Dragon's First Christmas by Emily Martha Sorensen

Author:Emily Martha Sorensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emily Martha Sorensen
Published: 2018-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7: Choleric

Bad tempers abounded the next morning. Though it was Christmas Eve, neither Rose nor Henry made any effort to speak to each other. Rose spent most of the morning with her textbook, while Henry spent most of it absorbed in the small book where he kept an account of their finances. For some reason, he kept looking up and staring at Virgil quite often before going back to his pencil scribbling.

Virgil spent most of the morning rolling around on the carpet, sometimes clawing at the brown, dried needles that had fallen from the tree. At one point, one flipped into his open mouth, and Virgil’s expressionless face somehow gave the impression of disgust and betrayal.

That was not-food! Why was not-food in his mouth? He didn’t like it!

Rose and Henry both started to stand up, noticed the other standing, hesitated, and then Rose sat down and Henry got up to remove the foliage from their child’s mouth.

They alternated feeding Virgil without discussion, this being an ingrained habit. They did run out of chicken by lunchtime, which Rose discovered when she got up to take her turn, so she cracked raw eggs into a pat of butter and fed that to Virgil, which he seemed very disgruntled about.

This was not-food! No, that was food. That was not-food! No, that was food. That was not-food! Virgil wanted his food!

Henry looked silently triumphant.

Rose tried to ignore this.

The phone rang several times, causing them to jump from their seats, but it was always the wrong sequence: one long ring and two short ones, three long ones, and one short ring and two long ones. That meant the phone was for another household. Rose hoped that none of these conversations lasted long enough that the call they were waiting for failed to come through, but given the frequency of the ringing, it seemed likely that the conversations were all of short duration.

At last the correct ring came, two short and one long, and Rose leapt from her seat to answer it.

“Hello?” she asked, hoping that it was her mother. Her family had agreed to call as soon as they felt Christmas dinner was only an hour away. It was barely two minutes past two, and Rose’s mother had estimated dinner would start at four o’clock, so Rose would be overjoyed to leave this tense atmosphere to walk there early.

“Hello, Rose,” her father’s voice said on the other end of the phone. “Your mother says the chicken’s ready, so if you want to come over early, you can. Your sisters are insisting they want to string popcorn, and your mother wants to go caroling as soon as we’re done with dinner. You planning to come along?”

“That sounds delightful,” Rose said. She did not consult with Henry. If he did not want to go, she would simply leave him behind at her parents’ home.

“It looks like snow,” her father added, “so you might want to wear your warmest coats.”

“Understood,” Rose said. “We will be over as soon as possible.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.