Free Hunger by Michelle Sagara

Introduction
     
    This story owes a large debt to one of my
oldest friends. I personally love Christmas, even though it’s mired
in commercialism and its own specific type of family angst. My
earliest memories of the season are of my mother helping us to make
construction paper chain links—large ones—one for each day leading
up to Christmas. We made a ritual of cutting a link each night in
December before we went to sleep, and so many of our wishes and
daydreams were tied up in what Santa Claus would bring.
    But in university, I discovered that this
sentimental attachment, shared by so many of my friends in their
own idiosyncratic ways, wasn't universal. The heart of this story
is taken from one of them, and it was a reminder—to me—that it’s a
season of plenty only for those of us who don't worry about the
little things.
    Like, say, starvation. But it added a layer
of melancholy to the season that has never quite left me, and also
a certain sense of gratitude, when I watch my own children in the
safety and security of our present.
    * * *
    I read this story twice in Calgary, just
before my oldest son was born. I was visibly very pregnant at the
time, but well enough to travel, and I went—with Tanya Huff—to a
Calgary convention. Part of the Canada Council funding that offset
the cost of our travel came from the library readings we did
outside of the convention. Because I was reading with Tanya—this
really does sound like a theme in the early years—I had taken this
story with me. It was simple, it was the right length, and it was
definitively not clever.
    I think this makes me sound humorless, in
hindsight, but I’ll live with that. At the convention, however, one
woman literally fled the reading in tears. I assume that something
in the story triggered something, because I don’t think it’s the
story itself, but I never found her to apologize.
    However, it was, once again, written for a
Christmas anthology. I miss writing for those, sometimes, because
right or wrong, there is so much tied up in family memories of
Christmas; in hopes, dreams, disappointment and a sense of the
season from all angles: the naive child’s, the anxious adult’s, the
parents who want Christmas to maintain some of the magic and
mystery that we ourselves remember.
    It is interesting to reread this now, though.
The mention of technology dates the story, even if no actual dates
are present. I even considered changing those, but resisted because
if I did that, I would never stop.
     

 
     
Hunger

    I used to hate Christmas more than any other
time of the year.
    Not because of the commercialism. Hell, with
my VCR and my laser disk player and my stereo sound system and car
and you name it, I’m just as much a consumer as anyone else. And I
didn’t hate the hypocrisy of it, at least not in the later years,
because I understood it. I didn’t hate the religious overtones, and
I’m not a religious man; I didn’t hate the idiotic television
specials or the hype or the gathering of the family.
    I hated Christmas because every Christmas
after my fifth year, I saw her.
    Let me tell you about her, really briefly;
it’ll make the rest of it all make sense. Well, at least I hope it
will.
    * * *
    When I was five, I went travelling with my
parents. We had three weeks at Christmas—and three weeks, at least
to a five year old, are forever. My dad didn’t like snow much, and
he especially didn’t like to shovel it, so when we chose a place to
travel, we went south. Fifty years ago and more, South America
wasn’t a really civilized place; hell, in many places it’s pretty
primitive now. But it had warm weather, and it had lots of people
fussing over my dad, which made him happy; it had good food, and
Christmas was still celebrated.
    Of course, it wasn’t Christmas like here, and
there wasn’t any tree, and there certainly wasn’t much in the way
of presents—I got more than anyone else—but it was happy enough,
until she came to the