Home for the Holidays

My brother was cutting away at white construction paper with a pair of scissors too big for his hands. My parents never bought the sharpened plastic scissors that kindergarten teachers often require. “As long as you don’t run with them”, they would tell him.
He interrupted his work to look up at me with a closed mouth smile. I rarely saw kids his age with glasses, but they sat atop his nose like they had always been there, right out of the womb. The white products in front of him were supposed to be water crystal formations, as unique as his DNA. Instead, my brother had repeated a pattern for all the paper snowflakes we were going to hang on our windows. I rubbed his shaggy head with the knuckles on my fist and took a new batch to hang on our frosted windows.
Looking out of my winter retreat, my parent’s home in Florida, I saw nothing but dead grass and dirt, which even the fake snow encrusted on the panes could not hide. The snow smelled like burned Styrofoam cups or gasoline if gasoline was a convenience store sugar treat.
I hung the snowflakes with Scotch tape, tacking them onto the white windows of our red brick house. At night, when the lights outside that hung down like electric icicles, you couldn’t see the paper snowflakes, but I know they were there.
I wanted to go outside and breathe out smoke, but I couldn’t as long as my parents were around. They didn’t know I enjoyed an occasional cigarette, or that I loved winter because the water vapor in my exhale and the grey in my lungs commingle to form dragon’s breath. Even as a kid, walking to the bus stop on Laurel Lane, I would pretend to smoke a cigarette, amused by the plumes that would escape my tiny mouth. I felt older than my peers, who stuck chalk candy sticks into their mouths and pretended to exhale what their parents would never condone. I knew none of their parents smoked. Only my dad did, because my dad had to. What else would you do when driving a semi-truck for twelve hours a day? The Winston eagle on my dad’s pack was so familiar to me, even after he quit driving his truck, and stopped smoking a pack a day.
I would have to drive my car around the neighborhood, or pretend to get a chicken quesadilla and an order of nachos from Taco Bell, in order to smoke. My dad’s nose was strong, though. His olfactory once had a race with a bloodhound’s and won- how else could he always know? I would walk up to my dad, shorter than myself, and give him a big hug. He would always say the same thing to me, “you smell like cigarette.” My Filipino father and many other first-generation immigrants rarely used the plural, so I imagined the aroma to be a name brand fragrance. The newest scent by Calvin Klein: Cigarette. They already advertised in movies and television, so why not step it up and make a fragrance. Phillip Morris could be on par with Jessica Simpson, or any other trashy pop singer, and release an unoriginal scent for young girls and ignorant parents to scoop up during the holidays.
It was approaching late afternoon, and the sun was starting to go down. This time three months ago, before we fell back to save daylight, before Benjamin Franklin influenced our times yet again, it would have been bright. Brighter than Washington D.C., where it got dark too early and was cold year round from the hearts of the politicians. My brother used the approaching dusk as a reason to get an early present. “Christmas is only like, 7 hours away”, he would beg. “Please, just one”, he would bargain. He always picked the biggest present, a trick he learned from his older brother. If the biggest isn’t the best, then why bother?
I was jaunted from my thoughts by a red wrapped package landing on my lap. My father had tossed me a gift, too. This one definitely wasn’t the biggest of them all, so I assumed the worst. I told him I would open it later, that I didn’t need to open it now. I was in college after all- I could wait. I would wait. So I put the box in my room, on top of my dresser, to open later. Maybe I could open it later, when I wanted to go outside and play in the cocaine rain, the only white Christmas I can imagine in Florida.
Several hours were burned away watching re-runs of classic Christmas movies. My phone lay next to me, as dead as the grass outside my windows. No movements, noises, or signs of life came from the small, black accessory. I needed something to do, something to occupy myself with. Christmas was still three hours away, and my boredom only just began to seep in. There wasn’t even any beer in the fridge. My father liked to drink hard alcohol on holidays. Crown Royal was his favorite, and the whiskey kept his belly warm even though we didn’t have a fireplace.
I saw the red package on top of my dresser again. It looked like a book, so maybe it was a book. I rarely read anymore, not out of pleasure at least. I couldn’t imagine what kind of book my father would get me, as the only books he ever read were written by poker professionals. I pulled off the ribbon, and undid the Scotch tape that held the Christmas skin on. When I was done with the present, there was a neat pile of paper next to it. After years of scrap paper hurricanes at present time, and the wails and yells from my parents, I learned to unwrap presents with the grace of a hungry, poor child. I would slowly peel back what I was looking for, careful not to appear too excited or anxious. There was nothing but a plain brown box inside, thin cardboard that you couldn’t even ship with. I was disappointed there was no book, as if I would read it, but pressed on.
I pried open the book sized box less gracefully, missing a piece of tape entirely and ripping an entire flap off. I pulled out a plastic sleeve, and tried to see what was wrapped inside the thin layer of tissue and bubble wrap. It was a metallic box inside a box. I flicked the top of the silver box open and tried to ignite the wick with a spark of flint. It was a new Zippo lighter, fluidless and dry- as dead as my lawn. My father knew all along.