When Steve asked me to find an early story for the January issue, this was the first one I thought of. I couldn’t remember the title, or what it was about, or any words or phrases from it, or exactly when I’d written it, though I thought I knew where it was stored. But it was not in the box under the printer, and I couldn’t find it in my files downstairs. I finally recovered it from an old anthology I had put together and bound at Kinkos for my own purposes. I wrote “The Christmas Thing” more than 25 years ago, and it was the piece I showed myself when I wondered why I wanted to write, and keep writing, when that activity seemed to bar me from other paths in life that might have been easier and more rewarding. While looking for “The Christmas Thing,” I came across a lot of old journal entries that I had at some point typed up. These pieces overflow with anxiety about money: using the baby’s birthday check from his grandparents to pay the rent, owing the dentist, going to the temp agency to take a typing test because I had no other work. Evident as well is a strikingly early despair over my marriage, which endured another ten years, partly due to economic necessity. So it startled me to see again how badly off that younger self seemed to have been, in many senses. And it startled me, too, that “The Christmas Thing” isn’t as good as I remembered it being. When I wrote it, I had no idea how to revise, and I didn’t work with my words very thoroughly. So when I look at this now, I see things I would do differently, cross out, connect, alter with a new idea or direction. Nevertheless, this piece from the mid-1980s is still recognizably my voice and is preoccupied with what still interests me. It’s about an imaginary country, as is my 2010 novel End of the Fire Cult. It has a kind of generalized interest in culture rather than character that still seems apt to me. Its fairy tale charm is offset by an underlying violence, and it manages to say a lot within a very compressed two to three pages. After writing much longer pieces—three unpublished novels from the 1990s and early 2000s—I returned to this short form with my collection The Human Mind in 2007. Fire Cult too works by means of small prose pieces, though they are connected by a narrative through-line. So in some way the writing I am doing today is closer to this early piece than to the work I did in between. I am grateful to find myself a happier, more confident person than the writer of “The Christmas Thing” was. I’m grateful, too, to friends who read this piece long ago and simply said “wow.” I’m not sure it actually deserved that response, but “The Christmas Thing,” with its protest against “maddening blandness,” kept a spirit of outrage and misery alive, even in a writer who became less miserable as she dealt with her circumstances and grew up.

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The huge christmas thing fell from one end to the other of Sadder Island. It was solid, but soft enough to push in and out. It had pores, but no breaks in it, or tears. Maybe it looked like a bed, if you put your face so close to a bed that you couldn’t see it. It had a sleepiness about it that made people want to sleep, and also made people think the christmas thing was sleeping.

Some people were trapped under the christmas thing. It had fallen on them and they could not get out from under it. It was so big that even its edges could not be lifted. Probably people were suffocating to death under the middle of the thing. It could be that they were already dead and even deformed by the tremendous weight of the thing.

People fell asleep against the christmas thing. They had dreams about getting up to get glasses of water, and about being asleep, and about being in trains and elevators with other sleeping people. Some people had angry dreams about people drowning under weight heavier than water, and about poison air. Sometimes a dream was that a woman was nice, and the person asked why she was nice. Then for one second she tried to punch them hard and screamed that if she stopped being nice, she was like this.

Other people who were still awake wanted to move the christmas thing. They wanted to shove it into the ocean and set it on fire. It was killing people. It was alive like a lung or a worm in some incomprehensibly large and slow state. They wanted to move Sadder Island out from under the thing.

Houses on Sadder Island had steep pointed roofs. The attics were tiny and tooth-shaped upwards. Men sometimes hurt their wives in this attic and left them there tied to chairs or to the wall. After these experiences, people often made stone heads and arms and set them up in dirt at the tops of hills. The island was filled with these statues. But the christmas thing had blotted them out with its huge, heavy softness. It was unmarkable, an erasure.

Maybe Sadder Island could be saved by means of boats. If people had never come in their boats to the island once, it may have remained invisible. Gods were always celebrated on open water. On holidays, tables under white tablecloths were taken out to sea and let loose. Some people went out in their boats to ask the gods for help against the christmas thing. At night, people who were awake could see masses of tiny lights in the harbor, coming from candles of prayer. Other lights were welcome lights, in case the souls of people suffocated under the thing had escaped to the water. The lights on the water seemed like a fever to the people asleep. The burning could have been in their brains, but sleeping turned the burning into signs like mothers’ faces or sounds from a radio. People sleeping very close to the christmas thing tended not to wake up in spite of friends shouting at them. It was awkward that the lights from the boats could be so easily transformed into part of a dream. Maybe the people who were asleep would continue to sleep because they had no reason to wake up, their dreams slid so easily over every interface.

Sadder Island’s belief in violent acts seemed not to help against the christmas thing. Most people believed that kicking an animal or even killing it could startle their luck into becoming better. But the christmas thing was a maddening blandness. There seemed no way of provoking it. It did not diminish if it were burned, and the smell of blood did not frighten it. Women with long cuts on their chests did nothing to it. Even boiling water poured on children had no effect on the christmas thing. Yet the people on the perimeter of the island clung even more fiercely to their customs.