And So This Was Christmas....

For those who started reading this short piece of fiction on Christmas Day, and wondered what the hell happened to the rest of it, I've given it a much needed polish and added what feels like a much better ending.

Hope you enjoy it.


Note To Self : When binge-writing and 'binge-drinking' on Christmas Eve, remember to press the 'Publish' button and not 'Save Draft' button if you want people to actually be able to read the story, you idiot!

A Christmas Story

Short Fiction by Darryl Mason

"Is he okay?"

He waited for her to answer.

He couldn't tell her what happened while she was away...

"He's not getting better, if that's what you mean."

How could he tell her, right now? She had more than enough on her mind already.

"I know your dad's not getting better. I meant...does he understand what you say to him? Can you talk to him?"

Down the hall, he could hear his son's sobbing quickly winding down as something in his bedroom grabbed his attention. When his mother had told their son she had to stay in Brisbane tonight, Christmas eve, he'd let out a little shriek, then a plume of tears. He didn't blame his son for crying, he knew he'd have burst into tears as well if he'd been told, at four years of age, that his mother wasn't going to be there when he woke up on Christmas Day.

"I talk to him," she said of her father, "but...he's off somewhere else. Most of the time, his face is just blank. Nobody home."

He struggled to catch all of what his wife was saying. Her old non-i mobile phone sounded like it was being shoved out of clear, crisp reception by 3-G, or 4G-3D, phones, or whatever the hell they were up to now. It was like he was trying to talk to her across a room, when there was a titanic hailstorm attacking the tin roof above. The static made it seem like wife was even further away than she was, where she sat next to her father, drifting out his last days in a nursing home that hummed steady silence and drifted with the tangy smells of death and shit. He knew she hated that place, and that she wanted to be home with him and her son on Christmas eve, wrapping presents.

But there were no presents to wrap.

"Are you still there?" she said, her voice grating with frustration. "Hello?"

"I'm here, the...line is shithouse, or the reception or whatever," he went to swallow, and couldn't it. His tongue, his mouth, throat, were dry, he needed water. Or bourbon. A decade ago, when he was 24, he would have dealt with the misery of the ruined day he had endured, and what would follow tonight, with three double Wild Turkeys and Coke, and then the rest of it straight from the bottle. But he didn't Do That Anymore. Even if he wanted to obliterate himself with bourbon tonight, he'd have to get in the car to go and get some. But the car went two weeks ago. The walk to the booze shop would take him fifteen minutes each way, through the sea of houses. If it was even open.

"I know where I'd rather be tonight..." she said, and he could feel her smile.

"I wish you were here, too."

"We've never been apart at Christmas, have we?"

"I don't think so...."

He could delay the inevitable confrontation with his wife until tomorrow afternoon, maybe even early evening, it would take her most of the day to drive back down the coast.

Or he could tell her now. Be honest, and tell her that he left everything to the last moment and that he had well and truly fucked up, that he'd been so absolutely sure there was another couple of hundred left on their final active credit card, but he'd been wrong.

He could tell her how it felt to stand there at the cashier's with a video game for his son in his hand and have his credit card rejected, twice, and to have someone there in the line behind him whisper, with disgust, "fucking loser," and to know that it was ultimately nobody's fault but his own.

He could tell her all that, but it would make her night even more miserable, worrying then not only about her father, and whether he would live to the New Year, but also about her son, who was now going to wake up in less than seven or eight hours to discover that Santa had left him no presents.

The ramataming splatter of static faded from their phones.

"No, we've never spent Christmas apart," she said, and he could see the memory movies he knew she was thinking about. "We even saw each other on a few Christmas days before we started going out. When you were still seeing...Sonja."

"You know I only went to all those parties with Sonja because I knew you were going to be there, looking wicked," he said. These were old lines, they both knew the routine and enjoyed it, when, once a year or so, they tossed these lines back at each other.

But it worked. His wife laughed, a real laugh, deep and loud. "How do you come up with such bullshit?"

"That's why you love me," he said. She'd needed to laugh, to get that release, and he'd done it. He'd made her feel better.

"It's not the only reason I love you, but it's in the top three."

How could he tell his wife that when their son woke up he was going to believe that Santa was a liar? And that he'd probably be waving the letter she'd written a month before, on Santa's Workshop letterhead, from the desk of Santa Claus himself, that promised the boy, if he behaved himself, the one present he most absolutely desired, as he'd told his father, "in this whole wide, world wide world."

It was a video game, for PC (a new Xbox was one third of a monthly mortgage payment they could never afford to miss), that put the player in command of the stars and moons of our galaxy. Before work finished for the year eight weeks ago, he'd watched a couple of previews of the game his son wanted from Santa on YouTube. The game had caught his imagination as well. One of the main gigs of the game was to move moons into the orbits of watery worlds to pull life out of the oceans, or to position a star into a rumble of asteroids and dead planets to make a new solar system, where life would eventually flourish if you could protect the planets from massive asteroid and comet strikes He wanted to play the game, too. And earlier today, when he'd been walking to the cashier's at the W, he'd imagined an afternoon of real joy and connection with his son as they played the game together on Christmas Day.

