Bryan Miller is an American, Kentucky-born, Minnesota-based writer and performer. His fiction has appeared on the Drabblecast, in Intrinsick and Dream of Shadows, and in the anthologies Shadowy Natures and The Monsters We Forgot, among other publications. His other work has appeared on the CBS Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and Sirius/XM radio. When he’s not in the midst of a pandemic he spends most of his days travelling North America doing live comedy shows and going to bookstores in the afternoons.
Television station manager Deke McClusky was a devoutly Christian man, especially when he drank bourbon, which is where he got the idea for the Holiday Hearth Yule Log Special. Not that it was his original idea. He’d heard about the daylong broadcast of a crackling fire beamed out annually on New York’s WPIX—heard it, presumably, over yet more bourbons at the Midwestern Broadcaster’s Convention in Cincinnati. He’d told everyone at the staff meeting that the Holiday Hearth would supplant the station’s regular lineup from 10am to 4 pm on Christmas day.
For six straight hours, the station would broadcast the image of a roaring fireplace.
But when a producer opened the box of tapes sent special from WPIX late afternoon on Christmas Eve she discovered not the pre-recorded Holiday Hearth but a series of old public service announcements promoting automotive frugality during the recent gas crisis. Deke called an emergency staff meeting, which settled into awkward silence when he asked for a volunteer to spend Christmas alone, shooting a live broadcast of a fire.
Gerald raised his hand.
Deke clapped him on the shoulder and told him, “This is a great service to the station, and the entire viewing community of Rapid City, Iowa. Just think about all those poor people who live in apartment buildings and drafty little trailers. They don’t have a chimney for Santa Claus to climb down. They don’t have a hearth to gather around as a family. That’s what this day is really about. Kith. Kin. You know about kith? I’m talking about a simple hearth that people can gather around and feel the warmth—if not actual warmth—that we can provide them through the power of television. That’s a great gift for a cameraman like yourself to bestow.
“Also, you’ll get time and a half.”
Gerald could use the extra money to buy a new starter for his Datsun. Working through the day also solved the pressing problem of how he would spend Christmas 1983: at his mother’s house with her and his stepfather Bruce and Bruce’s five kids, among all the mysterious, meaningless traditions of another family. Or else at his aunt’s, where his father and a mismatched assortment of bachelor cousins and uncles would barely talk at all until they started shouting.
There was a third Christmas option. He could drive over to Christina’s parents’ house and walk right in and declare that he’d been wrong, about a lot of things. That the time apart had so sharply clarified what she meant to him. She would see that he could make things right, thanks to this hard-won knowledge. Or maybe instead of walking inside he would make his declaration through the window, kneeling in the snow and watching his words of apology billow out in front of him as something you could actually see and pass your fingers through. In both imagined scenarios he brought along a gift. It was something in a small box sealed with a ribbon and bow. Gerald never bothered to imagine exactly what might be in the box, but he knew it was expensive.
But the days passed and now the stores were closed. He could still make the declaration, but going in empty handed seemed chancy, like arguing a court case without evidence. Working alone at the station would save him from having to choose any Christmas at all.
He would videotape the fire.
* * *
The next morning, strands of lights burned pale in the nougaty Christmas dawn. Electric meters hummed in celebration of Jesus. A drowsy Gerald navigated the abandoned streets to the silent station building. The artificial tree in the lobby, sprayed with chemical pine scent, presided over a litter of gift-wrapped boxes. They were all empty, the thought being what really counted.
The fireplace was located in Studio C, two doors down from the larger Studio B where Dean Phelps and Meghan McCord read the news nightly behind a long beige desk. Dean and Meghan would be off tonight, free to stay home and drink toddies and tell their families the news in person.
Studio C was reserved for pre-recorded one-on-one interviews. The fireplace leant the room a homey aesthetic sullied slightly by the sinews of wire duct taped to the unpainted cement floor. Unlike most everything else in the studio façade, the fireplace was real, complete with a brown flagstone hearth. Someone had hung a plastic wreath over the mantle, which was lined with sprigs of counterfeit holly and a row of silver-and-gold bulb ornaments. A cord of symmetrically chopped firewood stood sentinel at the carpet’s edge.
The whole production took fifteen minutes to orchestrate. Gerald zoomed in Camera 1 until the fireplace filled the frame. He hefted three split logs onto the clean, ashless hearth and lit them. Then he followed the producer’s simple handwritten instructions in the control booth: At 9am, threw the switch to break away from syndicated content to the live feed of the fire, bring up the soundtrack of instrumental carols.
For the remainder of the day, until 4pm, all he had to do was tend the fire.
He wandered out to look at the stacks of presents sitting under the lobby tree. Whoever had wrapped all the empty boxes had outdone themselves. They were ribbon-draped, color-coordinated, stacked two high and three deep. It looked like a kid’s daydream of a Christmas bonanza, and in fact did remind Gerald of one of his own Christmases many years ago.
It was the year his parents separated, which would have put him in fourth grade, during the last gasp of the ’60s. Guilt had driven them both to overindulgence with the gifts. His father drove back over to the family home in the morning to watch him tear through his bounty of presents. Gerald had bought them the customary one present each: for his mother, a faux-crystal swan to add to the aviary of bird trinkets she kept on a high shelf in the hallway, and for his father, a bottle of Drakar Noir cologne.
