Yael R.

Dragwyla First North American rights

Email: Polaris93@aol.com 19,525 words
http://polaris93.livejournal.com/

Nativity – a Story of Christmas Future

Dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi, Hatsumi sensei, and Brother Aldo of the Eleveners.

Setting his light but awkward burden on the ground for a moment, Father Mark Fisher opened the
door to his church – he still thought of it as his, for no one had ever come from Rome, or even from the
diocese, during this last terrible score of years to tell him it was not his. Entering, he peered into the
gloom to see whether, by some miracle, someone sat there in prayer, or waited to see him about
something.
As he knew already, no one was there. His tired old heart leaden within his breast, he trudged up the
aisle to the altar. On the raised dais upon which the altar stood, he set down the boxes he was carrying
next to the altar. They weighed very little. Even so, his heart was laboring heavily from the slight
exertion required to carry them the 200 feet or so from the back door of the nearby rectory into the
church and up the aisle to the altar, and he was completely winded from even that small an effort. He
was only forty-three, assuming he hadn’t yet lost track of how many years had passed now, but he felt as
if he were at least ninety-three.
He turned to the lamp that he had brought with him, already filled with some of the precious crude
“kerosene” – slightly hyped-up turpentine, really, but it would do – that James Donovan, one of his few
remaining parishioners, had given to the church (which meant to Mark and Sister Barbara Mahoney, for
they were the only ones left to keep the church open) to say a series of masses for his late wife, who had
died last year of cancer. Where Donovan had obtained the stuff Mark didn’t know, though he suspected
that someday he would be given the answer when James, facing the increasing likelihood of following his
wife any time now, decided to come to confession, so that he could meet his Creator with a clean heart.
James had come from a line of “lace-curtain Irish” from Boston, and his grandfather had had frequent
business dealings with old Joe Kennedy and his famous brood. As long as even the sorriest remnants of
human civilization persisted, Mark thought pessimistically, organized crime was very likely to be part of
it. James, like his father and grandfather before him, knew all too well that crime very often pays, and
quite handsomely, if you know how to go about it properly! No telling where the high-octane turpentine
had come from – and he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know.
At any rate, here it was, given to God – so he might as well use it for helping him to make God’s
House a fit place for worship and the coming Christmas Mass. Saying a brief prayer of thanksgiving to
God for the benefaction, and another for James Donovan’s well-meaning but thoroughly sin-stained soul,
he lit the lamp with the Ronson lighter a parishioner had given him years ago, before the Day, when
Father Mark had a well-entrenched nicotine habit and there were still cigarettes to feed it. (The flame
from the lighter was courtesy of James Donovan, as well – sometime back, the old man had brought over
a little jar filled with clear fluid, nearly the very last of a store he had had for years, he said, and gave it
to Father Mark for his lighter. After all, said James, it isn’t fitting to light Church candles with a
tinderbox – there’s none of the grace that belongs in church in the fumbling and mess of a tinderbox!
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Well, bless the old sinner, anyway – of all the men Mark had ever known, regardless of whatever entries
there were for his soul in the book of Judgment, Donovan obeyed the injunction to tithe in spirit as well
as letter, and then some! Doubtless God would know, and add it to the balance on Judgment Day.)
Absently he rubbed at his bald pate as he paused for a moment to get his wind back. Then carefully,
in order to spare his arthritic joints as much as possible, he lowered himself to the floor beside the pile of
boxes. The yoga he had labored at each morning for the last decade or so, after he could no longer ignore
the fact of failing health and strength, had paid off handsomely; for he was able, without too much
discomfort, to sit tailor-style, legs crossed. This certainly was a far more comfortable position than
trying to sit with his legs stuck straight out before him like those of a doll!
He paused once more to catch his breath, and reflected that though he was in poor health, with much
resulting discomfort, at least he was still alive. Perhaps he had his conscientious practice of yoga
exercises each morning for so many years, hardly missing a day, to thank. – Or, he thought, casting his
eyes upward and crossing himself, his Lord.
– Which reminded him:
Smiling a little at the maudlin folly of a doddering, prematurely old man, he reached out and drew
one of the boxes toward himself. Opening it, he took great delight in the lovely little porcelain-and-
wicker representation of a enhaloed, tiny infant in a straw-lined manger, along with a beautiful little
smiling Madonna and her husband, Joseph.
The porcelain figurines were flawless, after all this time. So were the other components of the
Nativity scene, he found as he opened their boxes, inspecting each one for possible chipping or breakage.
Somehow in all the last twenty years or so since the Day, whatever use they’d had, if any, had been so
gentle that they’d suffered no harm – though he doubted that they had seen any use at all. He and Sister
Barbara, finally deciding to explore the contents of that last cubbyhole in the utility room behind the
kitchen in case there might still be something useful hidden away in it, had come upon the boxes hidden
under a great pile of old mop-heads and cleaning rags, where someone had stowed them long ago. The
dust in that dark little hidey-hole had been so thick that it could have been thirty years or more since last
the figurines had seen daylight. Of whomever might have put them there, he had no idea.
Quietly he offered a prayer of thanks to God for the miracle of their finding, and for the soul of the
one who had so carefully put them away, that they would be left, safe and sound, to delight the spirit in a
far later day, when that spirit was so sorely in need of uplifting. Then once again he let himself be
immersed in delight of them.
Here were the shepherds, with their sheep – and yes, see, even their dog! Though he doubted,
chuckling, that two thousand years ago, the dogs of Judea had looked much like Highland border-collies!
And here were the Wise Men, dressed all in their royal robes, each with a crown fashioned of silver
and gold wire and tiny, semiprecious stones. With them in their box as well were three camels, each
heavily laden with goods and richly caparisoned with trappings of silk embroidered with gold, silver, and
a myriad gorgeous colors.
And here were the Archangels, glorious in gold and white, to announce the birth of the Christ.
And last, but not least, as St. Francis of blessed memory had taught, were the animals who had
shared the stable with the infant Christ, come to adore him: a gray donkey, a cow with her calf, even a
cat and several mice and some small birds of the sort that might be found in any barn.
– His face clouded over. Might have been found in any barn, once. But for the last twenty years, the
damage done by direct radiation, fallout, artificial plagues and similar militaristic assaults against both
body and spirit had taken a greater and greater toll of survivors of the succeeding generations, both
human and otherwise, born before that terrible Day. And as far as he knew, of all those born since, of
every species, those born alive – which were so frighteningly few! – were monstrous, only rarely viable,
and still more rarely fertile. He doubted that there were very many barns in existence anywhere, these
days, which held live cats, mice or birds clearly recognizable as such.
Ah, well, he said to himself, sighing. Here he was, all ready to set up the beautiful little Nativity
scene, found by miraculous chance Last week in a cubbyhole in a room they never used anymore, only
because Sister Barbara had trusted her God-given intuition enough to get Mark to help her look in that
cubby because she had a “hunch” – yet he was letting the joy which all should feel at the birth of Christ
be pushed aside by thoughts bordering dangerously on despair. Retro me Sathanas! he thought, and
chided himself for letting himself be tempted to this sin, one of the more subtle in the arsenal of the
Enemy.
Telling himself firmly to say 20 Ave Marias and as many Paternosters that evening as a penance, he
put the dark thoughts away as best he could, and let himself become lost for awhile in the delight of
setting up the Nativity scene.
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Slowly and carefully, using one of the sane cleaning-rags that had protected the figurines in their
boxes from discovery by those who would not appreciate them as they deserved, he cleaned each figure,
rubbing away the dust of years. Soon all of then gleamed in the lamplight, their surfaces polished to a
high gloss by the rag, the residue of oil in the dust that had obscured their beauty giving them a luster that
made them heart-breakingly lovely.
Humming “Silent Night” to himself, and grinning at the idea of a Roman Catholic priest singing this,
of all hymns, written and composed by that foremost mortal opponent of Holy Mother Church himself,
Luther Diabolus, he began arranging the figures in a traditional Nativity scene. One wall of the stable,
carefully crafted in wood, served as a backdrop for the Holy Family. At their left were the Wise Men,
each holding in his hands a delicately crafted, porcelain representation of his Gift to the Child; behind
then were their camels. To the Family’s right were the shepherds with their sheep and dog, each with his
staff or crook, kneeling in adoration of the infant Christ. The three mighty Archangels, in a glory of
silver, gold, and snowy white, hovered over the scene from the top of the stable wall. The animals who
shared the stable with the Holy Family were there, the cat and mice playing at Mother Mary’s feet, the
donkey, cow and calf next to Joseph, peering around him to see the Babe, and the birds hopping about at
the feet of the Wise Men.
Last, but greatest of all, save far the Holy Family, was the great silver Star, by whose light the Wise
Men had been enabled to find the stable within which the Holy Family was housed, overlooking the
entire scene on another wooden backdrop, much higher than the stable wall, that went behind all the
figures and the stable wall itself as well. This backdrop had been painted a deep royal blue, to simulate a
night sky. Tiny silver, gold, and colored spangles dusted across it represented all the Lesser stars, and
there were even a few larger ones to represent the planets. A Lovely little silver crescent moon, near an
upper corner, counterpointed the great Star above all.
Switching from “Silent Night” to “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” with great care he rose to his
feet, in order to get a better look at the results of his handiwork.
He grinned with real pleasure. Just perfect! Wouldn’t it be nice if the lovely little scene had at least
a somewhat larger audience then himself and Sister Barbara! But unhappily, that wasn’t likely. The few
people still alive in his parish seldom came anywhere near any church or synagogue, these days. Even
old Jimmy Donovan tended to come around only when there was a death in the family – or he feared his
own and wanted to make confession. People’s despair and bitterness at God for what had happened
twenty years ago usually kept them from ever coming into God’s house.
Still, he and Sister could take Joy in the Nativity scene with its beautiful, exquisitely crafted little
figures. And if, by the Grace of God, others did come to worship, or even just to get out of the weather –
which, even now, twenty years after the Day was still relentlessly hideous – so much the better.
Genuflecting once before the altar before going back to the rectory with the empty boxes, he
happened to glance upward at the clerestorys. If any of the rare breaks in the virtually eternal,
impenetrable cloud-cover fortuitously took place in the next few days, assuming it occurred during the
daylight hours, the light might actually come through one of the stained-glass windows above there at
such an angle that it would illuminate the Nativity scene, Well, Mark, he told himself, painfully rising
once more to his feet, don’t count your sunbeams until they hatch! (But even if the clouds were to open
only at night, he mused the fantastic auroras that still burst across the northern skies every time one of the
fleeting gaps in the clouds occurred after dark would do at least as well. Among the other strange, often
hideous legacies of the Day, the fabulous, continuous auroras, their weird and cosmic beauty so brilliant
and intense that it terrified, a vivid memory of Apocalypse, still pulsed nightly across the northern rim of
the world, according to all travelers’ reports as well as what he had seen. The auroras were children of
that inconceivable hell of radiation that still seethed high in the atmosphere and in the Van Allen Belts, a
relict of the gigatons; of hot crud lifted into the stratosphere and beyond by the nuclear bombs that had
slashed across the world with their star-hot claws on the Day.)
Mark set down the lamp, which still contained some turpentine, down on the dais. He decided to
leave it there in the church so that he and Sister Barbara would have light available to them if they
wanted to look at the Nativity scene or just pray before the altar. Then he limped back to the rectory
with the empty boxes in his arms, There were more lamps and lamp-fuel in the rectory; they wouldn’t
want for light for lack of one lamp. Halfway there, a sudden spasm of pain lanced through his gut like a
hot knife, and he nearly dropped the boxes in reaction Catching himself with difficulty, he stood, eyes
closed, and tried to concentrate with all his waning strength on the Stations of the Cross. Finally the pain
went away, leaving him shaky and strengthless in reaction. He continued on then, finally reaching the
back door into the kitchen, which he’d luckily thought to leave open when he’d come through it earlier
on his way out to the church, laden with the boxes, then still filled with their precious porcelain cargo.
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Once inside, he set the boxes down for a moment on the kitchen table, and carefully lowered himself
into a kitchen chair to rest. His arthritis was flaring up again, probably due to the mild exertion he’d just
been through. Winded, he panted for a while like a tired old dog, unable to do anything else.
Sister Barbara came into the kitchen “Mark! There you are!” Shakily she smiled at him, the general
palsy from which she increasingly suffered all too evident in her trembling voice end body. “Did you set
up the Nativity scene? Was everything in good shape? Oh, it will be so nice to look at them all!” Her
delight was more that of a naive young child than a grown woman already past her prime.
Though she was younger than mark by three or four years, Sister Barbara’s thin hair was pure white,
her skin covered with liver-spots. A cataract fogged one of her still-lovely brown eyes, and her hands
trembled with a frighteningly obvious tremor. Unlike Mark, she had not gone bald, though her hair had
thinned considerably; and she bore no ugly keloid scars of the sort that covered his back and left arm
with huge purple and scarlet masses of scar-tissue like lava-flows and colored moonscapes. Instead, the
burns she had suffered had all occurred deep inside her body, on the inner surfaces of her lungs, heart,