Tomorrow.

"Are you still there?"

"Yeah. Are you staying at the nursing home tonight?"

"I have to. The storm's gone crazy and the trains are out. I'm going to drag in a more comfortable chair from the day room when everyone's gone to bed. I think it's only me and nurses in this place who know it's actually Christmas Eve..."

"That's really sad. They don't even know it's Christmas.."

"I know. Anyway, I'm going to go."

"Okay. Do you want to talk him again? He's still awake, I can hear him ripping up paper in his room."

"Why's he still doing that? No, I'll call him in the morning. Make sure he's up by seven."

"He'll be up by five, waking me up."

"That's true...."

A long pause. He knew that she knew, in the way she always knew.

"So," she said, with a sigh. "Did you get everything?"

He had to end this conversation now. It was time to bail.

"It's all taken care of," he said, quickly. "Everything's cool. I love you. Kiss your dad for me. Merry Christmas. I'll talk to you in the morning."

He hung up, snapping the phone shut. He tossed it on the bed like it had scorched his hand.

He stood there for a moment, waiting to see if it would ring again, then headed for the bathroom and drank water from the tap. Being a deceptive bastard was thirsty work.

"Jamie? What are you doing?" he shouted through the house, from the bathroom.

"Nothing dad!" his son shouted back, from his bedroom. "What are you doing?"

"I'm going downstairs to see what's on TV! You hungry?"

"No!"

"Okay! I'll be back up to tuck you in!"

"Yeah, okay."

He had to get this done, before his son went to sleep. He had to go and tell him the bad news about Santa. And he'd do it, he told himself, in a few minutes, knowing food and TV were just ways to delay the inevitable.

He walked down the stairs, the rest of the house sat below, dark, quiet, still. The only noise in the whole house was the steady sound of his son slowly tearing long strips of paper.

It wasn't completely dark in the lounge room. Pink, yellow, blue and green lights glowed across the street, spilling through the curtains, dashing them with colours. It was the neon-drenched Christmas display that covered most of his neighbour's house. A remarkably detailed Christmas display that had drawn a steady stream of family-packed cars every night for two weeks. Most had stopped to admire his handiwork for a few minutes, but there were many who'd parked their cars and walked into his yard to explore his Christmas creation, to wander amongst those lights, to see what all the little mechanized figures of snowmen and elves and reindeer were going to do.

He knew his neighbour wouldn't be able to pay the astonishing electricity bill for this year's festival of Christmas lights, when it thudded into his mailbox in February, because he knew his neighbour wouldn't be there to get it. His neighbour had already packed up the larger pieces of furniture and valuables and moved them elsewhere, so when the bailiffs turned up and let themselves in some time next week to tally up the assets, they'd find nothing of any real value, all of it long gone.

There'd be no Christmas miracles for his neighbour, and his family, he knew that. There was no government bailout for them. They only owed hundreds of thousands, instead of billions.

And so, he thought, another family will leave the street, another set of familiar faces, some friends, who'd lived and shopped and taken their kids to the park and daycare centre in this neighbourhood for six or seven years, would be gone. Another abandoned house would join the twenty or more he'd already found within a few minutes walk. Some were occupied by squatting students who couldn't afford to live in the city in the more, others by the suddenly homeless who had fled other suburbs, in other states.

His son didn't seem much bothered by the disappearance of his friends from down or up the street.

He didn't understand this at all. When he was five, his best friend's family had packed up and left the street where he'd spent his childhood, and the experience had traumatized him for months.

His son just shrugged when he asked him if he missed the kids he used to play with. At only four years old, his son had said goodbye to nine of the kids who were born to families in the street the same year he and his wife had been blessed with him. They were all gone, moved on, leaving behind abandoned mortgages and abandoned homes that nobody wanted to buy.

For the past three years, the street had seemed like the perfect place to raise a child, surrounded by other young families, people like him and his wife, working families, other kids like his son. Everything here had felt familiar, everything had felt right. It had been a safe place, safe enough for the kids to get together in the park after school to kick around a ball, without a fleet of parents watching over them.

But the kids hadn't gone to the park much at all, at least, not as much as he and his friends would have, and did, when they were the same age.

His son, and his friends, were more interested in video games, and teaching their grandparents how to use a computer and get socially networked, than slamming each other into pebble-studded fields of mud in mad pursuit of a ball.

He stood at the bay window, and noticed for the first time, of the many nights he'd stood there, beyond midnight, staring at the lights, just how much the softly-blinding illumination lit up the surrounding houses, his own house, his front lawn. It was something of rare beauty, and he wished he'd spent more time enjoying it, rather than resenting it, because his own home Christmas decoration attempts seemed so futile in comparison.

