Lily was two feet taller than Emma, and a taller frame meant more weight, too, although Lily had a slender figure. Since the girl was a snow witch, the cold certainly wouldn’t bother her, so there was technically nothing wrong with leaving her where she lay. Except Emma knew Lily wouldn’t like to lie out here on her porch for anybody to see, and that innate maternal instinct which drove Emma to throw herself between her children and her husband’s experiments time and time again wouldn’t allow her to leave her deceased best friend’s daughter like this, either. So, she bent over, grabbed Lily’s ankle, and pulled with all her strength.
The raccoon took Lily’s other ankle.
They froze for a moment, staring at each other. The raccoon stood on its back feet, its little clawed hands wrapped around Lily’s ankle in much the same way Emma had positioned her hands. Its nose twitched. Emma raised an eyebrow. Its bushy, black-striped tail flicked.
“You and I are having a talk after this,” Emma said, and then she resumed pulling, as did the raccoon. Between the two of them, they dragged Lily into the house, down the hall, and toward the sofa. Then they took a short break for Emma to close the front door, and when she returned, the two somehow lifted and rolled Lily onto the sofa. After arranging her in what looked to be a semi-comfortable position, Emma found a blanket, covered the young woman with it, and then turned to face the raccoon.
It sat back on its haunches, waiting. Expectant. Gray ears swiveling to catch the sound of Pipaluk executing Plan C beneath them.
“My husband and children will arrive soon, along with a snow warlock,” Emma stated. “I suggest you try to act more like a raccoon if you don’t want to be found out.”
Its nose twitched.
She sighed. “Maybe it’s best if you hide in Lily’s room for now. It’s this way.”
Perhaps she should be more suspicious of a creature which was clearly not a raccoon and had somehow broken into Lily’s magic snow globe, but Emma fancied herself a good judge of character. There were some shady characters at mad scientist symposiums—Dr. Frankenstein wannabes, or “creeps,” as she liked to call them. This raccoon was not a creep, nor was it a “dweeb,” like the mad scientists who ate, drank, and breathed textbooks, along with supplements to compensate for vitamin D deficiency caused by lack of exposure to sunlight. No, this raccoon was a “weirdo,” just like her husband, which meant it was safe. Probably.
After installing the weirdo in Lily’s room with the witch’s laptop and instructions to search for information about raccoons, Emma returned to the living room just in time for a minor explosion to rock the icy floor beneath her feet. She clutched at the arm of the sofa as another explosion, louder and nearer, cracked the floor near the defunct fireplace. One more blast, and Pipaluk’s soot-stained, smiling face poked through the new hole there.
“Hello,” he said cheerily, blackened lab goggles very similar to the raccoon’s black mask. “Don’t come any closer. You should be fine where you are. Well…no, better take a step back.”
Emma took five steps back.
Pipaluk’s head disappeared, and, less than a minute later, the final explosion blew a hole through the floor, large enough to accommodate a good-sized Christmas tree. Which it did. The rocket-powered fir launched toward the ceiling, colliding with it and ricocheting off the walls of the glacial room, dropping ornaments and pine needles as it went.
“Pipaluk,” she called, dodging the flying evergreen.
“I’m trying.” His head popped through the floor again, this time tight with concentration as his fingers clumsily worked a game controller with a joystick. “I just—can’t seem to get—”
“Let me do it, Daddy,” called their eight-year-old son from within the tunnel.
“No, I can—”
“Give it to him,” Emma called, ducking the tree.
The problematic projectile pine immediately settled down when the boy took the controls. He piloted it effortlessly into a safe position next to the fireplace and the hole in the floor, bringing it in for a gentle landing with no jarring impact. Then he handed the controls back to his father and clambered out of the secret tunnel.
“What’s wrong with Lily?” he asked, running toward the unconscious snow witch on the sofa as fast as his heavy snow boots would let him. “Lily?”
“She’s resting,” Emma intervened, patting her son’s short, messy blue hair, so similar to the locks Pipaluk used to have. “Why don’t you fix the decorations with your sister?”
Pipaluk’s neon green wig disappeared for a moment, and then he lifted their five-year-old daughter up and out of the tunnel, also bundled into a snowsuit. Her bright pink eyes landed on Lily, and she hit the floor running, her first reaction to check on her favorite neighbor. The sight warmed Emma’s heart.
“She’s fine,” she reassured her daughter, catching the little girl before she reached Lily and steering her toward her brother and the innocuous-looking brown sack Pipaluk threw out of the hole. “Go make it pretty.”