and blood-vessels and deep within her brain and spinal cord, due to unwitting ingestion or inhalation of
fallout. To be sure, both of them had suffered from fallout, but she seemed to have taken it in far worse
measure than he Where in his case it had mostly affected his heart, joints and circulatory system in
addition to whatever horror was now gestating deep in his bowels, in her case it had attacked the motor
portions of her cerebral cortex and spinal cord, her eyes, her hearing and her endocrine system. She had
already gone through menopause some ten years previously, and she had been showing unmistakable
signs of premature senility for some time now. When Mark died, if she had not already predeceased him
she would be left all alone, with increasingly poor eyesight, hearing, coordination and emotional
stability. He hoped that by some miracle he would outlive her, so that he could care for her up until she
died, Otherwise, unless somehow others should come by to care for her, or one of their few neighbors or
passing good Samaritans took her away to live with them, she would be left helpless and alone, unable to
meet even her most basic needs. God grant that that did not happen!
He looked up at her and tried to smile. “Hello, Sister – how was your nap?”
“Oh, I couldn’t sleep, Father – I feel too good today to stay in bed! With the birthday of our Lord
coming so soon, I thought I might do some baking!”
He nearly choked, and hid it with difficulty. For the least twenty years, now both of them had been
living off a huge store of dried, powdered and canned foods of all kinds. During the last weeks before
what he privately always thought of as “Judgment Day,” but which the few people now left generally
called “The Day,” international relations among the superpowers, the riddle Eastern nations and the
various countries of Africa were becoming agonizingly strained. It was becoming all too clear that the
Cold War, rather than having been ended by the famous “November 19 Treaty” near the end of the
precious century, had only been on vacation and war; back, hotter than ever; it was then that the people
of his parish had providentially decided lay in these stores of “survival foods.”
His parish, which comprised the little town of Brownlake, Massachusetts, together with outlying
farms and other households nearby, situated about halfway between Rowe and the southern border of
Vermont, was about as isolated as a town could be. It had been the general consensus of the people of his
parish, Catholic end otherwise, that as isolated and remote from large urban-industrial or military centers
as they were, the chances that, in case of war, they would suffer from even a near-miss by enemy
missiles, let alone a direct hit, were so slight as to be nonexistent. Even so, his parishioners were anxious
about the possibility that distribution of food and other necessities of life right be disrupted if war should
break out. And so the townspeople of Brownlake and those living on nearby farms had pooled their
resources and laid in a gigantic stockpile of foods, toilet paper, sanitary pads, first-aid supplies, sewing
kits and all the other paraphernalia necessary to human life.
At the time, most of the recently-built rectory was waste-space, its projected use by various groups or
occupancy by deacons or others not yet fulfilled. Only young Father Mark, just out of seminary, lived
there, and as yet few others were putting the public areas of the building to any use. So Mark had gladly
donated three upstairs rooms in the rectory for storage of the enormous stockpile of food and supplies,
and the townspeople had gratefully accepted his offer. It was shortly after that that the world had erupted
in thermonuclear holocaust, the horrors of which had been hideously multiplied by biological and
chemical weapons. If not for that great store of food and other supplies providentially laid by in the
rectory by the people in his parish just before It began, the lives of Mark and Sister Barbara would have
been much shorter, not to say meaner, than they actually had been.
Oh, how right – and wrong – they had been! “Disrupted!” Dear suffering Christ, what a farce! It
was true enough that none of the thermonuclear missiles or other enemy weapons had come within sixty
miles of Brownlake. Indeed, partly because of the distance to major population centers, industrial and
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military targets, partly by luck and, of course, the grace of God, most of New England had been spared
direct hits, with the exception of the BosWash complex, Portland, Maine, a near-miss north of
Manchester in New Hampshire, Providence, R.I., and Burlington, Vermont.
Like most of the rest of the world, however, they hadn’t been spared either fallout or plague. The
first was carried to them by the wind from all directions of the compass; the second, by travelers from
other regions who were fleeing the nuclear bake-ovens and centers of pestilence which their cities and
towns had become.
Nor had they been spared the terrible Fimbulwinter that had followed, enveloping the whole world,
as far as he knew, in virtually omnipresent, unending cloud-cover that occasionally dripped rain or let fall
snow that was black from the holocaust of forest, field, and city. For not only had that famous treaty of
the last decade of the 20th century not succeeded in outlawing thermonuclear and other “non-
conventional” materiel, but no further treaties had come into existence to finish the job it had started.
Once Mikhail Gorbachev, that strange, enigmatic, saintly man who had seemed destined to lead the
whole world to peace by his one lone, shining example, had left office, aging and weary and ill and
unable to continue in public life any more, the nations of the world seemed to lose interest in all their
noble resolutions within mere months. without the driving force of international treaties and UN
pressures to carry them out, or the strange charisma of men like Gorbachev to inspire them, neither the
superpowers nor the smaller nations had, on their own got rid of their stockpiles of horror-weapons.
Indeed, they had added to them – including clandestinely built and emplaced monstrous machines such as
the diabolic cobalt bombs, and MIRVs that carried several varieties of natural and artificial plagues at
once. And soon the world was once more dancing at the brink of Armageddon, And so the world had
been blanketed with fallout from thousands upon thousands of nuclear and thermonuclear bombs, some
of them extremely radiologically dirty, as well as with a pall of smoke from the holocaust of whole
continents. As had been predicted Lone ago by scientists such as Doctor Carl Sagan and his colleagues,
nuclear winter had followed the devastation, and it had held the world in its poisonous, iron-cold grip
ever since.
The world over, of the relative few who had not died instantly under the incandescent hammerstrike
thermonuclear fist of some missile, port line or vehicular bomb, or later of burns, radiation, or plague, an
enormous proportion had succumbed to the terrible, unending cold or starved to death because, in most
places, crops couldn’t grow. Or they had died of the old, old Malthusian friends of the Reaper, which
from time immemorial had plucked so much unripe fruit from the Tree of Life: cholera, typhoid,
diphtheria, smallpox, and all the others of their grim kind, because of the impossibility anymore of
maintaining adequate sanitation, together with a nearly absolute lack of competent medical personnel and
medical supplies.
By sheer luck, a local Survivalist physician had given in to his intuition, which he had jokingly
called “Survivalist neuroticism,” and herd stockpiled numerous medical supplies, including vaccines
against commoner diseases, anti-toxins, gamma-globulins, and mega-vitamin supplements at his clinic,
just before The Day. ironically, he himself was in downtown Boston on business on the Day, and so
disappeared In the multiple-warhead burst that turned Boston and its environs into some 600 square miles
of Inferno. But his assistant, Judy Blaustein, who was also an M.D., and Jim Lewis, a registered nurse,
were at home in Brownlake that day. And so they had been able to pull many people through the
diseases that came in the wake of that near-successful frenzy of attempted planetary suicide, the sheer,
evilly senseless butchery of billions with no winners left afterwards that was The Day.
Even so, even for the “fortunate” people of his parish who were spared the bombs and the chemicals
and the worst of the plagues, as probably was true for most others who had survived, life here for almost
everyone had been a sample of what Hell must be like. Distribution of food and other vital resources
hadn’t been merely disrupted – it had been altogether annihilated, possibly forever, on the day that
Juggernaut had rolled its mad, incandescent, plague-strewing, agonizing way across the world!
But by God’s Grace, the goods stockpiled here just before then, together with largesse scavenged
from nearby houses whose former occupants were dead or fled, or, more rarely, brought in by travelers
coming from elsewhere on their last legs and halting here, usually to die, would Last him and Sister
Barbara as long as they lived. In fact, there was more than enough to provide for several whole families
for at least a decade more. For this part of New England, unlike Maine and regions closer in to what had
been Boston, had escaped the riots and looting and paramilitaristic micro-coups that most of what was
left of the world, after the nuclear holocaust and artificial plagues had done their work, had suffered.
Also, of the people who had lived here and had survived The Day and its aftermath, most had left the
area fairly quickly, following vague rumors of “someplace better” in Canada, or the Midwest, or
nowhere in particular, which came in over the few remaining battery-powered radios and CB sets, or with
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the rare traveler from elsewhere, himself following such rumors. So there’d never been much demand for
the stockpiled goods beyond the uses Sister Barbara and he made of it.
He and Sister Barbara had been lucky in another way. The rectory got its water from local wells, the
aquifers of which had apparently, all these years, escaped contamination from fallout or chemicals.
Certainly the two of them seemed to be no worse off for drinking it, and it tasted perfectly good, which
was not true of even some local wells, use of which by others seemed to have been responsible for their
swift decline and ugly death traceable to no other source.
So certainly they lacked neither food, water, nor other staple supplies needed for survival. But the
food they did have was fitted only to a spare and austere life. They had powdered eggs and milk, flour,
cornmeal, cornstarch, salt, even coffee and cocoa. They still had quite a bit of sugar, both brown and
white. There had been boxes of nutritional supplements, which had lasted for a couple of years before
their potency had expired, and these may have been at least partly responsible for the fact that he and
Sister had lived as long as they had, all things considered, in relatively good shape. They had
unsweetened chocolate, freeze-dried meats and vegetables, dried fruits, canned goods of all kinds. But
they had few spices, other than pepper; no Lard and, certainly, no vegetable oils; and rarely were they
able to obtain fresh foods, such as vegetables, fruits, eggs, butter, milk or neat. There was some wine –
but they saved that exclusively for Communion. As for luxuries, such as liquor, pastries, cigars and
cigarettes, these were out of the question.
What baking could Sister Barbara accomplish without shortening or spices or cooking spirits?
Looking at her, he noted unhappily that a certain vacancy in her expression, which he had hoped was
only some flaw in his perceptions, was more than just a product of his imagination. Yes, she was
definitely suffering from’ some form of premature senility, whether Alzheimer’s or some other
degenerative condition. Most probably the deterioration of her nervous-system functions, which had
brought about her general palsy, deteriorated hearing, and other problems, was bringing on early senility.
Not surprising, considering her general, progressive feebleness.
Sighing, he said kindly, “Now, Sister, it’s just too nice a day for you to work! Why don’t you come
with me to see the lovely Nativity scene? The Little figurines are so beautiful! And you certainly deserve
to see it – after all, if it hadn’t been for you, I’d never have thought to look in that closet where we found
them.”
Her face lit up. Forgetting, in her delight at this new idea, all about baking, as he had intended, she
said, “Oh, I’d love that, Father Mark! Oh, let’s go see it.”
Rising with some difficulty, which he was fairly successful in hiding from her, he offered her his
arm. Together they strolled out to the church, to look at the Nativity scene.
The walk out to the church and back, in combination with her emotion-filled reaction to the sight of
all the little figurines and props set up by the altar, proved to be extremely taxing to her poor, debilitated
system. She was therefore quite content to lie down for a while when they returned to the rectory. By
the time she woke again, near dark, she had completely forgotten about baking, for which Mark offered a
silent prayer of gratitude to whatever saint was in charge of smoothing over awkward moments.
Mark had made dinner for both of them. He hadn’t made much – hot soup made from dried lentils
and vegetables – but since, as usual, neither of them were very hungry, it was sufficient.
Well before dinner, he had started a wood-fire under the water tank that stood just outside the
kitchen door, its bottom level with the window of the upstairs bathroom, a metal flue concentrating and
conducting the heat to the bottom of the tank, and had turned on the pump, which was powered by a huge
screw which stored power from a windmill out in the fields beyond the church and rectory. By the time
they were finished with dinner, the water was fairly hot. The screw hadn’t the power to pump more than
just enough water into the tank for a good bath in the tub, an amount which would heat to a temperature
desirable for bathing fairly quickly. While Sister Barbara went upstairs to get ready for her bath, he went
out and, by means of a long piece of wood that hung down from its handle, turned a petcock that released
the hot water, which flowed in to fill the bathtub in the upstairs bathroom through a system of pipes
rigged to drain water from the tank into the tub.
Mark had installed the entire system, including water-tower, tank, valving, heater, windmill and
pipes many years before, when he still had his strength. All in all, he was almost sinfully proud of
himself for having had the foresight, ingenuity and persistence to rig the system, which even after all this
time, since a year or so after The Day, worked perfectly and had had no problems.
He had also installed a simple system of steps and rungs for Sister to use for getting in and out of the
tub after she had become increasingly enfeebled. It took her so little effort to use these that there was
little risk of her taking a serious fall while bathing. Thus she could still take a bath by herself, without
having to compromise her modesty by having Mark help her in and out of the tub.
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Even so, he hovered anxiously by the door and waited until her heard her call, “It’s all right, Father –
I’m fine. I’ll be out in a moment.” Then he went down the hall and waited while she opened the door
and went to her own room.
“Good night, Father,” she called.
“Good night, Sister.”
“Sleep tight, Father – don’t let the bedbugs bite!” she said, giggling girlishly.
“I won’t, Sister. Pleasant dreams.”
“Of course – Lord Jesus will protect me!”
“Yes, He will. See you in the morning, Sister.”