The thousands of dollars of lights and waving, smiling dioramas and glowing reindeer had cleaned out his neighbour's credit cards over three afternoons of madness in late October. Making something beautiful, if only for a few weeks, had become an obsession for him, as his family came to grips with their financial ruin, as they poised on the brink of fleeing the neighbourhood.

It was only now, tonight, that he realized his neighbour hadn't gone mad. He'd lost everything anyway, but in a final tribute to the neighbourhood, he had given the people of this devastated street something beautiful, a flood of light, a place to stand and be awed in the night by dazzling colours, it was a gift to the friends and neighbours that remained, and something free and wonderful for families to come and see, experience, share.

When other fathers who visited asked how much it cost, his neighbour had always grinned and declared, "Nothing!"

His neighbour had nothing left, so he had nothing left to lose.

He wondered, briefly, how long it would be before his family joined the exodus from the neighbourhood. Another month or two, maybe less.

From upstairs, the sound of ripping paper ceased. His son would soon be asleep.

From down the street, from one of the abandoned houses now occupied by homeless youth, who had in turn exodused the city, drifted familiar singing. "And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?" A John Lennon song, he remembered some of the words, a choir singing 'War is over, if you want it." The stereo the kids were blasting it from was up loud enough for him to sing along, but he got stuck on the words, "and what have you done?" The words repeated, a broken, taunting record in his mind.

What have you done?

He wasn't hungry anymore. He didn't care what was on TV. He had to get this over with. He walked to the stairs, and started climbing. He had to tell his son the truth.


"Are you awake?'

"Yes. I can't sleep."

"I know. When I was your age, I couldn't sleep either. I kept thinking I could hear Santa coming."

You idiot, why did you say that?

His son nodded slowly, then looked at his father.

"I don't think Santa's coming...."

"How did you know?" The words jumped out of his mouth before he could stop them. His son sat bolt upright in bed, and even in the low illumination thrown off by a Snoopy nightlight, the same Snoopy nightlight that had kept the monsters of the dark at bay when he was a child, he could see his son was already close to exploding into tears again.

"Santa's not coming? Why isn't Santa coming?"

His son had almost shrieked those last words. It was too much for him, he could see that. His mother away for Christmas Day, and now, no Santa.

"Santa's not coming because...." he paused. His son was already dealing with the fact that there would be no Santa, he wasn't coming, he already understood that. Now he had to explain to his son why.

Was it too early to beat his son's friends at school to the belief-rattling truth that Santa doesn't really exist? That the Santa his son already knew so much about, and dearly loved, was mostly dreamed up by Coca-Cola and cigarette advertising executives back in the first few decades of the last century?

It would blow his child's mind. He had to do this delicately.

I need to keep lying, he told himself, just for tonight, I can destroy the reality of Santa Claus for the boy in the New Year.

"Santa's not coming because...." he took a long, deep breath. There was nothing, his mind was blank. But then it wasn't. He had the story.

"Well, all over the world, in really poor places, poor families, you see, they can't afford any presents at all this year, none, and so Santa has to do a lot of extra...running around...flying around, in his sleigh, he has to fly a lot more trips to make sure the really poor kids get at least something this Christmas....outside of what he was going to give them anyway...before he found out their parents had...couldn't afford to get other presents....as well."

That was a terrible explanation. He knew it. This was going to be a long night. The kid wasn't going to go to sleep again, for hours. He could almost hear that sharp little brain churning through The Explanation for why Santa would not be visiting this year, dissecting it, comparing it to reality as he'd briefly come to know it.

He sat down on his son's bed, and waited for the boy to speak. His expression already showed that heavy doubt was tearing apart The Explanation. Some more foundation work for the lie was needed, but he had nothing else.

"That's why...Santa can't come here this year, you see? He's extra busy with the really poor kids."

His son nodded slowly.

"Are we really poor, dad?"

"No...I mean....we're not, really poor."

"Are we just poor?"

"No...well, maybe a little."

"If Santa doesn't give me presents, will poor kids in other places get my presents?"

"I don't know how it all works," he said. "Ease up on the questions for a minute."

So his son did, but he had nothing to say. They sat in silence, the night sky above the back yard glowing and filling the window, alive with stars and flashing satellites and the faint dust of the Milky Way galaxy.

He had an idea. He knew from his own childhood that on a clear night, you can see a couple or more shooting stars every half hour, if you stood outside with you head craned back, and paid attention. When he'd had a minor obsession with basic astronomy, before high school and girls and rock music pulled his eyes away from the heavens, he'd spent plenty of clear summer nights out in the yard with his telescope sweeping across the sky, and he'd seen plenty of shooting stars.

Had he told his boy much at all about the night sky yet? Not really. Not outside of basic explanations for what The Moon was, and why some stars seemed to twinkle, and others pulsed red, or blue.

His son, like himself at four, was showing a keen interest in science fiction TV shows, and, in particular, science fiction video games, but while he loved to blast through deep space on his father's laptop annihilating enemy transports and their escorts to micro-dust, the boy had never spent an evening in the back yard examining the endless light show in the sky.

