On the first day of Christmas, the two young souls made snow angels. I watched the boy rush out of his parents’ house, shrieking his companion’s name eagerly as she peeked out her door and gingerly placed a foot outside, testing the air. He had no restraint, diving into the fresh snow as if it were a mountain of cotton candy and giggling gleefully as he extended his arms to make an angel that was somehow twice his size. Against her better judgment, the girl scampered out to join him, her pigtails bouncing against her jacket as she struggled to keep track of her brand new corduroy mittens and layered scarves and her hat with a pink ball of string on top. They laid in the snow together, naming the stars and catching snowflakes on their tongues until the bell tolled in the distance, signaling that it was time for them to return to the warmth and light of the indoors.

On the second day of Christmas, music flooded the town square. The two souls had moved beyond snow angels now. Instead, they mused through the Christmas market. They splashed through puddles of melted snow, laughing at jokes the other made that were only half funny, critiquing the local art they had not time nor the money to buy, or perhaps on that night they did have all the time in the world. They chattered about their parents and teachers and friends and enemies, getting drunk off the cider and hot cocoa. She reached for his hand, and they began the trek home, unaware of the snow that covered each new footprint within seconds and the bell that rang out crisp and clear behind them.

On the third day of Christmas, the streets were lit up like a circus and the market was bustling but something was not the same. The music played but someone had decided the classical station had been used one too many years in a row. The boy and the girl had increased the size of their cohort substantially since the last time I had taken notice of them. The group jostled around and complained about the old couples taking up all the benches in the square and how the cider stand had already closed for the night and how the market was so bland and dreary this year. They huddled together to warm themselves around a small fire that soon fizzled out. The boy was irritated with the girl- they had all wanted to go to the theatre, but she had insisted on walking home before the snow became worse. She worried often about those sorts of things, and the boy could never understand why. She tried to say something to him, but he seemed busy with the others in the group. He was usually busy. She knew that he was too busy to hear her. The bell drowned out even her silence.

On the fourth day of Christmas, it came to be that time of year when the younger folks who had gone off to study were obliged to return home to help their parents with the monotonous duties of the season that made Christmas feel less like a holiday and more like the mess of consumerism and stress that the man on the television proclaimed it to be every year. The boy had drawn the short straw in a household full of old geezers and crying babies and parents too tired care, so he was tasked with the shoveling. He cursed as his cheap shovel barely scraped the surface of the buildup of ice in the driveway and his hands felt the frigidness of the snow he had once adored. When he saw her, she carried a large brown sack stuffed to the brim with groceries, and her hair cascaded in braids just a pinch more refined than the pigtails he vaguely remembered. He had not heard from her much- she had either gone off to Brown or Syracuse or maybe she had stayed local, he wasn’t entirely sure. He thought of saying something to her. The bell rang several times. He made up his mind that he would call out after the final chime, but no words came out of his mouth. As he watched her door creak shut, he could only think of snow angels.

On the fifth day of Christmas, a man and a woman stood hand in hand in the square. The rest of the town had gone to bed. I was confused. These weren’t the same two souls who had made the snow angels. They smiled and laughed and talked and did everything they should have but it wasn’t right. The girl’s eyes sparkled at the sight of a tiny stone in the palm of his hand, but they didn’t sparkle as before. Not as if they held the whole sky, not as if there were no conceivable laws in the universe that guaranteed the passage of every second, which meant that every moment suspended in the air was for her to make what she ought of it. Not in the way that made me look every new Christmas day for a sign of them together only to be met with the same old ringing of the bell. No, not in that way, I was sure of it. 500 miles away, a man sat on a Manhattan bench smoking a cigar. There was a picture in his wallet, of what I couldn’t say for sure. There were no bells in Manhattan.

On the sixth day of Christmas, the smell of freshly baked bread enveloped the gathering space at St. Anne’s as prisms of pink light flooded through the old stain glass windows. The woman hastily applied lipstick onto her cracked lips as her children ran in circles around her, pulling at each other’s hair. Frank was on the phone and they were 20 minutes late for church. They were so late that she hadn’t even heard the bell. There was a smudge of chocolate on Betty’s cheek and they hadn’t had time to fix the top button on Martin’s dress shirt. Things like this seemed to happen every Sunday but today it was worse. The woman was so flustered that when she ran straight into him, she barely comprehended who exactly was the object of her blunders. She instead spewed out a litany of the usual apologies and groped blindly for her children until she glanced up and got a look at him. He had aged but was still the same. He wore a clean suit, and there was a tall, dark woman standing next to him. She thought to herself that this woman had most likely never worn pigtails. She scooped her children up and hurried into the Church before either of them could speak.