Once she had closed her door, he went downstairs to the kitchen, to make himself a cup of cocoa.
He even had some marshmallows to put in it, from a supply of them, several large plastic bags worth,
left there twenty years ago, probably by a child, found by him just a month or two ago, behind a crate of
canned vegetables – the sweet things were almost nothing but sugar, far too acidic a medium for bacteria
or even the stubbornly viable, ubiquitous cockroaches to tolerate, and would keep forever. Offering a
silent prayer of thanks for such luxuries, and another prayer for the soul of whoever had provided the
marshmallows, he took his cocoa into the large living-room. There was wood in the fireplace, chopped
from the many dead trees that covered the landscape, or gleaned from the windfall from the few live
ones. With practiced ease, he used his tinderbox to start a fire, using shavings he had prepared earlier
that day for tinder. Then he sat by the hearth in a large easy-chair, his favorite, and drank his cocoa,
thinking over things his earlier activity had mercifully pushed aside for awhile.
Vicious as whatever cancer was now growing inside him was, perhaps he would outlive Sister
Barbara, after all. With sadness he realized how deteriorated she had become. If she lived out another
year it would be a miracle.
Then he heard a thin rain pattering outside on the eaves. Even now, he thought, that rain might be
depositing a thin, deadly layer of fallout on every exposed surface outside. Twenty years after The Day,
the upper layers of the atmosphere still carried an enormous burden of radioactive material from the
radioactive flotsam sucked up in the incandescent columns of air that had made the stems of the terrible
buddings that, for most of a day, grew into an evil forest from the thermonuclear seeds planted by
ignorant, evil men and women via ICBM’s, harbor mines, truck-bombs and plane-loads all over the world
on The Day. It would be decades, possibly centuries, before all of it had rained out or otherwise returned
to earth, or else had been caught up in the furious electromagnetic storms that still created magnificent
auroras, visible on any rare, clear night probably all the way to the equator from both poles, and ejected
into space. Fortunately, the overwhelmingly greatest proportion of this airborne mass of material
comprised relatively very short-lived isotopes. But enough of it consisted of such delights as plutonium,
U235, strontium-90, and a host of other nasty things with long half-lives that any of it, coming to earth,
had a significant chance of being dangerously radioactive, a hazard to any living thing it touched.
In addition, from the little that had come to them over privately owned, battery-powered CB and
ham radio sets, as well as sets belonging to the police and fire departments and some private businesses
in Brownlake, apparently almost every large metropolitan area, along with all important military and
industrial zones the world over, had been hit by so many megatons of thermonuclear bombs that for a
long, long time, the region around each, out to tens or even hundreds of miles, would be deadly to all life.
Many of the areas of the planet that hadn’t sustained direct hits were nevertheless in many cases at least
mildly hot, because of fallout, and might remains so for years.
On the other hand, though it made farming almost impossible, and had caused most wild plants to
sicken and die from lack of adequate sunlight for proper growth and metabolism, the virtually eternal,
unbroken cloud-cover was in its way a blessing. Upper-atmospheric ozone was still so badly depleted
after the ravages of The Day that it provided almost no barrier at all to ultraviolet light. Even the clouds
weren’t that much protection, but they were better than nothing. Without the clouds, blindness and skin
cancer would have been the lot of almost all living things unfortunate enough to have survived The Day
which hadn’t perished sooner -of the plagues or other, more immediate causes. When the rare rents in
the endless cloud-cover occurred at night, the hellishly lovely auroras, even this long after the Day, swept
down from the far north clear to the southern horizons. They testified to the amount of hot and nasty
garbage that must still fill the upper atmosphere The awesomely glorious, vast sweeping fans, bursting
crowns and rolling ribbons with fold piled upon gauzy fold, shimmering ghosts of light in strange spectral
colors so bright that they hinted of ultraviolet and worse cascading through the sky, told of the deadliness
of the sky, even now, twenty years Later.
He chuckled grimly as he thought about one of the strangest of the many ironies which the nuclear
Armageddon had brought about: Of the very little fresh produce available at any price since The Day,
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By Yael R. Dragwyla
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almost all was the product of intensive indoor farming done by people who, before The Day, had been
marijuana growers! To hide their illegal activities from the eyes of the law, such people had converted
inside rooms, basements, attics, even whole barns or other outbuildings into completely enclosed, sealed
micro-farms, complete with halide lighting for maximum yield, CO2, tanks, and recycled water and air,
to minimize the chances of detection by narcotics officers. These people were now the sole sources of
fresh vegetables, fruits, and medicinal herbs, as well as luxuries such as marijuana, tobacco, even opium
poppies and psychedelic mushrooms. In some cases, the more ingenious of such entrepreneurs had
rigged up stills to make distilled spirits from grains or potatoes grown in their indoor farms.
Their neighbors for many miles around gladly pitched in to help them build foot-, solar, wind- or
water-powered generators to keep their halide lights and pumps going. He’d heard that some even had
hydrogen-powered generators, scavenged from the hydrogen-cell automobile and boat motors that had
come out just before The Day, to back up systems powered by other, less dependable means. At any rate,
however they did it, such people had almost the only electrical systems still functioning, as well as the
only fresh produce – nutritional or recreational – of any kind. They were therefore not merely well off,
but in fact among the wealthiest people alive now. Their produce commanded fantastic prices in barter
or labor, and they lived like kings. They were the barons of the new feudalism, merchant princes of a
new Dark Age – or dark New Age, if indeed the scatterbrained “prophecies” of “New Ager” pundits and
gurus had finally proved themselves out in this latter-day Earthly Sheol. Indeed, these clever – and
lucky! – entrepreneurial “gentlemen skull-farmers” might well form a large part of what would someday
become a new aristocracy, for already their neighbors were turning to them for judgments on community
squabbles, or how to deal with crime.
In its dark way it was hilarious. A century from now, if humanity hadn’t become extinct by then, the
nobles and princes of that brave new world of the future might be the descendants of people who, before
the Day, according to federal law had been criminals, technically guilty of several felonies: growing and
selling sources of “controlled substances” such as marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms! God will have
His little joke, won’t He? – Or was the Joker out of the Enemy camp? Oh, well, it was one of the few
things remaining that he could still find amusing.
The greatest irony, of course, was that many of those marijuana growers had been self-professed
“Survivalists” before the Day, and had hoarded gold, silver and other precious or industrial metals, gems
and the like. Or, in many cases, they had deposited money in numbered Hungarian bank-accounts, or had
put their metals and gems into safety-deposit boxes in various banks under assumed names. The banks of
Hungary, like those elsewhere, including the USA, were now either radioactive slag or else inaccessible,
though intact, because the sites where they were located were too radioactive and/or too choked with
debris to permit physical access. Those that had hoarded their gains In banks in any fashion might as
well have dropped them into the Grand Canyon (most of which a misdirected MIRV had turned into an
Inferno of radioactive lava and choked with debris on the Day, according to what they’d gleaned from
local ham radios from various sources, military and civilian). And those who had hoarded them at home
in safes or underground backyard vaults might as well not have bothered at all. All metals had become
suspect, because they could be highly radioactive and show no sign of it even as they poisoned
everything near them, jewelry was likewise suspect if it had any metal in it, precious atones and gems
could not be eaten or worn or used for housing and so were useless, and industrial minerals, metals and
gems no longer had much use in a post-technological world. So all their careful acquisition of non-
traceable but legal wealth hoarded against the day of a hypothetical economic crash, had come to nothing
as a result of a real crash brought on by a civilization-destroying war. And any Survivalists who had
survived, who had not also had on hand the resources and expertise available to the dope-growers, had
literally been out in the-cold, out of luck. The question of whether ant or grasshopper would survive
nuclear winter, when the balloon finally went up, had turned out to have some very surprising answers!
A great deal had changed since that terrible day when, on a business trip for the parish to Boston, he
himself had been brushed by the wings of the Evil One. He hadn’t actually been in the city itself, but
some twenty or twenty-five miles away from it, not far from Concord, where he stopped to get gas for the
parish station-wagon he was driving. He had got out of the car to go across the street to get a soft drink
at the little mom-’n’-pop “mini-market” across from the filling-station, and had just reached the door of
the store, when a cluster of ICBMs, each carrying a payload of from 1 to 10 megatons, suddenly turned
the huge Boston conurb cluster into a system of smoking craters many miles across, averaging a half mile
deep each, filled with vitrified, hellishly radioactive and furnace-hot rubble, a fiery wasteland strewn
with debris that minutes earlier had been all the paraphernalia peculiar to a technological culture – and
the people whom that culture had served.
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By Yael R. Dragwyla
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At the moment the gigantic fireballs erupted over what had been downtown Boston and its many
suburbs, so many trapdoors suddenly swinging open upon the Pit. Mark was more than halfway through
the door of the little store, so that his head, neck, and most of his body were shielded from the terrible,
killing light of the air-burst by the door-frame. But through freak chance the glare from the blast hit one
of those mirrors that such stores kept high on the walls so that store personnel could easily see any part of
the store and thus keep an eagle eye out for shoplifters. From the mirror the infernal glare had been
reflected and re-reflected off either another mirror or some polished surface of metal or glass onto his
back. He had been wearing a short-sleeved black shirt with his clergyman’s collar, for it had been a hot
summer day. So not only was his left arm, completely exposed as it was to the direct light of the air-
burst, badly burned, but his poor back was, as well, The reflected glare had roasted him through the light-
and heat-absorbing black cloth of his shirt.
By some God-given impulse, rather than staying where he was or trying to go to ground in the
apparent shelter of the store, where he would have been buried in the rubble when the shock-wave
smashed it down like almost everything else even at that distance from ground zero, he had double-timed
It through the store to a door opening on a side-street. He had just made it into that other
doorway, across the store, when the shock-wave hit. The frame of the door held for just long enough for
him to escape being crushed under falling plaster and timber; he escaped being crushed by the shock-
wave himself only because the building, in being destroyed by it, absorbed enough of its force to spare
Mark almost all its force.
He had barely stepped onto the sidewalk when simultaneously the door-frame finally collapsed
behind him and red-hot shrapnel flashed past his face, cutting a gaping but shallow wound in his left
cheek and gashing his forehead. A larger piece just missed decapitating him, zipping by scant
millimeters from his neck and on into the ruins of the store. An explosion had erupted across
the street; the filling-station where he’d left his car to get gas and have the oil-level checked had erupted
like a pint-sized volcano from some effect of the shock-wave from Boston, or perhaps the heat of the
blast. Of the car – or any thing else that had been there – not a trace remained.
His memories for the hours after that had been hazy ever since. Apparently he’d gone to a first-aid
station, or by some other means had got his burned back and arm attended to. But the burns weren’t so
bad that they incapacitated him, though they hurt terribly. He vaguely remembered someone giving him
aspirin to take and sending him on his way, the turning back to attempt the hopeless task of caring for the
countless maimed, burned, blinded myriads, the survivors out of the millions that had lived and worked
in the huge Boston urban complex.
For several hours he’d wandered, dazed and in increasing pain, until he came across a young woman
wearing the habit of a Franciscan nun. One sleeve of her habit was ripped and torn, and her wimple was
badly stained and soiled. She was trying to calm three terrified little boys, who apparently had been
separated from their mother. Seeing nark and recognizing him for a priest of her Church, the young nun,
no more than twenty years old then, had called out to him, “Father – oh, Father, please help us!”
It had snapped him out of his fugue. His pain pushed to the back of his mind by the urgency of
another’s need, he came over to her and together they led the boys farther away from the burning city.
The boys, though hysterical and filthy dirty, their clothes ripped and torn to rags by whatever they had
been through in the last hour or so, were physically completely unhurt. In the company of the two adults,
whom they understood to be authority, they became quite docile, and were easily lead away from the
burning heart of the city. Eventually the little group came across a makeshift hospital set up in a local
post-office by a handful of physicians and nurses who apparently had been caught away from their
regular offices or hospital when Boston went up and hadn’t had a prayer of getting to them, so had made
do here.
Several firemen and policemen were there as well, helping to organize things and keep the crowd of
burned, cut, mashed, moaning, screaming people who were beginning to mob the place in some sort of
order, keeping them from overrunning the makeshift clinic or causing more confusion than there already
was. There was food there, and water, lugged in from elsewhere, probably from nearby buildings, as well
as medical supplies which the medical personnel had either brought with them, or obtained from the fire-
fighters, or scrounged up anywhere they could find them. So Mark, the three boys and the little nun,
whose name was Sister Barbara Mahoney, gratefully took shelter there.
While a nurse somehow found the time to get him to take his shirt off and clean and re-dress his
burned back and arm, Mark asked the nun, “Where do you want to go, Sister?”
“I’d like to return to Sisters of Hope.”
“Your convent?”
“Yes.”
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“Well, how far is it?”