The idea, the new lie, that popped into his head to further delay the day when his son learned that Santa Claus was only myth, a triumph of marketing, surprised him in its cunning, and potential for drama.

"Listen," he said to the boy, "there won't be any presents, but Santa has promised that every kid who misses out this year will get something extra special, instead of toys or...games."

That perked up his son's ears, widened his eyes.

"Something special? What is it?"

"We have to go downstairs, and out into the yard," he said and stood up. "So grab your shoes and put them on."

"Why do we have to go outside?"

He pointed out the window, to the sprawl of stars, fighting to shine their light against the orange glow of the city in the distance, bleeding neon up from the horizon, diluting their brilliance.

"You won't be able to see it properly from inside," he said, and held out his hand. His son was out of and then off the bed, rustling underneath it for a pair of shoes. He found them, quickly slipped them on.

"Is the something special from Santa something that flies?"

"No more questions," he said.

"But I want to know now," the boy tried to cry, but he had forgotten he was supposed to be upset and couldn't find the immediate tears.

He picked up his son and carried him from the bedroom.

"Don't cry, okay? Okay, what Santa did was...Santa made a promise to every kid that misses out on presents that he will send them their own special shooting star. That's why we have to get downstairs now. The shooting star Santa sent for you should be flying overhead any minute."

The boy liked this news. His legs started moving like he was running. "Hurry up! We have to go and see it!"

He felt a little guilty at how easy the basic lie, and the story he conjured up around it, was to create and explain. Now his son wasn't expecting a video game he couldn't afford. He was waiting for a shooting star, which he didn't know would be a meteorite or maybe even a chunk of old satellite, hitting the atmosphere, breaking up, burning up, flaring out.

I promised my son a shooting star, he thought as he carried the happily struggling boy down the stairs. What happens if we don't see one?

What then?



This seems so familiar....

It was a beautiful night. He'd kept his son busy counting stars for a minute or so, but he was already getting bored. The counting was punctuated by sighs that grew louder, as the promised shooting star from Santa failed to appear.

"Thirty two, thirty three, thirty four....when's it coming?"

"Soon. Very soon."

"Thirty...six?"

"Thirty five."

"Thirty five, thirty six, thirty seven..."

He'd learned in his late teens how to delay the moment when the emotional impact of something terrible actually hit him, and consumed him. Delay The Inevitable had been his life matra for most of his 20s. When his father had died, he hadn't shed a single tear for four months, then everything had come at once, a wave of sadness, grief and regret that all but crippled him. Booze had helped, but then the booze had become the problem, instead of the fact that his father had died and he hadn't said goodbye, or even seen him in those last painful months of his life. He hadn't let himself learn to deal with it.

"Thirty seven, thirty eight, forty..."

"Thirty nine," he croaked, convinced that he was about to burst into a wracking attack of sobbing louder than anything his son had unleashed during what had been an altogether utterly shitty Christmas Eve.

"Thirty nine, forty, forty one..."

He remembered then, a Christmas long past, from his own childhood, the memories came rushing back, a wave of images soaked with emotion. He had to fight to stop himself from crying. He remembered now why this moment in the backyard with his son seemed so familiar. His father had done the same thing with him, on a Christmas eve when he was five years old, taken him into the backyard, promising shooting stars instead of presents, there were no presents, his father had drunk the money his mother was going to use to buy them. It had been his father's Christmas ritual.

His father had kept drinking as they stood in the back yard that night, the crumbling, neglected old house a tilting heap behind them. He'd waited and waited for his shooting stars, and as he waited, he'd felt himself pulled into the deep, black curtain of the night sky. He could leave this place behind by going up there, one day. His father had eventually sat down on the grass, then plopped back into a snoring pile. But he'd stayed right there, rooted to the ground, eyes sweeping across the great, immortal dome of stars.

He didn't see a shooting star that night, and the disappointment had been devastating. But he went back out there the night night, and the next night, and every night for weeks, staring into the sky, watching hundreds of shooting stars blaze across the sky, or simply flare out in a second or two. An elderly neighbour finally asked him what the hell he was doing in the back yard every night, and when he explained, the old man had given him a small telescope, on a tripod, from the ruin of junk and detritus in his garage. His love of astronomy, of knowing everything he could about the stars, the planets, the universe, then began, and consumed him. Until girls distracted him, and then rock music, and drinking.

"Dad? I'm bored. Can we go inside?"

He faked a sneeze so he could wipe the tears from his eyes, without his son seeing how upset he was.

"Two more minutes," he said. "Santa promised you a shooting star and he will deliver. Two more minutes, just count the seconds..."

A loud, long sigh preceded his son's new count. "One, two, three, four, five, six..."

