Note: I made a list of prompts, and wrote a bite-sized story for each one. They don’t live in the same universe, but they’re all a little off-kilter from what you might expect from holiday fare. And if you pay attention, you’ll notice that the last line of each story becomes the first line of the next. Also? You can listen to these stories at my podcast website: BathtubMermaid.com.
A single snowflake landed on her sleeve, perfect and bright, and she watched it melt without looking away.
Jean—called Grandma Love by strangers more often than family—felt that familiar tilt in the air. The almost-midnight tilt. Midnight wasn’t a time so much as a mood, a soft doorway between one thing and the next. She’d always been good with doorways.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
She identified the caller without looking.
Lila.
Of course.
Jean answered. “Honey, before you yell—”
“I’m not yelling,” Lila said, very clearly yelling. “We’re leaving for midnight Mass in twenty minutes. You promised you’d show up on time this year.”
“Oh, I’ll be on time,” Jean said. “Just… not the kind of time you’re thinking of.”
“Mom.”
“I’m coming. Eventually. Probably.”
“Mom!”
But Jean had already hung up, turned the key in the ignition, and waited for the van to decide whether it felt like running. It did, but only after coughing twice and flashing the check-engine light in Morse code. The dashboard—held together with duct tape, crocheted cozies, and an actual rock she claimed was a grounding crystal—glimmered faintly.
Then came the tug.
That unmistakable tug.
She sighed. “Alright, midnight. I hear you.”
She turned the opposite direction from the church without even pretending to fight it.
Two blocks later, she found three small children standing around a busted sled that appeared to have lost a duel with a mailbox. One looked up at her with wide, hopeful eyes.
“You’re not her, are you?” he asked. “The weird van lady my cousin saw last year?”
Jean tipped her head. “Well, I definitely drive a weird van.”
“She helped fix his skateboard by shaking it,” the girl added. “He says she smelled like incense and peppermint Schnapps.”
“That sounds like a woman with taste,” Jean said.
They stared at her.
She sighed. “Alright, hand me the sled.”
With a practiced flick of her wrist, she retrieved a bungee cord from the van—bungee cords were to her what duct tape was to the rest of the universe—and began binding the sled back together. The children watched in awe as the sled slowly, improbably, reassembled into something sled-like again.
“You’re magic,” the smallest one whispered.
“I prefer ‘resourceful,’” Jean said, patting the repaired sled. “Magic comes with paperwork.”
She made it exactly one block before spotting a teenager slumped under a streetlight, sparkly combat boots kicking the snow. The girl didn’t notice Jean until the van window slid down with a groan.
“You look like someone who needs Grandma Love,” Jean said.
“Oh my God,” the teenager breathed. “My babysitter told me you were real.”
“I’m neither confirmed nor denied,” Jean said. “Why the tears?”
The girl confessed a tale of a best friend, a boy, and a betrayal so dramatic it could only have happened before one’s frontal lobe fully developed. Jean reached into her coat and pulled out a tangled friendship bracelet she must have made during an episode of cosmic absentmindedness.
“Give her this,” Jean said. “Tell her you’re sorry. Or don’t. Apologies are tricky. But hand her this, and she’ll know where your heart was supposed to be.”
The girl clutched it like treasure. “Are you really Grandma Love?”
“Tonight I am.”
The girl hugged her through the van window and ran off with renewed purpose.
The tug grew stronger—insistent, almost impatient. Midnight wasn’t far now.
She found Amelia on a porch halfway down a quiet street, knees tucked to her chest, snow gathering on her boots. The girl looked up when Jean sat beside her.
“Cold night for sitting alone,” Jean murmured.
Amelia told her everything—about her mother’s anger, about the burnt casserole disaster, about the unfairness of being a child with opinions.
Jean nodded like someone who had once been an opinionated child with a casserole problem. She wrapped Amelia in a length of sunset-orange knitting—bright, soft, and absolutely unfinished, like most things in her van—and together they talked until Amelia’s breath steadied.
Jean walked her to the door, waited until the porch light glowed warm instead of flickering, and hugged her once more for good measure.
Midnight’s tug eased.
Her van sighed happily when she climbed back in.
By the time she reached the church, the first verses of “O Holy Night” were already drifting out into the snow. She slipped in through the side door, earned precisely three raised eyebrows from ushers who recognized her only as That Woman With The Van, and made her way down the side aisle.
Roz spotted her instantly—children always did—and tugged her into the pew with a whisper-shout of triumph.
“GRANDMA LOVE! You made it!”
“I always make it,” Jean whispered back. “Just at the very last possible moment.”
The lights were dimmed and candles passed out to the congregation. Jean and her family sang together, Roz’s small hand warm in hers, candles flickering like tiny stars blessing every breath of “Silent Night.”
For one brief moment, the church felt like the center of the universe—quiet, glowing, exactly balanced between one day and the next.
Midnight settled. The tug faded.
Jean brushed a bit of candle wax from her sleeve, content.
And they think she’s never on time.