“Let me go look at the street-signs, to see if I can tell. I’ll be right back.”
She left for a short time. The nurse tried to give Mark a stronger pain-killer than aspirin. But now
that he had responsibility for the children and the nun, he declined, not wanting to become groggier than
he already was from fatigue and the strain which his burns were putting on his metabolism. “Do you
have some vitamin C?” he asked her.
“Why – yes, Father, I think we do.”
“Could you give me about 10 grams, if you have enough to spare, and some aspirin, about 15
grains?”
“Certainly – I don’t think anybody else will want the vitamins. I have some in my purse, as a matter
of fact – I went shopping this morning, and got some then.” She reached down and picked up the purse
lying at her feet; rummaging in it, she came up with several bottles. “Yes, here they are – a bottle of
vitamin C, and a multiple with lots of E in it. Here, take all you want. I’ll go get water for you.”
She returned with a cup half-full of water at the same time that the nun came back in from the street.
“Here you go, Father. – Did you find what you wanted, Sister?”
“No, ma’am – I don’t know the streets in this part of town at all!”
Mark thankfully gulped down 10 grams of vitamin C and a packet of the multiple vitamin for good
measure, then took the aspirin the nurse offered.
“Oh, thank you, Mrs. Potter!” he told her, reading her name off the name-tag pinned to the front of
her blouse. “My sister has always been a nutrition nut – she told me about vitamin C for pain and burns.
Hope she’s right!”
“Are you sure you don’t want a stronger pain-killer?”
“No – I’ve got my charges here to watch over, don’t want to get stoned on top of everything else.”
The nurse smiled, then sobered rapidly. She turned back to the nun. “Just where are you trying to
get back to, Sister?”
“Why, Sisters of Hope Convent – it’s in Cambridge. I was just here for the day, shopping for Mother
Superior – I got lost when the – when . . . it happened, and wandered around until I found the boys,
there, and –”
“Oh, sh- er, sorry, Sister, uh, Sister, you don’t want to go back there,” exclaimed a young policeman
who, standing nearby, had overheard them.
“What do you mean?”
“Come over here with me.” “Gently he drew her to the door, where they could look out toward
Boston. Mark followed. “Look,” said the policeman, pointing in the general direction of Boston,
Cambridge, and adjoining towns.
Sister Barbara gasped sharply, then moaned. A solid mass of brown and black smoke, lit in
uncountable places by angry red and yellow glare like evil gemstones or the eyes of demons, covered all
the sky in that direction in a world-wrapping pall. Elsewhere, oddly, the sky was a lovely, clear, deep
ultramarine, the sort of sky that still occasionally graced Boston on warm late summer afternoons like
this one – or, Mark remembered, an eerie chill going up his spine, from that vacation he’d taken on the
Florida Keys just before becoming ordained and the summers he’d spent as a boy on his granddad’s farm
in Oklahoma, that sometimes presaged a Force-10 hurricane or one hummer of a tornado.
“Oh. Oh, my God!” Sister Barbara moaned, sobbing a little. “Oh, dear sweet Jesus! The whole
sky’s on fire! Oh, my God, it’s all gone! Everything’s gone!”
She began crying wildly. The nurse put an arm around her and did what she could to comfort her
and calm her down. The three little boys stared solemnly at her and the other adults, finding no
reassurance anywhere.
The policeman said to Mark, “We’ve been getting it on the radio for the past hour, Father.” He
pointed to a corner where the policemen and firemen had set up a CB unit, with a cable trailing out into
the street, probably for juice from a fire-truck or patrol-car. A number of people – laypersons, medical
personnel, firemen and police alike – stood around it, listening in stunned, aghast silence as more and
more reports came in concerning the extent and movement of the firestorm which by now was consuming
all of Boston and much of the surrounding suburbs. By some fluke, the wind had set such that they
themselves were safe, at least for the moment. But everything from the center of Boston on out for a
radius of 15 miles or more was either in flames or in imminent danger of being sucked into the gigantic
holocaust by raging winds, as the fire greedily sucked in oxygen from farther and farther away, all the
oxygen closer in by now having been entirely bound up in the products of combustion. The voice of
whomever was transmitting came to him clearly for a moment as, by some work of chance, the voices in
the crowded post-office/clinic suddenly all stilled, and Mark heard, “Oh, my God, it’s a tornado – a
 Nativity
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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tornado of fire! We’re all going to –” The voice was drowned instantly in roaring static. “Shit, it got
him,” one of the policemen muttered.
The susurrus of voices started again, punctuated with moans and cries, footsteps and noises of
equipment being moved around. Shivering a little, from shock rather than heat, Mark went over to the
door and looked out at the sky, which was filled with smoke and fire. He became very aware of the
sound of the wind, now, a low, eerie moaning under which ran a nasty tittering sound, as of malicious
brownies or demented sprites. In spite of the fact that they were at least 30 miles away from Boston and
the heart of the firestorm raging there, it came to him with the force of prophecy that another fluke of the
wind could send the great fire roaring back in their direction at any time; or the terrible sucking wind
generated by the fire’s relentless demand for oxygen eventually could reach even this far and suck them
in, along with everything from insects and dead leaves and scrap paper to fire-trucks, buses, and parts of
buildings.
Shaking off the near-trance into which the vision of Hell over Boston had cast him, he went back to
Sister Barbara and the boys. “Sister, until we can find out where your Order wants you to go, why don’t
you come with me? And you boys, too – we’ll take you with us, if you want to come.”
The young nun nodded dumbly, passive in her own shock. But the three boys, knowing only that they
had become separated from their mother somewhere not far from here, were hysterically certain that if.
they stayed where they were and were good, their mother would magically appear and take them home
with her. They began screeching and struggling to get away from Mark so violently that he quickly gave
up. “Uh, officer,” he said to the young policeman he’d talked to before, “could you see that these
children are taken care of? They don’t want to leave here, and I think I Know of a place to go with Sister
where we’ll be all right – we don’t want to use up your resources here if we don’t have to.”
“Thanks, Father. Sure, I’ll get the boys squared away here. Sure you have a place now?”
“Yes,” said Mark. It was a flat lie, but the need to get AWAY from here, and as far from Boston as
possible as quickly as possible, was suddenly overwhelming. In order not to have to argue with the
concerned young police officer, he had coined the prevarication on the spot. Breathing a prayer of
repentance for the lie, and promising God to make proper penance later, he grabbed the nun’s small hand
and towed her with him out to the street.
Not all of the many miracles of the Day had been infernal. Just as the two of them exited the post-
office, Mark having no idea of where they would go next or how to get there except AWAY from Boston,
a truck he recognized came by them on the street, pointed in the general direction he wanted to go.
Before he could call out to the driver, the truck came to a screeching stop and backed up rapidly.
“Father! Father Mark” cried the driver. “You and the Sister climb in, I’ll take you wherever you want!”
He honked the horn emphatically in chorus.
The driver was Mike Donahue. Not only was Mike a member of Mark’s parish, but he was also a
near neighbor. “Mike! Oh, thank God! – Come on, Sister, this is a friend.”
Mike threw the passenger door open, and Mark got in, drawing the unresisting, numb young woman
after him. “Glad I saw you, Father!” Mike told him. “That damned firestorm back there is comin’ this
way – it’ll be here in no time flat! I’m headed back to Brownlake, okay with you?”
“You bet!”
Thus it was that he and Sister Barbara were among the fortunate few to leave the area surrounding
Boston before the banshee winds finally turned and carried the enormous firestorm far out to the very
outer edges of the suburbs. As they later learned, if they had stayed at that clinic they’d have been just
two more tiny bits of fuel for the gigantic, sky-reaving Fury which had eventually devoured the Boston
area with miles-high fangs of fire. Even now, he still felt twinges of guilt that he hadn’t tried harder to
get others there to flee the area, at least the little boys they had left behind at the makeshift clinic. And
he still didn’t know whether It was cowardice or Divine will that had impelled him to get the hell out of
there before it was too late.
Their luck had held almost all the way home, when the truck threw a rod about six miles from Mike
Donahue’s house, which was just down the road from the church and its neighboring rectory. By this
time Mark was feeling ill from his burns, which had begun to hurt fiercely again as well Groaning, he got
out of the truck with the other two, trying to pull himself together enough so that he could walk home,
when their luck hit again: Going in their direction, on his way to the town hall for a meeting of everyone
present in Brownlake concerning what to do about the current emergency, care still another close
neighbor of Mark’s, Bill Erikkson, driving a station-wagon.
Bill was a Lutheran, not a member of Mark’s Church. But like almost everyone else in the area who
was at all acquainted with the young priest, Catholic or not, he liked Mark and had a good deal of respect
for him – especially after having seen Mark pitch in to help during the previous autumn at harvest-time,
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By Yael R. Dragwyla
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boosting hay with the best of them, the equal or better of any of the farmers in the district at harvesting
chores of all kinds.
Now Bill pulled over to the side of the road right in front of Donahue’s truck, and honked to get the
attention of the three, who were still standing in front of the truck, wondering what to do next. “Hey, hop
in, people – I’m going to the town hall meeting. Can I drop you off somewhere on the way?”
“Man, you came just in time!” Mike told him. “Father Mark is feeling very ill – we need to get him
home to the rectory.”
“All right, I’m going that way anyway. You other two want to come with me?”
The three men, Mark, Mike, and Bill, looked at Sister Barbara. “Oh, I think I’11 go along with
Father Mark. He needs someone to look after his burns. I can keep house at the rectory until he’s well –
or my Order sends for me,” she told them.
“You need an extra hand there, Sister?” Mike asked her.
“No, I’11 be all right. Just drop us both off at the rectory.” Mark had told her about the little
community, its Catholic church and rectory.
“Well, fine, Sister,” said Bill. “You want to go on to the town meeting, then, Mike?”
“Yeah, maybe I can find some people there to get my truck home later, too.”
So the three of them got in with Bill. He dropped Mark and the nun off at the rectory, then went on
with Mike to the town meeting. (Oh, where was Bill, that good man, and his family now?)
Thanks to Sister Barbara’s patient care, along with nutritional supplements from the vast store of
food in the rectory, Mark was feeling much better in a couple of weeks, and his burns seemed to be
heeling, albeit with big, ugly, brightly colored scars. But Sister Barbara’s Order never sent for her. In
the twenty years since that terrible day Mark and the nun never had been able to get coherent
communications from their superiors in the Church. Everything had fallen apart – transportation and
communication had returned to just those forms and modes available in pre-industrial times. Every time
he thought about The Day and what had happened since, Mark was poignantly reminded of a pre-Day
novel he had loved as a boy, Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. The world had returned to
far simpler – and darker – days; for all he knew, the Church itself had died as its leaders had perished in
bombed cities or afterward, from plague, with no one left to keep the Body of Christ’s Bride alive. Even
so, now it was up to the priest to keep his perish going, at least, as long as breath was in his body and
anyone Lived here – so long as he could do that, the Bride would live, whether or not She would perish
with him.
So here the two of them, he and Sister Barbara, had remained, doing what they could to care for the
few remaining survivors and, finally, themselves, and thanking God every day for being granted the joy
of keeping His Word alive.
Apparently Mark had encountered almost all the radiation he was going to on the Day, and little or
none since. The keloid tissue that decorated his back like some mad tattoo artist’s finest efforts was ugly,
but so far had not shown signs of becoming malignant, and most of the time gave little trouble. Only
whatever minor imp lived in his gut now, practicing to be a higher-up in Satan’s hierarchy by tearing at
Mark’s lower bowel had given any real trouble. And that may well also have come about from whatever
body-burden of radioactives Mark had been loaded with on The Day.
Poor Sister Barbara, on the other hand, though apparently untouched by the initial blast or radiation
in Boston, somehow since The Day had been badly damaged by radiation. Perhaps she had drunk it in
from contaminated drinking-water while at a neighbor’s to use her nursing skills to help the sick or ease
the dying, or eaten contaminated food there. Or, she might have somehow drunk, eaten or breathed in
hot material in her wanderings about Boston’s suburbs on The Day before her path and Mark’s had
finally crossed. He really had no idea how she had encountered the stuff, while he apparently had
managed to avoid it, mostly – maybe they both had actually taken in equal amounts of the stuff over the
years, or he had even taken in more than she, but his system was better at getting rid of the stuff than was
hers.
Of course, it was possible that she was succumbing to the effects of chemical or biological materiel
dropped over the countryside during the Day (by which side, he could not have said. To this day, it still
wasn’t clear who had started the whole ghastly progression of horrors – perhaps even the United States
had, by accident or otherwise, in spite of all the “No first striker’ rhetoric by various US Presidential
administrations; and no one could say for sure even that all the nukes and other abominations that had
been released onto American soil had come from other countries). Certainly some of the fancier and
more subtle of the nerve–gases, or an exotic form of meningitis, could be responsible for Sister Barbara’s
slow, heart-breaking decline. Well, it was a lead-pipe cinch that he’d never know for certain. Not now.
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If there were any specialists in radiological or xenobiological medicine or toxicology who could tell him,
they lived nowhere around here.
Perhaps . . . perhaps, he mused, if the “cell-wash” biochemical flushing process which had been
developed and perfected at John Hopkins a few years before the Day were available now, the
frighteningly swift deterioration of her health and all her faculties she was undergoing could have been
halted or even reversed before it became serious. In fact, if –
Ah, well, no use to day-dream about what could not be; far enough down that road lay madness.
Best to go up to bed now, and get some sleep. Christmas would be here soon; as he had every year
before, he wanted to perform the Mass for Christmas, whether any communicants besides himself and
poor Sister Barbara would be there for it or not. So he’d have to dust and otherwise do what he could to
set everything in order for Christ’s birthday. For that, he needed rest and sleep.
It would be nice, he thought wistfully, looking over at the old HCR player in the corner, if he could
play a cube or two before bed. He had come to miss movies and music more than he could ever have
realized he would before the Day. How he wished he could still play one of the cubes he’d recorded of
the holo newscasts from Saturn’s moon Titan that had been transmitted by the remote-controlled probe
they’d finally landed there! Or the one of The Tempest, beam-cast live/delay from Hotel Selene in
Copernicus Crater . . .
Blinding tears suddenly flooded his eyes. He had to stop thinking this way, dammit! Come on, come
on, Mark – get your tokus up to bed and stop crying over spilt milk, because nothing’s going to come
along to un-spill it in your lifetime, boy! Are you a servant of Christ, or a sniveling little boy wallowing
in self-pity?
With an angry grunt, almost grateful for the fiery spear of pain that lanced briefly through his gut
and obliterated the memories and sorrow that had almost overwhelmed him, he hove to his feet and
headed for the kitchen with his cup and saucer. Carefully he rinsed them and putting them away – one
thing the Bomb hadn’t managed to do in were Beelzebub’s countless minions and all their nasty relatives,
especially the cockroach and the rat, who ever found the crumbs and leavings of man to be a gold-edged
invitation to move right in with him! Then he made the ever-more effortful climb up the stairs to his
room. There, he undressed and said his prayers as quickly as in decency he could, and fell into bed,
asleep almost before his head touched the pillow.