He hated himself and hated his life. What a fuckup he'd become. Christmas Eve and not enough money in his pocket to buy his kid even the cheapest piece of shit toy. He corrected himself, in his mind. He hadn't become a fuckup, he'd always been a fuckup. In four weeks, no longer than eight weeks, his family would lose their home. He still didn't know if his boss was even going to reopen the doors of his offices in the New Year, let alone ask him to come back to work. Not that it mattered, he wouldn't earn enough to get his family out of their debt problems.

What's going to happen to us now?

"Twenty eight, twenty nine, thirty," his son sighed again. He knew he was only out here now to make him happy. He was doing this for his dad, no other reason. "Thirty one, thirty two, thirty four...."

"Thirty three," he whispered, as the suddenly familiar raw despair of old soaked through him, a despair that he'd once diminished with alcohol, but now had to work its way through his system, feeling like it was killing a little bit more of his soul every time it came to visit.

"Thirty three, thirty four, thirty five...it's not coming."

"It's coming," he said through gritted teeth, a darkness of anger clouding his words.

I need bourbon...

"Thirty six, thirty seven, thirty eight...."

Come on God, you bastard, just give me this one thing. Please. Please? I'm not asking for a miracle, I'm not praying for you to make us win the lottery. I'm not praying for you to save this house, or protect my family, I'll do both, I'll find a way to get through this, but you have to give me this one thing, tonight. Just one little shooting fucking star. Just one, right now, so my son can see it. Is that too much to ask for?

"Fifty one, fifty two, fifty three....can we go inside, please?"

"No!"

"Fifty four, fifty five, fifty six...."

I did everything I was supposed to do to be a good man, a good father, didn't I? I stopped drinking, I worked every day in a job I hated because the money was good and it was close enough to work so I could pick my son up from day care, every day. I cleaned up my life, I got the job, I made a family, I brought a house, I paid my bills on time, I didn't sleep around on my wife, and I never hit her, or my son. What else do you want from me? What the fuck else do I have to do to get just this one single fucking break here?

"Dad? Is Santa really real?"

Great. Now this.

"Yes."

"Santa's not really real is he? He's made up, like cartoons..."

Please God, please, just one tiny shooting star. Let the kid believe in this, this little bit of fantasy, for a little bit longer.

"Santa can't make shooting stars, dad. He just makes toys and stuff."

He searched the skies, but the stars were all still. There wasn't even a blinking satellite to distract his son with.

So that's it, then. I prayed to you for help when I was a kid, and you did nothing. I prayed to you for help during all those years of violence at home and at school, and you did nothing. I've never asked you for riches, I've never asked you to kill somebody I hated, I've never asked you to do anything but make bad things into good. Make this bad night into a good one. Please.

"He just gives toys...he can't make shooting stars...."

His son turned and walked back to the house.

"Wait a second..." he said, searching the skies as frantically as he had that night so man years ago with his own father. "Wait..."

"I want to talk to mummy," his son said, almost at the back door. His voice quavered, quivered, the tears were not far away.

"Wait..."

If you won't do this for me, if you won't give me this one thing, one little shooting star, then I'll do it, I'll make it happen.

"Wait..."

His son stopped at the door, the big sigh came again.

"It's coming...."

"Dad. I want to talk to mummy!"

"It's coming!"

One tiny dot of light blinked, and then grew brighter, and began to streak across the sky.

"Look! Look!" His voice shrieked, and his son stopped pushing open the back door and looked into the sky, following his dad's pointing, trembling finger.

"Wow!" His son ran the few steps to get back to his side. He grabbed his hand, and squeezed with his little fingers. "Wow!"

The shooting star burned brightly, as it churned through the black, becoming the brightest object in the near moonless sky.

"Count it!" he shouted to his son. "Count it!"

"One! Two! Three! Four!"

The shooting star shuddered in its path, and burst into brighter light, almost blinding in its intensity. Chunks of it peeled away, dozens more tiny shooting stars. It left a fading trail of dancing, glowing dust in its path.

"Five! Six! Seven!"

His son's voice grew louder, more excited, with every number he shouted. He squeezed his father's hand tight. "Eight! Nine!"

The shooting star had arced across half the sky in its frenzied flight. In all his childhood years of staring into the sky through the telescope, he'd never seen a shooting star burn so bright for so long. He had no idea what it was. But his son was screaming with excitement.

As instantly as it had appeared, the shooting star finally burned away. For another couple of seconds, they watched as the light trail left behind faded, a glittering path through the heavens, already lost amongst those millions of stars, and the blinking red and blue lights of local planets.

"Wow!" his son said, trembling with excitement, "Wow! Wow!"

"Yeah," he said, "Wow."

It was an incredible coincidence, he knew that, it was nothing but coincidence. A massive and incredibly rare extra big chunk of old planet or asteroid had hit the atmosphere and burned up and they'd been fortunate enough to witness it. Shooting stars that big appeared once or twice a year, maybe less, and it was impossible to make plans to witness them. It's just a coincidence, he told himself, again, nothing more. Nothing more than that.

