The Firebird:  A Christmas Fantasy

I

On Christmas Eve I did not sleep, but stayed up late to watch.  The moon was high and bright and one star shone low in the sky.  At my window I watched them rise up from the black trees.  But for the candle in the corner the room was softly dark.

A little breeze stirred the dry dead leaves outside, but nothing else moved.  I watched the star shiver alone in the moonlight.  I saw the moonlight playing in the treetops.  I sat like this, alone, for a long, long time.

The candle burned low and dim.  Halfway up the sky the lonely star chased the moon, and I knew that the night had grown older and deeper.  The breeze died and the leaves outside my window fell still.  I watched and waited.

At length I saw him coming, up through the shadows on the lawn.  Slowly he came, bent beneath his heavy sack.  A light of neither moon nor star was all about him and clung to him as he came.  The candle in the corner grew suddenly bright.

The star peeped out through a window in a cloudbank behind which the moon had taken cover.  He came and laid a hand upon the window sill.  I faced him through the glass.

“Come out and follow me,” he said.

But I was afraid.

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