*****

Hidden in the dark recesses of the church’s foundation, her belly greatly distended with its cargo of
young, she pulled herself through one crevice or crack after another, looking for food and 8 decent place
to give birth.
She was cold, for here in the dank under-structure of the church the December chill was stronger
even than it was outside. Various molds and fungi, all of them diseased and poisonous-seeming, grew in
pungent rainbow abundance down here. The rotted remains of previous generations of the things had
combined with the damp and dirt and the dust of years into something like a thin tar coating everything.
Its sickly, mephitic odor made her gag.
The extra leg that dangled uselessly at her side, broken by accident when she had barely left her
mother’s nest, ached miserably from the cold. Pain shot through her distorted lower jaw as the cold
tugged differentially on its varying thicknesses of bone. More of her teeth were now rotten, probably
from the demands of pregnancy. As one of her neighbors in the colony in the Home Place had remarked
long ago, “One pup, one tooth.”
– The Home Place. She hadn’t thought of it for a long time now – had deliberately kept herself from
remembering. Remembrance was hopeless longing, one more agony for her already over-burdened
spirit. Oh, how she missed her home!
But as the iron cold inflamed old scars as well as her sick joints, bones, teeth and gums, the memory
of the flames that had caused those scars came back to her. With it came the agony of loss of parents,
litter-mates, friends who had died in the fire that had consumed her home leaving her wounded and
bereft in a lonely, terrible world.
She had no way of determining exactly how long ago the fire had been. The People had never used
or even known of clocks. But they did know the Moon, as all living creatures do; they knew the rhythm of
Her tugs on every cell of their bodies. The legends said that long, long ago, before the time of their
remotest foremothers, She had been a visible as well as a felt, living Presence in the night sky, Her ever-
 Nativity
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 14 of 23

changing body, waxing from nothing to pregnant fullness and then, giving birth to the fulfillment of their
desires in manifest form as she did, waning to nothingness again, varying in color from bright, glorious
argent to serene ivory to a Magickal, incandescent blue-white to the sick yellow of old, moldering bone.
If so, She had drawn the Dark Veil across Her Countenance so long ego that even the memory of that
time had been last to the People. Yet no one actually needed to see Her – mere eyesight was nothing,
after all, to the whole-bodied Communion which all life had with Her, the joy of Her touch clear to the
marrow of the bones. So their concept of the passage of time was in terms of full Moons: so many Great
Moons* ago, thus-and-such happened. She knew it had been several Great Moons now since the fire, at
least, perhaps two big-litters’ worth. Certainly it had been a good long while; she had been in her first
youth then, still virgin. How, though she wasn’t old, she certainly was no longer truly young.

*Great Moons were also known as Dance Times: for that was when, like all other living things,
consciously or otherwise, they gave themselves over to Her Ecstasies.

She remembered, now, that horrible night when the barn in which the Home Place had been caught
fire and burned to the ground as the result of an improperly fended cook-fire which had been built by
some wanderers who had sought refuge in the barn from the rain. She had been lucky – she had been
napping in one of the burrows close to an exit when the fire broke out, erupting like a small volcano in
the rotten, moldering bales of hay and piled-up, broken pieces of old, tinder-dry lumber scattered and
commingled on one side of the main floor of the barn. She’d awakened at the first warning touch of
scorching air; startled awake by it, she had thrown herself head-first at the exit. She was already
halfway outside when a jet of superheated air, rushing outward from the fire, had caught her,
momentarily turning her into a running torch as the fur on her flank and haunch erupted in flame.
Without thinking she threw herself onto the cool dirt, just beyond the side of the barn, and rolled on it in
a frenzy of fear and pain, crushing out the fire. Then she’d hurled herself into the little ditch that ran
near the barn, which was full of cold mud covered with a film of frigid standing water, run-off from a
rainfall on the previous evening. The cool mud had drawn all the heat out of her burns. She’d then
dragged herself over to a nearby weed-grow, hillock, where there was a long-abandoned gopher-hole,
and had crawled into the old burrow to sleep off the worst of her pain and the sickness the burns brought.
She’d lived for a while an odds and ends scavenged from the surrounding meadow. When her burns had
healed to thick keloid scars, she took off along the nearby road, to see what there might be out there for
her in a cruelly wide, empty world.
One after another, she’d explored the empty houses slang the road. She didn’t find much:
weathering, rot, and other scavengers preceding her over a span of time vaster than she could imagine
had more or less done for anything edible. She did find enough – barely – to keep body and soul
together, but little more. So she had wandered on down the road, hoping for better fortune further on.
At one house, she ran into a fellow-scavenger, a large male of her kind. He was rather handsome,
save for a crooked front leg and a weird piebald color-pattern in his fur. That was where she had
become pregnant. For it had been a night of the Great Moon, and both of them, their cares forgotten in
the Moon’s Ecstasy, had lost themselves for awhile in sexual frenzy. With the waning of the Moon they
had lost interest in each other, and she had once more taken herself off down the road.
At last she had come here, to the church, after a long time of wandering. So far, she had found no
food here – and the cold, the awful cold, was like a knife of silver fire plunged into her scars, her aching
joints, her rotting, snaggled teeth! And it was so close to her time – if only she could at least get out of
this hellish cold!