Well, he thought, maybe something more.

"Wow!" his son was still yelling. "Wow!"

For the first time since their talk in the boy's bedroom, they now looked at each other, and began to calm down.

"Was that shooting star for me, dad?"

"Yes. It was."

"Can I tell everyone that was my shooting star, dad?"

"Yes, of course you can."

"THAT WAS MY SHOOTING STAR!" his son suddenly yelled to the neighbourhood.

He thought his son meant he wanted to tell 'everyone', meaning the last few kids who lived in the street, his teacher, and his mother, when she returned home, but no, his son meant everyone. Everyone still left in the town, within hearing distance of his magnificent yell

"That Was My Shooting Star! Santa Sent That For Me!"

"Yes," he lied, agreeing with his son. "He did. That one was for you."

"Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"Best Christmas ever."

"It's not Christmas yet."

"I know," he said, and stared into the stars. To his father, the boy's smile was as wide as the horizon, and he knew instantly that like him, his son too would become hooked on star-gazing.

"But dad?"

"Yeah?"

"It's still the best Christmas ever."

"Yeah," he said. "You're right, it is."

And it was.

ED Day Ends

The last chapter of my online novel about life in Sydney after a virus pandemic kills millions is now online. I'll update soon about what I'm going to do with the novel now it's finished (short of a few changes), and why I chose to publish it free online.

Here's an excerpt from the last chapter of ED Day : Dead Sydney :

"This depopulation thing was always going to happen eventually, Paul,” Bossbloke said. “You know that, don't you? The world was already running out of food, water, energy, everything. We had to find 18 million football fields worth of land every year just to keep up with all the hungry mouths being born, while established farmland across the world was turning to fucking desert, or covering over with ice. This had to happen. They would have eaten the whole world.”

“The planet couldn’t sustain so many useless eaters,” I said, I knew what he wanted to hear.

Bossbloke grinned and clapped his hands, once. Crack, like a rifle shot. “Exactly!"

"If selective depopulation didn't happen, billions would have starved to death," I said.

Bossbloke nodded. "Exactly. What was the choice? Depopulation by virus, which means quick deaths, or depopulation by starving people to death? There is no choice. In the end, it really was an act of mercy."

Go Here To Read The Final Chapter In Full

Go Here To Read ED Day : Dead Sydney From The Beginning

ED Day : 'The End' Is Nigh

I'm a few days, maybe a week, away from The End of my online serialised novel, ED Day : Dead Sydney.

While I've always had a vague idea of how I believed the story would end, not writing to an outline means I've often been surprised at how the tale has turned out, chapter by chapter.

For example, (spoiler alert), the sniper murders of three key characters, a few chapters ago, wasn't something I planned, or even wrote in my mind. I didn't want that to happen to these people. I sat there, reading the words that appeared on the screen as they were slaughtered, as though I was reading the work of somebody else. A very strange experience indeed.

Most of the latest chapter now online, likewise, fell out of the brain dump in one fast 3am writing session after I tossed the chapter I had already written, and rewritten, and relentlessly polished until it was flat, sterile, fucking boring.

Where this new chapter leads the last part of the novel (maybe two more chapters) is not something I planned, or even now want to happen to these characters who have become so real to me in the past year. But I know if I delete this chapter and rewrite it to fit with how I originally thought this story would end, my brain will violently punish me by exploding a few blood vessels. And if I did slump dead onto the keyboard before I reach The End, there's about one or two hundred regular readers who I'm sure would dig me up to try and find out how it all ends.

This has been such a bizarre writing experience. I used to need drugs to trip myself out this much.

An excerpt from the latest chapter of ED Day : Dead Sydney :

There’s nobody to put out fires that big, and we don’t have the water to spare even if we had a volunteer firemen’s unit to activate.

Bookman had warned of all this. The destruction of our written history and culture, who we are, the story of how we got here, how we became a nation.

Bookman told me last week that 12 bookshops he knew of had been torched or burned, including antique shops loaded with rare books and letters. He made me promise him that if anything ever happened to him that I'd guard the Mitchell and State libraries with my life. I failed him. It's all gone.

I see it all now, what is happening here. We have a dangerous and destructive enemy, and this enemy is at war against us, the survivors of ED Day. They want to strip us of our history, and break us down, make us feel lost and helpless and cut off from our culture, who we are, where we came from.

They're winning.

You can read the rest of the latest chapter here. And feel free to leave a comment, as critical as you like (but make it a bit more insightful than "This Sux", okay?)

If you're not already reading ED Day, you can start from Chapter One here.

Latest chapter from the ED Day novel is online now. An excerpt :

He then asked Johnny how they were going to organise themselves when thousands of other survivors reached Sydney.

What exactly was Johnny's big plan to cope with that kind of crises? They can feed a few hundred people, but what if two thousand turn up on a cruise ship, all starving?

"Who are you talking about," he asked Bossbloke. "Who's coming here?"

