The Day After Christmas

On the day after Christmas, they started appearing, cast out of houses, stripped of their finery, lying crooked in the gutter, garbage bags flanking. My brothers and I walked to school and halfway there, three blocks away, was a steep ravine called The Hollow. A place of some dark mystery in summer, one hundred feet deep and forbidden land according to most parents, The Hollow sang its song to all neighborhood kids. Returning to school after Christmas, my brothers and I would drag the discarded Christmas trees along the sidewalk and onto the bridge that spanned The Hollow, then heave them over the railing, watching their graceful tumble earthward, their air brushing final fall. "Hey, I used to do that too!" Donnie was a lot older, almost done with high school, and his walk took him right by our elementary school - he laughed to see us hauling the trees to that concluding bridge. He grabbed a large one, bigger than any of us could handle, and upon the bridge had us help him hold it upright on the railing, as it stood in life, as it looked down upon Christmas gifts; we watched it slowly lean into Gravity, watched the balletic descent into silence. Donnie kept with us that first month into the new year, the pile of trees growing in the bottom of The Hollow. He told us things, we told him things, we asked him things and he told us more. My brothers and I still talk about that big tree on the railing of the bridge over The Hollow. It hit right on top of the pile of other trees and bounced off to the side, its own special place. As January wore on, we didn't find as many trees, and ultimately it was all done. Eventually the school year too was done, and then more years, and school itself was done. The trees at the bottom of The Hollow rotted away to nothing. Somewhere in there my mom told me that Donnie had been shipped off to war, killed within a few weeks. We had that one magic month. December 25, 2016 For Anthony Slausen's contest - 'The Day After Christmas'