What his father had actually asked Gerald for was to sing a duet with him on a reel-to-reel home audio recorder he’d borrowed from a friend at work. Specifically, his father wanted Gerald to join him in “You Are My Sunshine,” a tune both his parents used to sing to him when he was sick. His father’s plan was to play the tape for Gerald’s mother on Christmas. One last Hail Mary to stave off the divorce. But eight-year-old Gerald balked at the idea of singing on tape. He flatly refused. After several minutes of cajoling, his father sighed and resigned himself to packing the recorder away.
* * *
A ringing phone startled Gerald out of the snowglobe fantasy of his Christmas memory. He looked at the light flashing on the main-line station phone, hesitated a second, answered it.
“Hello,” he said, then quickly corrected himself. “I mean, KTIA News, merry… holidays.”
“Lord in heaven, man, do you call that a fire?”
Deke McClusky spoke loudly over a fuzzed cacophony of chatter and jangling stemware.
“Were you a boy scout, son?”
“Um, in the early seventies.”
“Did you receive a merit badge for fire-starting?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Well then we’ve found the source of our problem. That fire is looking downright sickly. I don’t think it could melt ice cubes.”
The phone’s corkscrewed cord wouldn’t stretch all the way back to Studio C, so Gerald had to lay the receiver on the desktop to go back and check on the fire. Sure enough, it had dimmed to a crimson mound. Gerald piled two fresh logs onto the coals before speed walking back to the phone.
“Now that’s a fire fit for an American Christmas,” Deke said. In the background, someone was shouting Deke’s name—actually, saying “Deekers!” — but the old man ignored them. “This Holiday Hearth Yule Log Special speaks to the very core of our mission here at KTIA. We’re not just a news channel, we’re a community hub. This fire is for all the citizens of Rapid City to gather around together. Metaphorically, I mean, alone in their homes. This is about getting back to Christ and the values Ronnie has been talking about.”
Gerald didn’t know what to say to that.
“Well, uh, thank you, sir, and let me just say —”
“Merry Christmas, Jeremy! Keep that fire burning.”
A little after eleven, Gerald realized he’d neglected to bring lunch. He fed two fresh logs into the flames, tugged on his coat, and hurried outside to the Datsun, which was stubbled with a fresh beard of snow. He let the wind blast it clean as he sped down the empty highway to the Golden Garden, a tiny strip-mall Chinese restaurant. The sign out front read “Open 365 Days A Year!”
Humid, oily air blew in from the open door. Inside, two cooks in unsullied chef’s whites sat around a table playing cards with a pair of almond-eyed women. They smoked from a communal pack of Marlboro Reds laying open in middle of the table among bowls of steaming food not found on the sweet-and-sour takeout menu: gummy white tentacles unfurling from a yellow curry lake, alien-looking turnips with bushy green tops, whole pink shrimp resting atop an anthill of white sticky rice. The younger of the two women slapped-down cards and shouted something triumphant-sounding in Chinese. Then she nodded Gerald’s way and sidled behind the counter. She shifted into English to take his order of ham fried rice with egg rolls.
“Will be about fifteen minutes. You are our first customer of the day!” She said it like he won something. Then she snapped a series of staccato syllables to the cooks, who made the international hand gesture for Yeah yeah I’m coming as they stubbed out their cigarettes.
Gerald noticed an OPEN sign glowing neon blue in a storefront across the barren parking lot. Marley’s Wine & Spirits. He ducked out of the restaurant and into the liquor store, a narrow joint with thin, sticky carpeting that stretched back through two isles of booze. Behind the counter, a bearded clerk with transition-lens glasses sat reading a magazine about handguns.
“Merry Christmas,” Gerald said.
“It’s only a holiday if you choose for it to be,” the clerk replied without looking up from his magazine.
Gerald jerked his thumb toward the world outside the fogged windows. “Tell them that.”
“You know what day Rosh Hashanah is?”
Gerald shrugged.
“Jewish New Year. I don’t know the date myself. Passes by every year and I don’t even notice. But to some folks that’s a holiday. That’s for you to decide.”
“Very philosophical.”
The clerk nodded to his copy of Small Arms Monthly. “I do a lot of reading.”
Gerald studied the rows of pint bottles over the clerk’s shoulder. He drank infrequently, almost never hard liquor. He remembered his granddad, his mother’s father, who he called Popsy, quaffing E&J XO Brandy from a coffee mug. Regular days he preferred beer or rye and never until six o’clock, but on Christmas it was brandy only and brandy early. Gerald asked for a bottle.
“The St. Remy costs a bit more but it’s a lot better,” the counterman said. “It is Christmas.”
“You just said it’s only a holiday if you want it to be.”
“Depends,” said the philosopher-clerk, “if you want the XO or the St. Remy.”
Gerald returned to the restaurant with his brown bagged bottle and waited another five minutes for his order to come up. The longer he sat, the more he worried that the untended fire had broken free from the Holiday Hearth, and was right now swallowing up the station. He sped back to find the building standing cool and quiet in the snow.