Bossbloke answered, "...other survivors. People from towns and villages up and down the coast. All those people in the mountains, I saw the fires up there. You could have tens of thousands of survivors turning up here in the next six months. And we will have Army or militia roll back into into the city eventually. They were more prepared than most of the civilians….”

Bossbloke said he didn't know who and when, but he said it was inevitable that others would flock to Sydney, and if there were any surviving members of the state or federal government, or the Army or Navy, they too would return and they would have solid plans for how the new society would grow and flourish and be structured.

"It's been almost eight weeks," Johnny said, "no-one's come yet, mate."

"If we aren't organised," Bossbloke said, the impatience clear in his gruffness, "if we don't have our shit together, if we don't have community leaders, if we don't have structure to our society, then the outsiders will take over. They'll see that we're weak and disorganised, that we're as vulnerable as a little kid lost in the desert. They will crush us and take from us everything we've worked so hard for."

Go Here To Read The Latest Chapter From ED Day

Go Here To Read ED Day From Chapter One

Freedom Or A Return To Prison Colony Days?

In the latest chapter of my serialized online novel, ED Day (about life in Sydney after a bird flu pandemic kills millions) some of the survivors are finding themselves in growing conflict with the man who has appointed himself their leader. Entire streets of Sydney are now burning, with no way for the survivors to fight the fires, after an act of arson.

The narrator, Paul, is now close to deciding whether he will stay and help the survivors he has come think of as family, or if he will leave the city and make his way to the Blue Mountains, where he knows his girlfriend waits for him.

From ED Day, Chapter Sixteen :

All the time we were talking, and arguing, Greenfingers had said nothing. He'd sat with us for a while when we were drinking harbour-cooled beers and then he’d gone back to his work. Outside the greenhouse, he was re-potting a huge variety of vegetable seedlings. Mostly salad greens, but also more varieties of tomatoes, beans and root vegetables. The huge garden beds of the Botanic Gardens, now mostly stripped clean of all those foreign decorative flowers and shrubs was filling up with Greenfingers' food crops. The soil was magnificent, rich, fertile (or so he told me). The ashes and crushed bones from the thousands of corpses that had gone through the funeral pyres were now feeding the fruit and vegetables that would soon be supplying enough food to help keep a few hundred people alive.

But as I watched Greenfingers working away tonight, almost oblivious to the towers of smoke and flame rising above the city, I wondered what sort of society would be living here in a year’s time, when most of the crops would be turning out a steady supply of fresh food.

Would this society twelve months from now be the small enclave of mostly free survivors that we’d had for the past two months, or would it be more like a return to the prison colony that gave birth to this nation more than 200 years ago, on the very same harbour foreshore where we now live?

Go Here To Read The Latest Chapter Of ED Day

Go Here To Read ED Day From The Beginning

Note : Thanks to all the readers of my blogs who have sent me e-mails of support, criticism and encouragement in the past four months that I've been publishing the chapters of ED Day
online. I will be able to make the finished dead tree novel available for sale through this and my other blog sites, and I hope to get the price for a copy down to around $20. The finished novel will, however, always be available online to read for free.

Right now I expect to have the last chapter finished and online by late February. The first print run should get underway by mid-March.

Thanks again.

"Make It End"

The latest chapter of my free online novel ED Day is now up :

If this was bird flu, I hadn't seen anything this extreme before. I coughed up plenty of blood and pus when I was ill at the detention camp. I felt like I was going to die, the throbbing agony in my bones and joints and the struggle to breathe through all that fluid, the endless vomiting and stomach muscle spasms, all of it made me want to die. But I didn't begin to decompose when I was still alive, like Maggie.

Is this the next mutation? Is this how bird flu is going to really finish off humanity? By mutating into an evil more horrific virus and delivering a immune-system apocalypse that means no-one can survive once they got sick because decomposition begins before you even die?

Be warned, though, this chapter gets gruesome as it vividly describes the last hours of an elderly bird flu victim.

If you haven't been reading ED Day, you can start here at Chapter One.

If you're a regular reader, here's a link to Chapter Fifteen.

"I Want To See This City Come Back To Life Again"




Another chapter now online from the free-to-read serialized novel, ED Day, on life in Sydney after an apocalyptic bird flu pandemic.

An excerpt from ED Day - Chapter Five :

It’s night outside now. The towers of the city stand tall and dark, shiny black fingers against the deepening sky.

Why did you leave me behind? I want to go, too...

I didn’t believe much in God before ED Day. I don’t believe in God any more now. Hundreds of corpses of little kids scattered all over the city makes you realise fast that there probably isn’t someone who really gives a fuck about what happened to us, or what happens to us now.

I want to go, too.

But I don’t want to go. I did a few weeks back. I stood on the roof, toes over the edge, waiting for a wind, or a muscle spasm, so I didn’t have to decide. I thought about Kat, and how she'd feel when she found out I was gone.