*****

It was now morning again – or at least what passed for it, since the Day. Mark got out of bed with
difficulty, the night’s cold having locked his joints and muscles.
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By Yael R. Dragwyla
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The effort was worth it, though – through his bedroom window, once he’d opened the curtains, he
saw that long rifts had formed in the cloud-cover, so that shafts of sunlight played on the barren ground
and the sickly, winter-bared or dead trees and other sparse vegetation.
“Well, maybe it will be a happy Christmas after all – oh, Christ!” The spasm in his guts doubled
him over, and he fell to the floor. It took quite a while for him to recover and struggle to his feet. After a
painful time he was able to recover and struggle to his feet. With difficulty he managed to dress himself.
He went out to the kitchen.
He began putting coffee on to perk on the wood-burning stove. (Before the Day, his parish must
have been thick with caffeine-fiends; there might literally have been a ton of coffee in the storeroom!)
Just as he was getting ready to light the fire to brew the coffee, a noise he hadn’t heard in years brought
him at a dead run to the back door and out onto the tarmac lot beyond: the
sound of an automobile horn!
There in the parking-lot was an ancient pickup truck about the size of a brontosaurus. Some terrible
relict of a dark dream of the fabulous Summer of Love of the middle of the last century, it violated the
eye with an abominable medley of oncoidally fungal mauve-orange-mustard-and-olive paisley and a blue
that was pintoed with flaking gray, ulcerous age-spots; the latter had apparently been half-heartedly
applied sometime later in the truck’s long, long life in an unsuccessful attempt to cover up the former, an
effort which had been abandoned far too soon. The thing had obviously seen better days – a lot of them!
– but the fact that it ran at all was miraculous. Debarking from this vehicular nightmare was a slender,
olive-complexioned old man; his fierce, heavy mustache and the gold ring in his ear reminded Mark of
something. Now what – ?
Ah! he had it: as a boy, visiting Granddad’s farm during the summers, some of his chief joys were
the visits of the Gypsies, who came again and again to the few on their long, cyclic, nomadic wanderings,
exchanging their skills as tinkers, herbal veterinarians, and laborers for food, old clothing, money, odds
and ends from the store of things too good to throw away but no longer valued by the people on the farm.
One of the Gypsy – no, the Rom, they called themselves, from “Romania,” their homeland in Europe –
one of the Rom “princes” that had come with his people to the farm so long ago had looked rather like
this old man, gold earring, mustache and all.
The old man who stood before him now on the tarmac of the parking-lot, unlike almost everyone
Mark had seen for the last two decades, was healthy and hale, looked to be still strong and agile – “full of
juice,” as the Bible had said of Moses in late old age. This man held his slender body upright as if the
spirit that it housed were a flame, ever rising to Heaven. His eyes, two pools filled with midnight ink,
looked the priest over carefully, a bit suspiciously.
Perhaps the Great Lord Murphy had gone on vacation; for once Mark’s slowly deteriorating memory
worked the way he needed it to. Enunciating carefully to get around his rusty linguistic skills, he spoke
one of the few Romany phrases he’d learned as a boy on the farm, a greeting that a gaja – an outsider* –
would not be likely to know. “Sarishan! Kooshti dai!”

*Gaja, the literal meaning of which is “farmer, settled one,” is very similar in meaning and implication
to the Yiddish word goy: “Not one of us,” “the despised outsider,” “stranger who might be
dangerous because he is a stranger,” “barbarian.”

The old man’s eyes narrowed in surprise. Then he grinned. “Boro Duvel! – Ah, hey, children, I
t’ink we got a Romany Rye, here!” he called to the people still in the truck. Turning back to Mark he
said, “Nu, rom san tu?”
Mark grinned back, and walked up to the old man. “Better than usual,” he replied. ‘So, what can we
do for you?”
Pointing to the back of the truck, which was covered with a canvas roof laced tight across high,
arched metal ribs so that it looked rather like a Conestoga wagon, the old Rom dayan said, “My daughter
an’ my son-in-law, he should live to be a hundred and twenty, or at least a lot older t’an t’at s.o.b. Marvin
Finkelstein, are in t’ere. My little girl is about to – you know, have a baby. We need someplace clean,
warm, out of t’e cold, a bed for her, you know? You got a neighbor, an old putz – pardon me, alter
kocker named Donovan, said we oughtta come here, you’d help us. T’at right?”
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By Yael R. Dragwyla
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Mark, who was having a deal of trouble keeping a straight face, said, “Oh, my goodness – yes, yes,
by all means! Please bring her in! Yes, of course – and you and her husband, too!”
“Ah, good,” the old man said, sighing wearily. “We’ve been traveling for days – not’in’ anywhere,
you know?”
“I can imagine.” Mark could, too. How in the holy name of Christ Jesus this man and his family had
been able to maintain themselves and their rattletrap truck in a condition of relatively enormous
prosperity, for what must have been a long, long time, he had no idea. That they had been able to feed
and clothe themselves, keep the truck in fuel and do as well as they seemed to have accomplished, in the
vast, lonely, wasteland that the North American continent had been for the last twenty years, was a true
miracle. “Oh, Lord – well, we’ve got good well-water, a stove, food, everything you need, even linens.”
He mentally patted himself on the back once again for having installed the water-heating and -delivery
system that provided hot water in relative abundance for baths, laundry and cooking.
“Good, good. Fat’ah, it’s like a miracle. T’ank you. T’ank you an’ may t’e boro Duvel bless an’
keep you, an’ make His face to shine upon you! – Say, what do I call you?”
“My name is Mark – Father Mark. . . . By the way, are you, uh, related to Mel Brooks?”
“Hunh?”
“Never mind. It’s – well, are you Jewish?” Mark still was fighting a terrible urge to break out in
hysterical giggles, the old man’s Ringlish dialect nearly overwhelming him.
“Nah, Fat’ah – it’s like t’is: if you want ta catch ‘em, you gotta know what t’ey do. Marvin
Finkelstein, he should only roast in hell for a couple of four-day weekends sometime, is t’e lousiest
Yiddish teacher I never ran across, you know? Alt’ough he does make the best kosher salami I never
tasted in my life. An’ his old lady makes up for a lot – I’d schtupp her proper if she wasn’t so sweet on
t’e old buzzard. Uh, I’ll try to watch it –”
“Oh, goodness, no! It’s rather . . . “
“‘It’s rat’ah,’ what?” asked the old man, puzzled.
“Oh, it’s just that it’s rather nice. When I was In college, ‘way back when, in my salad days, I
boarded for a while with a nice old Orthodox Jewish couple. Brings back nice memories.”
“Ah! – well, t’en, ver’ pleased ta make yer acquaintance, Fat’ah Mark. An’ I am Vladimir.” He
stuck out one square, neat hand. Mark took it, and they solemnly shook hands.
Mart, did not ask for the old man’s formal name – either he’d give it or he wouldn’t, in his own time.
“Vladimir” might or might not be it – more likely it was the old dayan’s nav gajikanes, reserved for
public use, especially among gaja. To ask for it would be gaja insensitivity and rudeness, worse than
boorish, possibly a deadly insult – the Rom believed that a man’s name was linked to his soul, and that if
anyone knew a man’s true name, he could work black Magick against him. To ask for the name of a
Gypsy was to risk serious trouble, in most contexts.
Quickly the old man vent around to the back of the truck. “Hey – Jimmy, Rose, we gotta place! The
good Fat’ah here is gonna let us stay in t’e rectory! Come on, Jimmy – help me get Rosy up to t’e
house.”
Mark heard the woman mutter something protestingly, obviously annoyed. Mark grinned to himself
– even in these awful days, Feminism was still with us! Let’s hear it for Betty Frieden of Blessed
Memory!
“Damn, Daddy, I can make it to the house myself! You an’ Jimmy act like I’m made of glass or
somethin’! I’m no cripple – leggo me, you big clown!” she squawked at someone inside the truck.
“Now, darlin’, tu fuli tochai,” said a second, male voice in what Mark had long ago privately
Labeled “you-all Hollywood,” a Californian trying to be taken for a native of Dixie, “don’t get yore
pretty li’l tokus all in an uproar, you hear? Ya gotta admit, baby, yore center of gravity ain’t what it used
ta be – an’ you got precious cargo aboard!”
“Don’t you ‘now darlin’,’ me, you – you great, big, overprotective man!” But she giggled, and it
was all right.
Vladimir helped from in front, the invisible Jimmy, from behind. Soon Rose, whose great, swollen
belly seemed like a keel five times too big for its ship, was standing on the tarmac, leaning against the
truck’s tailgate. She wore Levi jeans into the front of which a great, accordion-pleated bay of white
cotton cloth had been built to accommodate her vast pregnancy, and beautifully polished “drugstore
cowboy” boots, gaudy in red, black and white with rhinestones and glitter trim. A long-sleeved, blue-
and-white checked shirt with mother-of-pearl cufflink studs, dark string tie and black “cowboy” hat
completed the ensemble. She was simply beautiful, her stunning midnight hair cascading down her back
like waves of trans-Plutonian space, her skin flawless and her brown eyes lustrous – and she seemed as
crazily out of place in the midst of this desolate landscape as a diamond in a dung-heap.
 Nativity
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 17 of 23

Then a pair of long, long legs, clad in Levis but ending in a pair of much plainer, more austere and
practical-looking men’s work-boots, came over the tailgate, soon followed by the rest of Jimmy, Rose’s
husband.
While Vladimir looked on in high glee, Mark’s struggles to keep his lower jaw up rivaled those of
Saint Anthony against the succubus. Jimmy, from his huge, beautifully coiffed Afro, right down to the
toes of his long legs, was one of the darkest-skinned human beings Mark had ever seen. About twenty-
three or twenty-four years old, more or less his wife’s age, Jimmy regarded Mark with a faint “What’re
ya gonna do about it, dads?” smirk. Evidently he’d been through this before.
Rose’s 40-megawatt glare favored all three men equally. “Ohhh . . . men!” she spat, and started to
stomp off in the direction of the rectory. She almost immediately ran afoul of a small rock, her boot-heel
coming down on It at just the wrong angle, and turned her ankle. Before she could fall, all three men
rushed to catch her, shattering the moment, which had been nearly sublime in its awkwardness, at least
for Mark.
Jimmy, who took the burden of his wife’s weight, was suddenly all anxious husband and about-to-be-
papa. “See, Rosy? Now, dammit, until this baby’s born, I want you to be careful, hear?”
Rose put up a strenuous mock battle, then suddenly smiled and kissed Jimmy’s large nose. “Oh, you
– you worry too much, sweetheart!”
“Hah. “
“Hey, c’mon, lovebirds – let’s get Rosy inta t’e house, okay?” Vladimir barked.
“Boy, howdy, Daddy, you said it!” said Jimmy. “– C’mon, Rosy – I am not takin’ chances with you,
you little hellion.” He scooped up his grinning wife and carried her bodily to the rectory.
Vladimir and Mark followed at a more modest pace than that which Jimmy’s great long legs, good
health and youth managed so effortlessly.
“Hey, Fat’ah Mark.”
“What, Vladimir?”
“You look, like, a leetle shook up, you know?” the old man told him, chuckling.
Mark couldn’t think of a suitable reply. Finally, in spite of himself, he grinned and returned the
laugh. “I shouldn’t have been surprised – my horoscope today said I was going to meet a ‘tall, dark,
distinguished man’.”
Vladimir threw back his head and roared with laughter, “Well, you know,” said Mark, “one doesn’t
usually expect such an interesting, ah, combination of people. You know?”
Vladimir laughed all the harder, if that were possible. Then, sobering a bit, he said, “Yah, well, t’e
kid’s all right. He got sick an’ tired of working for t’at fink Finkelstein as the Shabbas goy an’ ast me for
a job, an’ I says, Why not? An’ pretty soon, you know, I find out he can manage t’at little hellcat of
mine, an’ nobody else ever could, you know, so when he asts me, can he marry her, I say, Hey, I’ll pay
you!”
Now both men were laughing hard enough to bring tears. In that mood, they followed the young
couple in to the rectory’s kitchen.
There they met Sister Barbara. Mark felt a twinge of unease as she came into the kitchen at the
sound of their voices, not knowing how she, who had been born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama,
would react. But even with her senility, Sister Barbara’s kindness, Christian charity and genuine natural
liking for people was quite undamaged. Glad of the company, and filled with a motherly concern over
Rose’s advanced pregnancy, she invited the little family to stay as long as they wanted, and then bustled
upstairs to help make rooms ready for them. Mark could hear her humming “Connie’s Big Secret,” a
song that one of those new “Doktor Bands,” Janor Jr. and Wotan’s False Bleeding Heads, had made
popular just before The Bay, as she went – he hadn’t seen her so cheerful in years. A great weight that he
hadn’t known was there seemed to fall from his shoulders.
“Well, people, can I fix you anything? Coffee? Chocolate? A sandwich?”
“Ah, Fat’ah, you’re too good to us,” said Vladimir. “Tell ya what – we got lotsa stuff out inns truck.
If you let me use your stove, I’11 make us all some lunch. What say?”
Blinking, all Mark could do was smile and agree.
The day went well. By nightfall, the little family was well settled in. From the amazingly rich
collection of everything from food and clothing to furniture, books, and medicines packed into the huge
bed of the old truck, along with the ample resources of the rectory, beds were made up in two empty
upstairs rooms for Vladimir, Rose and Jimmy. The old man had his room, alone, between Mark’s and
Sister Barbara’s; directly across the hall from it were the rooms shared by Rose and Jimmy. If Rose went
into labor during the night, Vladimir could be there at once to assist. According to his calculations, she
was due in a very few days – possibly on Christmas Eve.
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By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 18 of 23

