✅ The Nice List

Midwinter Feast

This chapter is dedicated to Db, with many thanks for supporting me again!

Once they got to the kitchen, Tarja had to help Merri up onto her chair. The gesture came so naturally that she didn't think about it until a moment later, when she was opening the fridge and trying to decide what to do next. Merri was as tall as she ever had been, surely. The two women were only a couple of inches apart in height, and Tarja knew that they were around the same age; sympathising with each other as they dreaded the approach of the big three-zero, and regretted how little they had done with their lives. And yet... treating her like a child came naturally. Like a kid who wasn't big enough to reach the table on her own, even. And from Merri's grin, it sounded like it felt natural for her as well.

What would a small child want for lunch on Christmas day? It wasn't like there were many options. They had decided weeks before that they weren't going to brave the supermarket crowds in the next few days, so they had decided exactly what they were going to eat each day, and the fridge was stuffed full with everything they could possibly need. Merri had been the one to make the final decisions about what went where; carefully arranging it so that the things they wouldn't need until tomorrow were placed behind everything that would be important for today's meals.

Lunch was going to be simple, making it easy to cook later. As much as Merri didn't care about Christmas, she saw it as a perfect excuse to do a proper roast; and the fancy meal she had insisted on would take both of them the whole afternoon to prepare, leaving a whole week of leftovers. Before that busy day, they had planned a light lunch. Crackers and biscuits, as many as they could want, and then a cheeseboard and a deli board in the middle of the table. Effort required: zero.

But as she looked at the tupperware box containing cheese, salad, deli meats, and two different types of pâté, she realised that she would never even have considered letting a small child put her own lunch together. It just wasn't appropriate. But there didn't seem to be any other options, so she shrugged and decided to see what happened. She lifted out the tub of stuff, and quickly unwrapped a dozen little pieces of foil, decanting their contents onto two glass plates. She set them down in the middle of the table, and then took the box of biscuits and crackers that Merri had selected from the top of the cupboard. Many of them were individually packaged, and she was sure that they were meant to open them as needed. But she could imagine a little kid struggling with the packages, so she took a sharp kitchen knife from the drawer and slit down the side of each packet before emptying all the crackers into a couple of large bowls.

"I'm sorry, sweetie," she said when she sat down opposite Merri at the kitchen table. "This is all we've got for lunch. It's probably not very good for your cute little spoon. You might have to build some of your lunch yourself. Do you think you can do that?"

Merri grinned with excitement, and grabbed a handful of biscuits before dropping them into her bowl. Of course, if she imagined herself as the director of a construction crew, with cutlery that was supposed to look like vehicles, the idea of building a meal was sure to get her excited. Just like a real little kid.

There wasn't much call for a spoon when eating cheese and crackers, but Merri made do. She backed her truck-fork down the ramp into her bowl, and then used her fork truck to push a cracker onto it. Then it would move over onto the other little ramp, and she could put on a little handful of cheese and use the bulldozer to smooth it down. She probably ended up with more food on the table than in her mouth, but she seemed to be enjoying the experience, so Tarja didn't see a reason to interrupt.

Once she was sure that the child was okay, Tarja could focus on her own crackers. She assembled and ate them one handed, while the other held a slip of paper that had come with her first gift of the day. The diapers, it turned out, came with a free gift, which had immediately caused the word 'giftception' to come to Tarja's mind. It was a nice word, and she resolved to find some excuse to say it later in the day. But now she was trying to figure out what the added extra was. The instructions said that it was designed to help a little one really feel like a child at christmas; and that it was magical. She had investigated the occult and mysterious enough in her life that she felt she had a fairly good idea of what the mystical felt like; and a free gift in a commercial product wasn't it. Presumably something else, then, just using magic as a marketing point for children in the same way as any number of 'magic' colour changing rings and dolls with growing hair. Not that it would be any less awesome for that; Tarja just wanted to be sure that she knew what she was playing with.