I thought about all those babies that Kat and Matron looked after in the hospital, some of them still fighting for their lives.

I thought about that day, three days after ED Day, when I came down from my rooftop hideout and first met Bookman and Matron and Trader, walking the streets, calling out for other survivors. I thought about how happy I was to still be alive, and to find people like them, so happy to have found me.

And I thought our first barbecue in Hyde Park, when three dozen of us cooked the last of the steaks that were still edible (before we cracked the first tin of Spam), and drank warm champagne, and found a few minutes amongst all the death and misery when we actually forgot what had happened and we were just new friends, having a drink, and eating together. Sharing. Surviving.

I want to go, too...

I want to survive this. I want to live through it, and see what happens next. Tomorrow. Next month. Next year. Two decades from now.

I want to find out if Chrissie is still alive. I want to see the vegetable gardens and rooftop orchards grow big enough to feed all the survivors. I want to see a whole flock of sheep and lambs grazing on the slopes of the Domain and chickens and ducks getting fat for our future dinners in the Gardens and all the streets of our part of the city totally cleared of corpses.

I want to help these people as much as I can, because we all need each other now.

And I want a million more nights like this, when you can see every star in the sky, and you can see the flurry of movement of the owls and other birds making new homes in the apartments next door, where people had left balcony doors open before they died, or ran away, and when you can hear the soft, beautiful songs of the dolphins in the harbour, as they swim and play, coming back to waters their ancestors knew before any of us came down out of the trees.

I want to be here, I want to be a part of it. All of it.

I want to see this city come back to life again.

Go Here To Read Chapter One Of ED Day

Go Here For The Latest Chapter


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The Lambs Of Temptation

The second chapter of the online novel, ED Day, is now up. It's free to read and download and new chapters will be published three to four times a week :

ED Day : Chapter Two


ED Day is the story of how 300 survivors of a massive bird flu pandemic, that kills millions in Sydney alone, rebuild their lives and society in the city centre. They clean up the streets, stockpile food and water, but they are 'trapped'. Outside of the city, something terrible is happening, but so far the survivors only have glimpses of what is going on.

Here's an excerpt from Chapter Two :

...nearly everyone is hanging for fresh meat. A big fat juicy steak smothered with fried onions and sauce is only the stuff of fantasies now. Lots of fantasies.

Nobody yet has snuck into the pen where we keep the sheep and lambs we rescued from the petting zoos in Darling Harbour. Butt some of the survivors get this weird look in their eyes when they’re standing around watching the sheep and lambs crop the grass in Hyde Park.

I probably do, too. There's about sixty legs of lamb walking around the park most afternoons, with Preacher as their shepherd. Trader was drooling over those lambs one day last week, and he pointed out that some of the lambs were snacking on the wild mint that's popping up all over the park.

"Look!" he said. "They're just asking for it!"

Go Here To Read Chapter One Of ED Day

Dead Sydney

By Darryl Mason

This will either be one hell of an adventure, or an absolute disaster. But it's too late to back out now.

From today I will be publishing three or four short chapters a week from my new novel 'ED Day' on a dedicated blog. That is, I'll be posting chapters from the new novel I'm still writing.

The chapters are free for you to read, download and even comment on, if you're motivated or inspired to do so by what you read. And I hope that you are. If you've ever wanted to be a book critic, before the book is finished, here's your chance. Go for it.

I'll be posting chapter two over the weekend. Another two chapters will go up during the next week.

The novel, written in the form of a journal, tells the story of how 300 people survive a massive bird flu pandemic that wipes out millions of people in Sydney. Some of the survivors are convinced there was nothing natural, or accidental, about the pandemic that has killed everyone they knew and everyone they loved.

As the story unfolds, you will learn more about how the pandemic came about, how the survivors met, and how they go about rebuilding their lives and society.

A quiet, still Sydney where humanity has all but disappeared is a scary place, but I like, and believe in, the idea that that survivors of such a near completely fatal pandemic as portrayed in ED Day really would help each other, and take care of each other, and get on with rebuilding their lives and society, as best they can.

As Paul, the leader character of ED Day, says in Chapter Two (or maybe Chapter Three), you can only sit around in your commandeered penthouse getting hammered on free 40 year old whiskey for so long before you want to get back to work and get busy doing something worthwhile. Get busy helping people.

But the world of ED Day is not going to be full of kindness and caring and sharing.

Far from it.

There's something going on outside of Sydney that none of them are even remotely aware of, but I think they're going to find out about it before we get too far into the story.

There are dark forces at work amongst the ruins of a once bustling Sydney society. And for many of those who survived the pandemic, the worst is a long way from over.


Writing the novel this way may prove to be a good idea, or an extremely bad one. Whatever. It will be a writing adventure and that's what I'm most interested in right now.

You can read more about why I'm doing this, and how it came about over at Your New Reality.

Or you can just go straight to the first chapter and start reading :

ED Day - Chapter One : The Silence In The City

Enjoy.