After Rose and her husband had retired to their room for the night, and Sister Barbara had likewise
gone to bed, Vladimir split wood piled up in the garage for kindling and built a good fire in the enormous
fireplace that graced the rectory’s main room. It was the first time since late summer that Mark had felt
really warm. His arthritis was too advanced, and he was otherwise too feeble, to chop much wood; he
had had to be content with whatever gleanings he could find within a mile or so radius about the rectory.
“Thank you, Vladimir – I haven’t felt so warm in years!”
“Eh – my pleasure, Fat’ah – turnabout’s fair play, you Know. T’at was one great supper you fixed!”
“Well, if we’re keeping score, it was your turkey and your whiskey and –”
“Ah, never mind.” The old man waved away Mark’s humorous protests. “Who gives a damn,
anyway? I can get all tie turkey I want, you know? An’ t’e whiskey – it’s like wine an’ dope an’ food, all
I want. We trade for it.”
“Oh? How”
“Like, I know herbs. You know? know all about ‘em. How do you t’lnk I stayed so damn’ healt’y
all these years, eh? An’ t’e girl, an’ Jimmy? So, I’m like a doctor – better’n a doctor, ‘cause t’ose quacks,
all t’ey know is look-up-inna-book, pills here, pills t’ere, t’ey don’ know not’in’ about Nature! You
know? Whaddaya expect from a buncha dopes who grew up believin’ in t’e same t’ing t’at finally
dropped t’e Bomb on alla us? Pah!” He spat into the fireplace for emphasis, then went on. “Now, me I
got a t’ousand years of Romany wisdom, right here –’ He pointed at his stomach, in the region of his
liver. “I got alla t’at! I can save lives, I can heal burns so good, you never know t’ere was a burn,
anyt’ing you want!
“An’ I can deliver babies – anytime. I am t’e best.
“– Well, not for t’e Rom” he admitted with a sheepish grin. “I’m only so-so, for t’e Rom. But t’ere
is no g~ doctor anywhere as good as me! So, like t’at –” he snapped his fingers – “i can write my own
ticket!
“An’ Jimmy, now, he knows magic! – Oh, not Rom Magick, you know, except he’s beginning to
learn t’e real stuff from me, he’s slow, you gotta un’erstan’, all t’ose years wit’ t’e gaja, it kinda
stupefied him, as you c’n expect. But he’s a good boy, Romany Rye, you know, he really is, he’s
learnin’ – he’s pure-D Rom in t’e heart. I know t’is – how, you ask, can a schwartze be Romanichals,
true Rom? It’s easy.
“See, t’e world’s in short supply of all kindsa people right now. Us, too. So, we got to recruit. You
know? If t’ere ain’t enough Rom, t’is ol’ world’s gonna go down t’e tubes an’ stay t’ere, for all time –
pfffft.’ He made a sound like a it match plunged into water. “So God says, well, for now, We’ll just sorta
wave Our Hand an’ hey! presto! Abracadabra! some o’ t’ese gaja, t’ey ain’t really gaja anymore, t’ey’re
Rom! Jus’ waitin’ ta be found by t’eir own.
“—So anyway, Jimmy’s a whatchacallit – a prestidigitator. Man, he is good, he is t’e best. He
knows t’e T’ree Rings trick, t’e Dove trick, t’e Magic Mirror, t’e Ghost, gets outta sealed milk-cans after
bein’ tied up good wit’ ropes an’ chains – all of it! Houdini, T’urston – move over! So he’s t’e
entertainment.
“An’ Rose, she’s a chov’hani an’ like, what you say, a vet’rinarian. She never vent to school – not
gaja school, anyway – but she can make any animal you want to name well again when it’s sick, set
broken legs, everyt’ing. She set a butterfly’s wing one time, she was a little girl an’ found t’is bug wit’ a
broken wing an’ set it, an’ kep’ it in a box just like a sick-ward for it, an’ it got well.” His face was set in
a dreamily astonished look as he remembered, and he smiled over the memory of his talented daughter’s
first patient. “An’ everybody’s got sick animals. ‘Specially stock, or dogs. You know?
“So, we got work anywhere we go – anyt’ing we want.”
“You say you deliver babies” asked Mark.
The old man’s face, so animated, suddenly became a stone mask. “Yeah,” he said bitterly in a far
quieter voice than he had been using up until now. “Yeah, I bet I delivered a million of ‘em.”
“Well, were they –?”
Vladimir, who had been smoking an enormous, fine cigar, got God knew how from God alone knew
where, took the cigar out of his mouth and twiddled it, staring at it for a long, silent while. Mark waited,
not really wanting to hear the answer.
Finally, as if the words were cast in molten lead, the old man told him, “Not one damn’ one of ‘em
since The Day was . . . healt’y. All of ‘em. Sick. Dead. Or no arms, or legs. Or bleeders. Or no – no
figs, you Know, like a steer, a . . . a capon, a eunuch. Sterile. I dunno about t’e girls. But not one of
‘em . . . whole.”
“I’d heard . . . I’d heard that . . . that there just don’t seem to be any healthy births. – Not just
human beings, either. Farm animals, wild ones . . .”
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By Yael R. Dragwyla
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“Yeah,” said the old man, sighing, “t’at’s pretty much it. Not just animals, eit’er – plants, too.
“Like, t’e reason you don’t see hardly any animals, birds, growt’ aroun’ no more is t’at every
generation has more an’ more wrong wit’ it. Fewer an’ fewer can have any babies. An’ t’e only reasons
anybody can grow crops anymore, you know, like corn or oats or grain, is eit’er t’at t’ey grow it indoors,
you know, an’ hand-pollinate it ‘cause t’e bees mostly are all dead, or t’ey got strains t’at mutate like
sonsabitches all t’e time, but have built-in whatchacallems, regulators in t’e genes, somebody tol’ me, t’is
graduate o’ UC Irvine twen’y-five years ago, maybe, aggie prof-type, anyway, t’ey got built-in t’ings so
somehow all t’e changes, t’e mutations cancel out an’ t’ere’s plen’y healt’y stock most o’ t’e time. But
animals don’ do so good . . . an’ we’re animals, Fat’ah – we sure as Hell ain’t daisies! (Maybe we’d ‘a’
done better if we had been – I never seen no daisy build an H-bomb!)
“ – Eh, it’s fucked. It’s all completely – oh, hell, Fat’ah, I’m sorry!”
“No, no, not at all – I understand, I really do. I – I’m afraid I feel the same way a good deal of the
time. The few people still living around here – well, it’s been the same for all of them, as well as for
people who come through here, I understand. It rather looks as if there aren’t going to be many more
generations, at least of Homo sapiens aeternitatis atomicus, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Again Vladimir sighed deeply. Then he carefully pinched out the ash of his cigar; putting it
in his pocket, he stood up and said, “l’d better get my beauty sleep, Fat’ah Mark. – I gotta be ready when
t’e kid is – you know. “
“Of course.”
“G’night, Fat’ah.” The old man rose and sauntered off to his room. It wasn’t until he’d left, so
strongly had Vladimir projected an aura of vast competence, strength and self-confidence, that Mark
realized that the subject of their conversation was also intimately concerned with the current situation of
Vladimir and his family. Cursing himself for an insensitive idiot, Mark said a Rosary in contrition, and
went to bed feeling a great weight of years and horrors.

*****

For days, she had been crawling around in the Stygian crevices and crannies in the foundations of
the church. All she had found to eat were some admittedly tasty and fat cockroaches, a few black beetles
that left a metallic aftertaste in her mouth, a small arthritic snake, and a two-headed, newt-like thing that
wasn’t particularly classifiable (neither was the way it tasted). Even worse than her gnawing hunger,
driven by the insatiable demands upon her body made by the pups she carried, was the terrible, grinding
cold of the earth into which the building’s foundations were sunk, over and through which perforce she
crawled in her search for what she needed for survival. If she couldn’t find warmth soon, she and her
unborn babies were doomed.
One frigid afternoon, noises above woke her from a stuporous sleep. Muffled and attenuated by the
think layers of material above her, there came to her the voices and footsteps of large beings. The
footsteps and the voices continued for quite a while. Then whatever it was went away.
She found the sounds interesting. True, they seemed to come from overhead – but they came at her
far more loudly from a distant corner of the foundation than they did from directly above her, where
whatever it was seemed to be.
She wandered across a large open space toward the place where the sounds had been the loudest,
and found a hole there in the cement walls. it was just barely large enough for her to enter, in her far-
advanced pregnancy. Quickly she slipped into it, and found herself in a passage sloping upward.
Following the passage, she came to an opening in the wells, this one much larger than the one through
which she had entered in the first place. She found herself looking into the side of a large horizontal
shaft of some kind. An almost undetectable breeze from the shaft fanned her face.
She climbed into the hole laboriously, and made her way along the shaft until it made a right-angle
turn, straight up. The breeze had been very warm, at least compared to the freezing cold of the
foundations. Using almost the last of her badly depleted reserves, she jumped straight up, toward what
perhaps only her imagination had placed there: a light.
Desperately grappling with her paws, which were very sore from both a kind of pregnancy-induced
rheumatism and bruises and sores which were the product of malnutrition, she caught the lip of another,
more-or-less horizontal passage that led off from the vertical shaft she’d been in. She hauled her swollen
body into the passage and made her way along it, panting hard, following the tantalizing hint of light and
warmth beyond.
 Nativity
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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One after another, she went from passageway to passageway, shaft to shaft, always moving upward.
Ar last, when her strength was almost gone, her efforts were rewarded: she emerged into a vast,
rectilinear cavern, along the walls of which lights flickered and gleamed. Indeed there was light here,
and a healing warmth.
Exhausted, she moved slowly out into the open space. There before her were the strangest things she
had ever seen: firelight from pretty torches supported by black, weird frames on the walls gleaming here
and there from their vitreous surfaces, eldritch figures made of something hard and slick were clustered
around a wicker-work box filled with hay. Still another of the slick, hard things lay in that hay. But
weird as the scene before her was, she hadn’t the energy left to fear it. Instead, its tantalizingly
fortuitous promise drew her onward, out into the light.
Now near to complete collapse, she crawled slowly up to the wicker box. If that stupid weird thing
on the hay weren’t there, the box would be just perfect for a nest! And if that larger hard thing next to the
box weren’t quite so squarely in her way, she could crawl into the box quite easily. Hmmm . . .
Grunting and straining with the effort, spots swimming before her eyes as exhaustion caused her to
come nearer and nearer to passing out, she shouldered aside the thing blocking access to the box; it
rolled sway, coming to rest up against the tall thing covered with cloth that stood close by. Then, pulling
herself upright by grasping the side of the box, and levering her nose under the thing on the hay within it,
she carefully pushed the hard, slick object to the far side of the box as she climbed over the near side.
Finally, she was in the box and the hard thing wasn’t; it fell over the side with a semi-musical clatter
and rolled sway.
Very pleased with herself, she lay back On the hay, infinitely weary but content in the warmth of the
great room. She could just make out a bulky metal contraption in a far corner, through the door in the
front of which came the red glow of fire; the warmth came from there. The place certainly seemed safe
enough; maybe she had found a real haven at last.
Suddenly a sharp, burning pain rippled through her pelvis, tearing at her groin from deep within.
She gasped in her pain, then, as she realized what was happening, she turned her body so that she could
put all that was left of her strength into assisting the birth-process, squatting so that gravity could do its
share, too . . .

