The Money Tree, Eve Vang [read this if .txt] 📗

The Money Tree

By Eve Vang

Catching a snowflake on to your palm, you can see the intricacies of the design. Almost like a star, it bends into itself and outward again. It seeks nothing but a flurry of its own mirrored image, flattened in ice form. Though beautiful, the concept of a snowflake is almost a confused mess. Its jagged edges in every direction, with not one the same. All together, when it falls, the soft blanket it creates on branches in the streets hide life in hibernation.

Though it is tempting to want to walk on the cloud of newly fallen snow, Mag could remember slipping on the ice beneath, one too many times.

This year, was another year of family gatherings over a small Christmas tree. Though, they could invest in a larger tree, they put the little one out once again. Whether it was a habit, like her grandmother’s neurotic method of stirring condensed milk into her Chinese porcelain teacup trimmed with gold during the cold months –she would spin the spoon and listen to the tink, tink, tink of the metal against the porcelain somehow pacifying her moods –or it was a reluctance to find something new.

The tiny mismatched ornaments hung on the artificial branches like family photos on a mantle in other people’s homes – theirs were old mementos on a tree. But year after year, no one was able to put the memories away nor invest in new ones.

Her sister’s fifth grade craft, a tiny wooden bear, painted creamy yellow, with a nose painted off-point to the side of its face. Its large black eyes, though soft could pierce through your heart with the things it’s seen over the years.

“This year was a tough year,” her mom would say, repeated assuredly every Christmas after they’d open presents.

But they’d laugh it away anyway as if the laughter could heal and create a centripetal force to rewind the bad in a teacup back to the good.

Parkas, waiting in line in a church parking lot, she remembered. That was the Christmas Eve her parents were going to pick up gifts at Toys for Tots to wrap before morning. From a distance, you could see a line of evenly sizable silhouettes distributed in single file with a dip, where four small heads bobbed, and back to the line up of adult shadows against the building wall.

Christmas Day, Grandmother sat on her couch, her face contorted from licking her lips nervously, forcing her bottom lip to pout permanently now. Her fingers intertwining, locking and unlocking, as if mulling over something she wasn’t able to convey. Like an obstacle course, red wrapping paper with Minnie and Mickey Mouse shone in the early sun along with stationary boxes dotted with green, gold, and silver stars from the Dollar Tree, laid in jumbles of clutter around the den. Tong climbed over the piles to grandmother. She stared at him trying to remember her youngest grandson, but her eyes remained a deep blank. What beset her left her almost blinded.

Brunch followed, a meal of leftovers from Christmas Eve dinner, consisting of sticky rice the color of lavender, egg rolls broken into halves, soggy egg salad, young bamboo stir fry, pepper sauce and chicken wings. Grandmother sat in her favorite spot; she could still remember that.

“Ah, we forgot one more gift.”

On the table sat a lively green plant tied in red tinsel. Its leaves widened in the torso and eclipsed smoothly at the ends. Brought in from the winter cold, it lifted towards the sun photosynthesizing from the den, illuminating the house – a lucky money tree, the table centerpiece.

In the other room, the hopelessly diminutive Christmas tree remained.

Publication Date: 02-11-2019

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