Pipaluk climbed out of the tunnel, and behind him was Boris, a strip of white tape over his purple nose and bewilderment in his blue eyes. The children were pulling wreaths, figurines, ornaments, and other assorted Christmas decorations from the brown bag, and although the pile beside them was already larger than the bag, there was still more inside.
“Sorry about what happened earlier, Boris,” Emma apologized. “Lily can be very touchy about her magic.”
“I…noticed,” the warlock said, standing next to the hole in the floor and looking around the room. “Is she okay?”
“I have the cure!” Pipaluk burst out, literally jumping up and down in his excitement.
“Did you bring the food?” Emma asked, raising an eyebrow at her husband’s exuberance.
“Ah…oh, yes, here.” He reached into a pocket of his white lab coat and handed her a Fisher Price plastic banana. “But I did it! Last night, with that explosion, I—”
“Mommy, where should I put this?” a high-pitched child’s voice interrupted.
“Wherever you want,” Emma replied. “She’s fine, Boris. Just worn out from overdoing it with her magic. Are you sure, Pipaluk?”
“It was sitting on my lab bench this morning, and look! Look!” He shoved the glass vial in front of her face, pointing at the label. “It says ‘The Cure’!”
She frowned at him. “Pipaluk…”
“Well, we won’t know if we don’t try it!”
She grabbed his arm and yanked him back as he darted for Lily. “You cannot give her something you haven’t tested.”
“But—”
“Come with me. Boris, could you watch the children, please?”
“Honey—”
Emma half-dragged Pipaluk and his suspicious vial out of the room and down the hall to the kitchen. “If you didn’t put that label on that vial—and I know you didn’t—then who did?”
“I don’t know,” he whined. “But why would anybody make it up? What if it was that fairy who—”
“You and your fairy,” Emma sighed. She released Pipaluk’s arm and set the toy banana on the counter next to the soup. “Taste it.”
“But—”
She turned to face her suddenly deflated husband, placing her hands on her hips for emphasis. “If you’re too scared to try it, then you’re certainly not giving it to Lily.”
He removed his lab goggles from his face and pushed them up to the top of his head, his mouth twisting into a frown as he studied the vial with pink eyes so large they looked almost buggy behind his thick, round glasses. “Well, I guess I could try a drop…”
“Two drops.”
He sighed and nodded. “Two drops. Well, if this doesn’t work, I love you.”
“It will work,” she said, dropping her arms to her sides. “I believe in you. Now, I just add water, right?”
Lily's mother had covered the inside of the house in ice when she moved in—floor, walls, ceiling, even some furniture—and yet somehow, the pipes never froze. Pipaluk's work. Emma couldn’t claim to understand everything he did, but he knew his science, and the water flowed freely when she turned on the faucet. She filled a glass, turned off the water, climbed down from the stool, moved the stool toward the soup and plastic banana on the counter, and climbed up again.
“Oh.”
“Everything okay?” she asked, sticking her finger in the water and shaking a single drop onto the banana.
“Oh!”
She glanced over her shoulder at Pipaluk. He was trembling from head to toe, his pink eyes wider than ever.
“Pipaluk?”
A series of loud pops sounded as the banana bounced across the counter, dropping platters of food everywhere it touched and filling the kitchen with the aroma of turkey, ham, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, and more assorted holiday foods. Pipaluk, too, bounced in place, reaching higher heights with each jump.
“Pipaluk?”
“It works!” He landed and raced toward her, grabbing her shoulders and kissing her full on the lips. “It works and I have so much energy and I have to give this to her right now and you’re the best honey!”
She was still processing when he bolted out of the kitchen, teasing the rushed syllables apart to form individual words. The potion was supposed to help Lily recover her energy after overdoing it with her magic, so it stood to reason it could give Pipaluk more energy, too.
Oh, dear. If he gave her the full vial—
“Pipaluk!” she cried, racing after him.
Greens and reds decorated the icy blue living room at heights she hadn’t expected, but she couldn’t take the time to appreciate Boris helping her children when Pipaluk was upending the vial over Lily’s mouth. She launched herself at him and tackled him to the floor—too late. The empty vial hit the floor and shattered, and she and Pipaluk landed with a resounding thud.
“No!” Pipaluk wailed. “I only had one!”
“You gave it all to her!” Emma shrieked.
“But it could regenerate if—”
Then, to her disbelief, the shards of glass zipped together again, knitting themselves back into a vial filled with a clear liquid.
