“Blue Christmas” (2025)
Albert John Belmont
Oil on Canvas
The cart’s got a bum wheel. I should have known better, should have tested a few before bluster-walking it out of the store. Too late now, though. I’m not going back, even though the squeak and veer of it flames my ears when someone’s nearby. The only consolation I’ve got is that it’s temporary.
Sweat swamps my unshaved armpits as I wrestle the cart into the lineup beside the church. I don’t see him come up, and the man’s appearance at my elbow startles me into a rabbity recoil.
“It’ll be safe enough here. There may be no honor among thieves, but there’s plenty among the damned.” The joke’s well oiled, but his laugh’s not: It’s orange with rust and jagged edges, big enough to show off a gap in his molars and the dull tin crown behind it.
I look back and feel an abrupt pity for my cart, so barren beside these others heaped with essentials. Luxuries, even. Sleeping bags and pillows tucked under trash bags. Dew-swollen notebooks. A neon orange dog halter, the leash woven through the cart’s metal grid. A white plastic alarm clock with glow-in-the-dark stickers running cockeyed along the hands, identical to the one I’d smacked across the room morning after morning until it cracked. Heaps of artifacts from the worlds their owners had left behind. Or had been exiled from.
The man ushers me down the concrete steps into the basement, shunts me toward the line and the ladle-armed ladies in overbright charity smiles sudden as popped umbrellas, like that wouldn’t be bad luck indoors. Like bad luck’s only ever been a rumor for them. They look at me without seeing anything but their own reflections. I see them admire themselves in the small mirrors of my eyeballs, imagining the stories they’ll tell their families over dinner.
I know. For a while, I was just like them.
The questions I’d planned to ask—about services in the city 70 miles south, about transportation, about safe places to sleep—congeal on my tongue. I swallow them back with the tide of nausea from the stench of overspiced food and the rank unwashed. Instead, I give them a wind-up smile and my sister’s name when they ask. These days, only her gravestone uses it, so it’s not like she’ll mind the loan, not like she did when it was her cassette tapes or the homecoming dress I twirled in her mirror without permission. It’s not like it’s necessary, either: By the time Richard drags himself away from the barstool symphony with its bridge of “my wife left me,” when the sympathy drinks dry up and he stirs himself to ask around for me, I’ll be unfindable. I’ll be miles away, sheltered with people like me, this person I never planned to become.
It may not be necessary, but I still choose the lie. The man who escorted me in has disappeared, engulfed by the huddle of others who clump together laughing like old friends. I perch myself on the edge of a bench alone with my battered tray, chewing fast so I can leave and forget I was here.
Back in the open air, I swipe my thumb across my upper lip. It comes away with an oily sheen that slicks the handle of my cart and makes it slip under my hands. The wheel squeaks out of sync with the hiccuping tick of the alarm clock in my pocket.
Guess I’d rather be a thief than one of the damned.
I don’t trust the old owner or the off-brand AAA battery. I hook a fingernail in the alarm clock’s notched wheel, ready to set the time, and skirt my gaze in through the passenger window of a sedan at a stoplight. Instead, my eyes catch the driver’s. His grip mine in disgust and then drop away. By the time the light turns green, his face is blank again and my clock reads 5:47.
It becomes a grim game to pass the time. With each passing car, I count the ticks of eye contact, watching for that slide whistle of a smile, for a flicker of recognition, even though I’m two towns from home. And then, when there’s nothing, I look for the moment I turn invisible, when their eyes slip off my skin like tires on black ice.
It’s not like I’m asking for anything. I’ve got no cardboard sign, no outstretched coffee can. They just don’t want to see what they don’t want to be. Can’t blame them; I never thought I’d be on this side of the glass, either. I watch until the dark swallows their faces, hiding their eyes behind their glare-smeared windshields.
Isolated by the night, I duck deeper into the graveyard at the edge of town, settling against the trunk of a willow, its branches hiding me from any lingering eyes.
The stones cling to the night’s cold; it bleeds into my fingers when I pick them up and let them drop, clacking back together in the french drains next to the bus stop. A few cars pass, their headlights competing with the dawn for dominance. At this hour, no one looks my way. I may as well be one of the rocks.
I pull the clock from my pocket. The sight of its familiar face doesn’t carry me back. The anticipation of leaving doesn’t carry me forward. In fact—I tap it against the hard edge of the curb—the clock doesn’t work at all. The second hand ticks toward nothing, caught between the six and seven. Damn thing’s broken.
No matter. Out here, like this, time hardly bears watching. Or at least I can’t bear to watch it. Guess we’re the same, time and me, slipping past with no one to mark us.
I fidget the rocks into a tower. They’re too smooth to nest easy, worn edgeless by eons of battering currents. I tap them into balance, starting again each time they tumble.
At first, the girl is just a shimmer on the periphery. I sneak glances at her between settling each stone in place, watching the mirage of her solidify to a figure. It feels like remembering as much as seeing: the overlarge Iron Maiden t-shirt flapping in her wake, the yellow-green smear of a bruise across her jaw, the crossed arms holding all her pieces in place. There’s an uneasy familiarity in the distance-blurred details, and I tuck my discomfort between the stones.
She could be me. Or I was her, once.
The hill messes with my perception; her movement is all quick-flicked joints and swinging hair, but with each stolen look it’s like she’s hardly moved. In every stop-motion frame lives a memory: the rattle of a slammed door. The echoes of false apologies eaten by the cold spring air. The imprint of rings embossed in flesh.
The rocks pile higher, rising with the sun. Maybe I’m leaving town, but the stones will stay. For a while, at least, they’ll leave a mark.
I wait for the girl to pass. Instead, she scuffs to a stop. Seeing her up close, my memories are eclipsed by her reality. The bruise scallops the pale, insufficiently freckled skin along her cheekbone, not her jaw. It’s Snoopy dancing across the black field of her shirt. She is both older and younger than I remember being when my soles last slapped the sidewalk as I walked away from one fist, before I was pinned by another.
Her eyes sideswipe mine. She takes in my details like I studied hers.
Maybe in me she sees a premonition of her future. Maybe we are each other’s ghosts.
“Can I—?” Her hand agitates the air over the tower.
I nod my encouragement, my permission, and she feels her way to a green-speckled rock. It has heft. A small shelf notched by some ages-old break and polished by time. It’s a good choice. With held breath, she balances the stone at the top of the cairn.
The other questions tiptoeing behind her eyes stay unasked. So do mine. She brushes the dust from her hands onto her jeans, flicks a wave toward me, and continues downhill. She shrinks into the distance, hazy as evaporating dew.
Soon I’ll vanish, too. Soon the spire will be kicked down or raked flat. Even with all these rocks and all these hours until the bus pulls onto the highway, our monument will never be anything but temporary.
I stand up, joints creaking like the wheels of my cart, and pluck the dandelion sprouting from a crack in the sidewalk. With the whisper of an inarticulate wish, I thread it through the gap beneath her stone, where it glows in the loosening light.
Lindsey James: As a lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, I’ve long been captivated by the stories of rural and often forgotten places. This particular piece began when I saw a homeless man, his shopping cart parked on the sidewalk, build a cairn of drainage rock outside a restaurant in our small town. That impulse—of wanting to create something to mark his presence when he and so many other homeless folks go unseen or ignored—compelled me to explore the tension between wanting to stay invisible and wanting to be seen, between the ways we see each other and the ways we only see aspects of ourselves reflected in others. You can find me on Instagram at lindsey.james and on Bluesky at lindseyjameswrites.bsky.social.