Now what can I do for you?”

      “It’s Santa Claus. He’s disappeared. My mom took me here to see Santa and now there’s no Santa. We looked all over. Do you know where he is?”

      Fats burped, not even trying to hide the sound from the kid and his mother. “Ah, you mean Santa’s missing?”

      They looked at Fats with incredulous eyes, and for a second I got the impression the wee tyke was thinking that my partner might have gobbled down Santa—red suit and all—in some kind of out-of-control eating binge. Fats was certainly big enough and hungry enough to eat a horse, so Santa wouldn’t be much of a problem. Fats was a giant-sized adult compared to the tiny kid. Lucky for the kid he’d never seen my partner on a real eating binge. It was not a pretty sight.

      The mother came over. She was a worn-out, worked-out lady, thin, pinched face, nervous eyes. She’d seen hard days. “My name is Gwen Smith, and this is my son, Robert....”

      “Bobby!” the kid corrected.

      Fats nodded, “You can call me Fats, Bobby.”

      Bobby smiled, said, “The name fits you.”

      Fats just broke out in laughter, said, “See, Griff, what I gotta put up with from some wisenheimer kid?”

      I nodded. I watched Bobby’s mother. She was concerned about something. Something that bothered her and didn’t seem right to her. I began to wonder about it, said, “So tell me, what’s the problem, Mrs. Smith?”

      She looked at me closely, then back to Fats, then to her son, Bobby, and said, “Every Christmas Eve they have a Santa on the