“Yippee!” Pipaluk leaped to his feet, dragging Emma up with him, and danced around the room at a speed that made her head spin. The kids were laughing. Boris looked more confused than ever, from what Emma could see of his blurred face. And then—
“What’s going on here?”
Pipaluk stopped suddenly. It took a moment for Emma to focus her vision now that she wasn’t in constant motion, but Lily was sitting up, her brow furrowed as her sleepy blue eyes took in the room. They slid across Pipaluk and Emma, frozen in a dip with Emma bent nearly backwards, to Boris, holding the tiny five-year-old girl with curly brown hair up to the mantle, to the little boy with blue hair hanging decorations on the battered Christmas tree. The line between Lily’s black eyebrows deepened.
“Isn’t it…July?” she asked, mumbling her words.
“Merry Christmas!” Emma proclaimed.
Her son leaped to his feet and ran across the room, jumping into Lily’s lap and throwing his arms around her, and her daughter squirmed so violently in Boris’ hands that he had to set her down before she fell. She raced to Lily, too, burying the confused snow witch in exuberant children and ebullient hugs.
“Pipaluk, let me up,” Emma reminded him.
“Oh. Sorry.” He straightened and pulled her up with him, and she pulled free from him, fixing her scarf.
“You need a pick-me-up,” Emma explained to Lily. “And since you gave us a wonderful winter setting, we’re giving you Christmas.”
Lily looked no less befuddled. “Then why is he here?” she asked, nodding in Boris’ direction. “And what happened to his nose?”
“Uh, you did,” he said, collecting himself and giving her an apologetic smile. “After I broke through your snow globe. Sorry about that.”
She stared at him, her expression tight with concentration until the little girl poked her cheek. “He’s Santa Claus!”
Her blue eyes shifted down to the two smiling faces in her arms, brown eyes like Emma’s and pink eyes like Pipaluk’s, and her face instantly relaxed into a smile. “Then where’s his beard? And his big, round belly?”
“He shaved and went on a diet,” the little boy said in all seriousness.
Emma smiled and shook her head. “Did you two bring your presents?”
The two children scrambled off Lily’s lap and tumbled into the tunnel amidst a flurry of giggles. Lily pushed the blanket back and turned to put her feet on the floor. “Did you…?” she asked, looking at Pipaluk.
He puffed his little chest out with pride. “I did it,” he announced. “It took a few hours and tweaking some calculations, and I had to—”
“Before you go into the details, could you give Boris something for his nose?” Emma interrupted.
Pipaluk’s chest deflated. “Oh, yes, sorry. Be right back!”
“And don’t take too long! The food’s getting cold!” she called after him as he disappeared into the tunnel. “Now, Lily, this is Boris. He’s an author.”
“I know,” Lily said, pointing at a book on the coffee table. “He wrote that. I don’t know what Crystal told you, but—”
“Let’s get the food dished up,” Emma intervened. “We have soup, turkey, green bean casserole…”
She successfully prevented Lily from turning down Boris’ job offer before he could even make it and led the two much taller people to the kitchen, where the plastic banana had covered every surface of the counter in more food than was reasonable for six people to eat, especially since four of them were extremely small, before it helpfully dropped itself into the trash can. Lily took dishes from the cabinets and passed them to Boris, who passed them to Emma, who stood on a kitchen chair and dished food onto each plate. When they reconvened in the living room, her children had finished piling hastily wrapped presents under the disheveled tree, and Pipaluk had brought the medicine he invented years ago for fixing broken bones.
Emma ate in silence, content to watch and listen to everybody else enjoying themselves. She and Pipaluk had created Plan C, also known as “Christmas in a Bag,” a few years ago. The calendar Lily unwrapped gave that secret away, but Emma would explain nothing else. It wasn’t magic, no matter how much Lily insisted it looked that way. It was all complex math, obscure science, and a healthy dose of luck.
The working Christmas tree lights added a soft yellow glow to the blues and whites of the icy room, splashed with red and green in a chaotic mess of decorations only two young children could create. Lily removed a glove and twirled a finger through the air, creating a soft dusting of constant snowfall, and Boris’ nose healed, although he grew a thick beard as a temporary side effect of the medicine.
So, just like any other Christmas, Emma thought happily. Smiles, chaos, and snow. Perfect.
Date of creation: 12/06/2024
Word count: 4,961
Author’s note: The prompt was to write a Christmassy science fiction story featuring a sassy heroine in less than 5,000 words.
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