{"id":1825,"date":"2021-11-11T13:07:38","date_gmt":"2021-11-11T13:07:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1825"},"modified":"2021-11-11T13:07:42","modified_gmt":"2021-11-11T13:07:42","slug":"icicle-music-by-michael-bishop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1825","title":{"rendered":"Icicle Music by Michael Bishop"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Icicle Music<\/em><\/strong> by Michael Bishop (F&SF<\/em>, November 1989) starts with a twelve-year-old called Danny getting up early on the Xmas morning of 1957. When he goes downstairs he finds that his (single) mother has scrimped and saved to find the money to buy him a shotgun. As he loads the gun and plays with it, Danny hears what he thinks may be a burglar coming down the chimney; eventually, a grungy looking man in a heavy red coat and khaki trousers appears.
Danny challenges the intruder and, after ducking an ornament thrown at him, shoots. His mother hears the altercation and comes downstairs, taking the shotgun from Danny and reloading. But by the time she is ready to shoot, the man is almost at the top of the chimney\u2014so she goes outside to get a clear shot:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unless [Danny] was imagining things, there was a deer on their roof, a buck with twelve to fifteen points. The guy who\u2019d tried to steal their Christmas was mounting the jumpy creature. He encouraged it\u2014\u201cUp, Blitzen, up!\u201d\u2014to fly him to safety over both the riverside dump and the rooftops of their sleeping town.
\u201cStop!\u201d Mom shouted. \u201cStop or I\u2019ll shoot!\u201d She sounded just like a sheriff on a TV cowboy show.
\u201cNo, Milly!\u201d the man on the roof pleaded. \u201cDon\u2019t!\u201d
\u201cClifton?\u201d Mom murmured. Then, louder: \u201cClifton?\u201d
The compact little buck (a courser, Danny thought, like in \u201cThe Night Before Christmas,\u201d which Mrs. French had read them on the day before their holidays) soared up from the house. It lifted like a dream creature, pawing the night air and defining both itself and its desperate, neck-clutching rider against a blowing purple scrim of stars. All Danny could do was marvel. There should have been seven other reindeer (if the words of that silly poem counted for anything), but one was about all Danny could handle.
The deer\u2014the courser\u2014drew an invisible circle over their backyard. Mom and he looked up to see its glinting hooves and white belly. Then the thief sprawled across the deer took a shiny ball from the pocket of his coat and nearly unseated himself sidearming it with all his wounded strength at Mom and him.
\u201cHere\u2019s something for you, Milly!\u201d And the stolen ornament\u2014a second one, Danny realized\u2014shattered on Mom\u2019s forehead.
\u201cOuch!\u201d
\u201cMerry Christmas to both you and the brat, bitch! And to all a good ni\u2014\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Danny\u2019s mother shoots, and (spoiler) the man falls off. The reindeer then crash-lands into a barbed wire fence. Both die. The mother subsequently takes her ex-husband\u2019s body to the dump and burns it, while Danny butchers the reindeer for meat.
After this captivatingly bizarre start the story leaps forward thirty years, and we find Daniel in hospital. He has just finished telling a man called Philip about the incident, and goes on to tell him about what happened on the tenth anniversary of the altercation in 1967, when he was camping alone in the wilds: Danny was visited by the ghost of his father, and his sleeping bag and tent disappeared (presumably his father\u2019s doing) while he was following the apparition. He almost died from exposure.
Danny then recounts what happened on the twentieth anniversary in 1977, when his father\u2019s ghost came and took the soul of his terminally ill mother.
After listening to all this, Philip gets up to leave. He kisses Danny on the forehead, and notes that it is the thirtieth anniversary that day. Daniel then asks Philip to get Gary to visit him, but Philip has to remind Danny that Gary is \u201cgone\u201d (there are hints in the latter section that Danny is gay, and presumably in hospital with AIDS). Philip leaves.
The story ends with this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside Daniel\u2019s window, faint icicle music. The glassblower\u2019s panpipe hanging from the cornice had begun to melt, releasing long-pent melodies.
\u201cCome on,\u201d Daniel murmured. \u201cCome on.\u201d
He couldn\u2019t wait. He wanted his father\u2019s bitter ghost to get a move on. If it materialized in the room and stole his soul, that would be a welcome violation: a theft and a benediction, the first Christmas present his daddy had given him in over thirty years.
Come quickly, Father. Come.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This is an odd and very dark Xmas story but it works, and I suspect it\u2019ll stay in reader\u2019s heads for some time.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,400 words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Icicle Music by Michael Bishop (F&SF, November 1989) starts with a twelve-year-old called Danny getting up early on the Xmas morning of 1957. When he goes downstairs he finds that his (single) mother has scrimped and saved to find the money to buy him a shotgun. As he loads the gun and plays with it, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[472],"tags":[442,217,25,470,444,12,471],"class_list":["post-1825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-michael-bishop","tag-442","tag-3-5","tag-fsf","tag-michael-bishop","tag-santa-claus","tag-short-story","tag-spirits-of-christmas"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1825"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1841,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1825\/revisions\/1841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}