Inside, he refueled the fire. Then he cracked open his bottle to celebrate a successful caper.
* * *
Gerald was delighted to find the marsupial front pocket of his hooded sweatshirt perfectly fit a pint of brandy and two egg rolls.
“It’s a Christmas miracle,” he muttered.
He ambulated up and down the hallways, sipping and munching. The brandy’s sugary sharpness tasted not entirely unlike sweet and sour sauce, and paired nicely with the greasy dough and savory pork. He made an illegible mental note to share this discovery with the Golden Gardeners.
Gerald left a wake of glistening crumbs behind him as he meandered from office to office. In Dean Phillips’ desk he found a disorganized free-for-all of paperclips and uncapped pens and, deep in the back, a gently used cocaine spoon. Next to the typewriter stood a framed picture of Dean and his blonde, tanned wife bookending sunshiny kids standing proud in their bathing suits on Dean’s pontoon boat, the “News Anchor’s Away!”
It was difficult to imagine coiffed Dean as a family man. Watching kids play sports without the buffer of sportscaster Dan Tremain. Waking up next to a woman with no makeup and sleep-smushed hair. Telling his wife he loved her without the aid of a teleprompter.
Gerald took another drink of brandy.
Christina had wanted to be married. To him, Gerald, specifically. She’d hinted at it. Then she said it outright. She wanted what her parents had. Gerald had pontificated aloud that getting married seemed to fix people in time. When families reconvene everyone falls back into established roles: domineering older sister, easily dismissed younger brother, petulant middle child. Like actors mounting a revival of a once-popular play. Married people were typecast.
What Gerald could not explain to Christina was that he’d always imagined himself a better man, wiser, calmer, more courageous. He still held out hope that might come true, just as he also suspected marrying Christina would render this version of Gerald as his final, flawed self. He wasn’t ready to laminate his personality.
* * *
Somewhere near the end of the bottle of St. Remy, after the Chinese food’s tiny cardboard temples had been emptied, Gerald relocated to the lobby and onto the floor among the pile of empty boxes. They buckled under his weight. The heap made for a surprisingly comfortable Yuletide nest. He noticed, as if from some distance, that he was weeping. Just a bit.
With his eyes shut and the chemical scent of fake pine thick around him, he could almost imagine he was back in another, better Christmas, four years ago.
He and Christina had been dating only a few months. It was a year of firsts, for both of them, and their inaugural holiday as a couple. After putting in time with his own family, he drove to Christina’s parents’ house. Her folks were already asleep, so he and Christina had the whole living room to themselves. The Beach Boys Christmas album twirled on the record player. Gerald and Christina reclined, tangled, on the couch.
They opened presents from one another. She bought him a green knit winter cap topped by a red puffball like a fuzzy cherry. He’d gone all out on a necklace with a thin gold chain and a heart drawn in miniscule diamonds. She put it on. At some point the Beach Boys quieted and they both drifted off. Gerald woke in the 3am dark with her legs snug around his waist and the heart-shaped pendant resting coolly on his cheek. He got up and tiptoed out to his new Datsun in the driveway, but not before pulling an afghan up to Christina’s chin and dropping the needle on the record player so the Beach Boys could run their repertoire for her one last time.
Then Gerald opened his reddening eyes and it was gone.
He was here, in the headachy light of the station lobby. And the fire—how long had it been since he checked on the fire?
He grunted as he rose and headed down the studio hallway without turning back to regard the mangled heap of presents.
In Studio C the fire had dimmed to a champagne glow. The cord of wood, only slightly diminished, remained vigilant as a palace guard.
Gerald hefted a fresh log onto the fire with no real precision. He added a second. Then Gerald paused and looked again at the pile of wood. Individually each log was manageable, but stacked there, one atop the other, like one year following the next, they formed some unbearable burden.
He tossed on another log and another until the jammed-up kindling spilled out of the hearth’s hot mouth.
Now the fire was really going. Flames crept out across the logs he’d sat along the sides of the hearth, and even on the floor. Smoke billowed around the chimney and clouded the studio with a gray haze.
Back in the lobby, the phone chimed. Gerald was vaguely aware that it had been ringing for some time now.
Satisfied with his work, Gerald sat down heavily on hearth’s hard rim, as far as he could get from the fire, which was really blazing now. It sent rivulets of sweat racing down his back. The whole studio glowed the color of honey. Earthy woodsmoke became accented with the sharper smell of melting plastic. Probably the fake wreath burning.
Gerald remembered the camera standing there, waiting. He stared into its curious black eye, looking through a dark tunnel out onto all those Rapid City Christmases.
Out in the lobby, the phone’s unrelenting pleas were joined by a heavy thudding, the jingle of breaking glass. Through the open studio doorway, Gerald could see the faint red-and-blue of the fire trucks’ flashers pulsing through the lobby and tinting the shadowed corridor. The colors flared across the wall like twinkling Christmas lights.
He gazed into the camera, the fire hot all around him. He would need to leave soon. Very soon. But first he had to do something.
Over the shouts of the fireman in the hallway he began to sing, slurring, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…”