*****

“Eh, come an, Fat’ah – it’s okay, already! Like, everyt’ing is fine in t ‘ere !”
“Oh, damn – look, Vladimir, I just know that damned candle is going to drip all over everything and
–”
“Naw, you’re just worryin’ for t’e sake of worryin’!”
“I tell you, that candle will make one hell of a mess in there. And I really should put another bit of
wood into the stove, there – who needs Midnight Mass in the Ninth Circle?”
“Hunh? – Oh, Hell, all right! Sheesh, you’re just like t’e wife was, t’e boro Duvel bless her –cor t’e
drom, 40 miles out t’e door an’ down t’e road, she just knew she’d left her jewelry behind, or t’e cat, or
some damn’ t’ing. – Oh, all right, already! Let’s go out t’ere an’ check on t’at damn’ candle and t’e
stove an’ get it t’e Hell over wit’, so I can get some sleep tonight! Gotta be all bright-eyed an’ merry for
Santy Claus tomorra, don’tcha know?”
Chuckling, he went back with Mark from the rectory down the brick path to the church. Where
Mark had to pick his way carefully in the heavy gloom of night, Vladimir was as sure-footed as a cat, and
reached the door of the church well before Mark did.
He had the door open and was inside before Mark got close. Mark saw him step inside.
“What t’e fuck?”
“What’s wrong, Vladimir?”
“I – shee-it, Fat’ah, you gotta see it to believe it! Come on in an’ take a look at t’is!”
“What is it?” he called, finally reaching the door, out of breath with a stitch in his side.
“You won’t believe it until you see it! – Hell, I don’ believe it, an’ I’m seein’ it for myself!” A vast
glee danced in the old man’s voice, along with an even greater wonder.
Mark, huffing and puffing, came up to where Vladimir stood by the dais upon which the altar and the
Nativity scene sat. Vladimir was staring down at the little figures there, holding a candle taken from a
wall-sconce for light. “See for yerself, Fat’ah.”
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By Yael R. Dragwyla
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With some trepidation, Mark came in and made his way up to the dais. He climbed up with some
difficulty, the winter’s cold having settled even more viciously into his aching bones and muscles.
Coming up to stand beside Vladimir, he looked down at the little Nativity scene.
The baby Jesus had disappeared. So had His Mother. At any rate, They were no longer where he
had put Them.
But the manger which had cradled the figurine of Jesus wasn’t empty. In fact, it was filled to
overflowing; occupied by a skinny, mangy female rat, covered with terrible burn-scars along her back
and flanks, her distorted jaws holding only a few rotten, snaggled teeth. A mangled-looking extra leg
dangled awkwardly from one side, between her forelegs and hind leg; it looked as if it had been crushed
and healed badly.
At the rat’s swollen udders nursed six perfectly healthy, perfectly formed rat pups. Even to the two
men, who had long been acquainted with rats as pests and scourges, the tiny little pups seemed beautiful
in their perfection.
The mother rat, emaciated and exhausted and ill-used as she was, wore an expression of pure bliss.
The light from Vladimir’s candle fell on the mother rat and her pups like a halo. A shiver went up
Mark’s spine, something he hadn’t experienced since the first time he had performed the Mass: a sense of
Presence, of something huge and terrible and wonderful, a Love so great it left no room for anything so
small as joy or hope, no farther away than his own heartbeat.
“Her babies – they’re perfect,” he breathed, unable to speak above a whisper, so stunned and awed
was he by the little miracle there before him in the hay of the tiny manger.
“Yeah, t’ey are – an’ t’at’s weird. You’d t’ink t’e way t’e –”
“Hey, Dad! Father Mark! Come quick! She’s just gone into labor!”
The two men whirled around to see Jimmy standing in the doorway of the church. He was panting,
as if he’d run all the way from the rectory, and his handsome face was haunted by apprehension. “Come
an, the puri bibi, uh, the Sister’s alone there with her and doesn’t know what to do!”
“Oh, cara Duvel – come on, Fat’ah, let’s go!”
The old man moved like a streak for the rectory. For all his ailing body, Mark wasn’t far behind.

*****

Several hours later, after the night was over, the first of Rose’s twins, a hefty boy, met the light of
day and the open air, followed soon after by his sister. Right after each was born, Vladimir laid the baby
on Rose’s belly. Not until the afterbirths were completely expelled, more than half an hour after the little
girl was born, did he cut the umbilical cords.
Sister Barbara, who had been a surprisingly great help because of her miraculously remembered
nursing skills and experience, had finally been gently but firmly guided to bed by Mark; she had worked
herself to the point of exhaustion, and desperately needed rest and sleep. Protesting unhappily all the
way, she had given in with great reluctance only after Mark had promised to get her up In a few hours so
that she could see the babies again. Mark sensed a great happiness in her; the birth of the two children
had given her a Joy in life and, he believed, and fervently hoped, a will to live that already seemed to be
making a sharp, positive difference in her health and wits. Still better, Vladimir and his family had
decided to accept Mark’s invitation to stay, at least for a while; with the babies here, Sister Barbara
would experience a continuous renewal of that healing begun with the twins’ births this morning. Mark
felt more optimistic about both Sister Barbara’s and his own futures than he had in a long, long time.
While Rose lay exhausted but content, her babies nursing busily at her ample breasts, and Jimmy,
proud and fragile like most first-time fathers, sat by her bed, gazing down in awe and love at his newborn
children and wife, Vladimir took Mark aside.
“Hey,” he said when they were out of Rose’s hearing, “did you see –”
“I did,’ said Mark. “Two beautiful babies.”
“Yeah. T’ey’re perfect. – I don’t mean t’at like most grandparents. Oh, well, t’ere is t’at, yeah, but
what I mean is, t’ose two are t’e first babies I’ve seen at all in twen’y years wit’out one damn’ t’ing
wrong wit’ ’em.”
“Oh, dear Christ, maybe –’
“You t’ink so, too? Maybe it’s not t’e end? Maybe we’re gonna make it? I dunno – but t’at boy an’
t’at li’l girl are t’e two best Christmas presents anybody ever had.
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“Fat’ah, I – I hope this don’ sound, you know, silly,” said the old man, “but I, I wanna, I wanna like,
go back out t’ere to t’e church. I wanna like, you know, say t’anks.”
Something burned in the corners of Mark’s eyes. “I know. So do I, Vladimir, so do I.”
“Hey, Jimmy!”
“Yeah, Dad?” the young man said absently, gazing adoringly upon his wife and children.
“Jimmy – we wanna, the Fat’ah an’ I, we wanna go do somet’in’ for a couple minutes. Rosy’ll be
fine wit’ t’e babies until we get back, okay?”
“Sure, Dad – we’ll be okay,” said Jimmy, never looking away from Rose and the twins.
Vladimir and Mark went out to the church, slowly, each lost in his own thoughts. When they came
to the door of the church, both suddenly remembered the rats inside in the manger of the Nativity scene.
“Hey, wonder how our little fam’ly in here is doin’, what do you say, Fat’ah?”
“You know, if they’re still there, after being disturbed by us last night – well, I just remembered that
I put part of that sandwich I made for myself last night, out of the bread and cheese you brought, in my
pocket here, for later, and never did eat it. I’ll bet she could sure use it!” he said, grinning.
“Well, let’s go see.”
Before they could enter the church, however, they were startled by sudden, unexpected warmth and
light.
“What t’e – hey, Fat’ah, mi Duvel, will you look at t’at! T’e Sun’s comin’ out!”
Mark looked up. Stunned, he saw that the dark, heavy cloud-cover that had covered the sky for
twenty years, except for occasional, ephemeral rents, was breaking up, blowing away, disappearing. The
sky thus uncovered was a beautiful ultramarine, the clean, cold sky of a clear winter’s day – as such had
been before The Day. Nor did the sun, its nakedness uncovered by whatever meteorological miracle had
cleared the sky, seem particularly harsh; at least here, the ozone layer apparently had healed itself, once
more screening out the deadly ultra-violet band of the sunlight.
The two men, reluctant to leave the light and warmth of the sun, which neither had seen like this for
two decades, finally went into the church. Slowly they walked up the aisle to the altar.
Just as they came to the dais, the last remnants of cloud overhead broke up, and light poured in
through the stained-glass windows in the clerestory high above.
Light, ruby and emerald, sapphire and topaz and amethyst, poured liked liquid rainbows down onto
the mother rat and her six pups lying in the hay of the manger. The creatures lay In a pool of
multicolored light like a bath of liquid topaz.
“Hey, Fat’ah!” said Vladimir, his eyes dancing with mischief and awe combined. “I lied, you
know?”
“Huh? About what, Vladimir?”
“T’ose two back in at t’e house weren’t t’e first healt’y babies I’d seen since . . . It.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Here’s six more of ‘em. – Hey, Fat’ah, where’s t’at san’wich? T’is li’l lady here could sure
use it.”
Mark fished out the battered cheese sandwich, as well as some candy he had serendipitously put in
there earlier and forgotten until now. “Oh, my, isn’t that nice? Rats like candy better than cheese, I
remember. Let’s give it all to her.”
Vladimir held out his hand for the food, and Mark gave it to him. Vladimir then offered it to the
famished mother rat, who didn’t seem at all afraid of him. She had awakened when the two men first
came into the church. Now she sniffed at the food, making sure it was nothing bad. All at once she
made up her mind, and wolfed it all down in a few famished bites.
Then, still showing no fear of the two men, ignoring them both, she began grooming and cleaning
her babies.
“I wonder what became of Virgin Wary and the Christ Child?” mused Mark.
“If you don’t mind my sayin’ so, Fat’ah, t’ey’re right here.”
“Hunh?”
“All seven of ‘em . . .”
Suddenly, as if his heart were about to burst with the joy that filled it and he had to do something
with it or die, the old man began singing “Old Hundred”:

“Praise God from Whom all blessings flow, /

“Praise God all creatures here below . . .”
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By Yael R. Dragwyla
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Joyously Mark banished to the dungeons of his unconscious mind the knowledge that the hymn
rightfully belonged to the Anglicans. Feeling happier than he had in twenty years, he threw his arm
around the old pagan’s shoulders, and joined him in singing the hymn.
Vladimir in turn slipped his arm around Mark’s slight, stooped back. Together the two men sang:

“. . . Praise Him above, ye heav’nly host, /

“Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
“Aaa-men!”

Together, in the light and warmth of the new day, they stood by the manger, looking down at the life
it cradled. Mark, giving in at last to the volcanic emotions that threatened to burst his chest and throat
after endless, soul-killing years, broke into raw, racking weeping that clawed at his heart with talons hot
as the Sun beating down in April on frozen rivers. Beside him, Vladimir’s tall, straight, hard body
trembled like a leaf in a spring gale with wracking sobs. Out in the world, a storm of light beat down and
blew away the last remnants of the world’s darkness. The little mother rat in the hay gazed in vast
contentment upon the babies who lay upon her breast, enhaloed with the same rainbow light that poured
over the body of the crucified Christ above the altar – and somehow, in spite of the torture which the
Cross inflicted upon His poor, wracked body, His beautiful face seemed no longer to show the Agony
once carved into it by His ordeal high on an evil hill above Jerusalem, faithfully reflected in His icon by
the artist who had rendered Him there in wood and paint. Instead, Mark saw with a start even through his
tears, His expression contained only a deep and abiding peace.