On the seventh day of Christmas, a swath of busy bodies gathered around the counter as the children stuck gumdrops on gingerbread houses for a time before growing bored and turning on White Christmas. Or perhaps it was Jingle All the Way, or it may not have been a Christmas film at all. I couldn’t quite tell from the window. One of the men poked his brother’s arm and asked who the new neighbors were, smacking his lips as he questioned why anyone who was at least half in their right mind would choose this time of year to pick up and move. His brother took a minimum interest in the question and droned to his wife that some people had just moved in and Bill wanted to know what their deal was and was it some rich fellow buying his parents place or what, surely she knew, she knew the people in the town and what went on. His wife stood by the window, stirring her drink. She mumbled yes dear she knew and yes Bill the situation was rather odd and yes it was some rich fellow, but her mind was really somewhere else. Something deep stirred within her as she watched the man stepping out of the red pick-up, laughing as his children made funny faces at him from the back seat. As her own children drew funny faces on gingerbread men, she thought of how nice it would be to sleep and dream of hot cider and lights and the sound of the bell and snow angels.

On the eighth day of Christmas, the man breathed in and out. He had never spent Christmas in the ER. His mother had gotten sick but he told Doris not to worry or cancel plans. She had taken the kids down to Napa to see their cousins. Apparently, it hadn’t snowed there. The doctors had seen his mother, and they assured him she would be alright. He wasn’t sure. Last time he heard a doctor say that his uncle ended up needing a hip replacement. Hips just give out sometimes, he guessed. He had checked her in four days ago but he was still there, listening to messages from work and family and whoever else as they pinged into existence on his device. The nurses came out occasionally and asked if he needed anything to drink. He had refused all of them and was about to tell the next nurse who came out to really not bother with the drink until he looked up to see her and faltered. He was briefly brought back to a time when the only thing that mattered in his life was the blue of her eyes against the white of the snow. She opened her mouth to say something but the doctor had stepped out hurriedly, somewhat awkwardly, from behind her. His lips moved but the man didn’t hear a thing. He felt as though he would never hear anything again. Not the woman quietly slipping back to the room with the other nurses, not his mother’s laugh or her words, not even the sound she had loved the most, that cursed beautiful bell.

On the ninth day of Christmas, he had constructed a beautiful display of Christmas lights on his front lawn. He thought perhaps his mother would have liked the snowmen the best. He held his daughter up to do the honors of flicking the switch that would set the whole menagerie ablaze as he wondered when the bell would chime. However, it wasn’t the chime he heard but instead the clang of many pattering feet as four large black labs sprinted down the sidewalk, loping through the snowbanks and clumsily bumping into the manger scene that held the whole apparatus of lights together. He watched as the entire configuration of art collapsed like dominoes, each light coming down and fizzling out until nothing was left but silence. The woman’s mouth gaped open as her dogs sprinted to sit quietly at her door. He stared at her, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did, so he took his daughter’s hand and went inside.

On the tenth day of Christmas, both homes were empty. The snow had yet to come this winter out of some anomaly. One family was spending the holiday in the tropics. The other was making the long and arduous road trip down south. No one was there to notice the lone rider on the skateboard who flicked her cigarette carelessly onto the patch of grass between the two homes. I implored her to stop and turn around as the flames licked higher and higher until it seemed as though they had reached the height of the bell sitting up in its tower. She didn’t hear. I supposed she was a lot like the boy. Or perhaps the girl. As the flames surged into the homes, I wondered if she too had at one point made snow angels.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, the two strangers looked like snow angels. Their arms spread wide, they yelled aloud to each other about what had happened and how could you let this happen and how it had happened and what had really happened underneath all of it. The years dragged on for them but for me they were just twelve days in which I watched and wept and wondered at how love had come to die in the town even before the moment it was lost in the flames. I wondered who people were anymore. I wanted to believe I had been watching the same two souls, but how could I be certain of even that? I felt as if I knew everybody in the town and had seen them and they had heard me but hadn’t really listened. I wished that there was something I could have done, but I am only a bell, tolling out the endless marches of time, signaling every new beginning, every chilling end and the finality of it all. There should have been someone to guide them. There were plenty of souls down there. Someone should have helped them. In the darkness, I wasn’t sure anyone would. I rung out, imploring them to remember the snow angels. I still ring out every single day and louder still on every day of Christmas. Some Christmases I think people can still hear. Others, such as this one, there is no snow on the ground.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, I saw two souls in the town. And if I didn’t know any better, I’d say they were on their way to make snow angels.