For a few, thunderous heart palpitations John’s world narrowed to the sound of footsteps, his future collapsing into the calamity they portended. Thankfully, as it usually did, the anxious electricity localized into a tolerable buzz, somewhere near his heart. Still, his body refused to move.

John imagined ice forming on the steps outside his apartment, making them too slippery to climb. He imagined a frozen wall crystalizing beyond his door like The Great Wall of Westeros. Then, he remembered. In the real world, when he wasn’t role playing a powerful mage in Nordic Runes, John was pathetic and powerless. The footsteps grew ever closer.

There was a time, maybe as few as six months ago, when John would have bolted up at that sound. He would have scrambled for a plastic bag and scrapped up as much of the garbage as he could. He would have called out Just a minute as he crammed the bag under his bed and then fumbled with a can of Febreeze to direct its neutralizing mist over piles of dirty laundry and marijuana-infused couch cushions, masking a tiny measure of the decaying skunk smell of his sad home.

None of it would have helped, of course. That wasn’t the point. It was a signal to his parents that he was at least willing to try, that he had the common decency to be ashamed of the wretched creature he had become. It was a way, in other words, to let them know he wasn’t a complete lost cause. Now, though… John wasn’t going to fool anyone. There really wasn’t much point in pretending.

The gentle but resonant rap upon his door calmed some of John’s nerves. It was her, thank god. At least it wasn’t him.

“John?” a woman’s voice called. “John, can you open the door please?”

John unpaused the game and moved this character through Uldwyld forest. Inside, he pressed down against the roiling, sputtering feeling in his guts and tried to focus on the full moon looming above the trees in the game’s night sky.

She hates you, John, whispered the voice at the back of his mind. Everyone does.

It had been weeks since John had seen anyone. Why couldn’t his Mom do the world a favor and just leave him alone?

“John, I know you’re there because I can hear that game. Can you please let me in?”

After a half-minute or so, a key slid into the lock, followed by a turn of the doorknob. Hesitantly, the door swung inward to reveal a fit, friendly-eyed woman, face lean and etched with laugh lines. A drooping Santa crowned shoulder-length, chestnut hair, complimenting a god-awful sparkly Christmas sweater covered in actual ornaments, which protruded from it like glittery warts. She held a three-ring binder against her chest like a student going to class.

“John-”

When her eyes fell upon John, she flinched.

There it is, right there. That’s how disgusted she is by you.

“John,” she started again, obviously trying to sound normal, like she hadn’t just recoiled at the very sight of him, “why aren’t you dressed, buddy? Hurry up and throw on a terrible Christmas sweater, we’re all waiting for you.”

So it was today. John ignored her, staring at the television and mindlessly navigating his character towards the Uldwyld Ruins. He should engage with his mother. He should nod when she speaks, he should reply to her questions and he should look her in the eyes because that’s what normal people did. He just couldn’t. He couldn’t look at her again.

“Buddy,” she said, “Can you respond to me please?”

“Don’t feel good,” John mumbled.

Silence dragged between them. John didn’t need to look at his mother to feel her disappointment. Her embarrassment. He could sense the wheels turning in her head, trying to figure out how two wildly successful people had failed so miserably with their youngest child. Gerald Robbie brought massive corporations to their knees. Sheila Robbie delivered new human beings into this world. They have succeeded at virtually everything else, but still they couldn’t fix their fat, lazy, worthless loser of a son.

“How’s it going with Door Dash?” she asked, leaning a pretend-casual shoulder against the frame. “Any deliveries this week?”

Right. Door Dash. It was a part-time, food delivery service that let its drivers choose how often they worked - which meant, his parents seemed to think, it was a job even someone as incompetent as John could keep. Except he couldn’t. He couldn’t even motivate himself to apply.

“Going fine,” John said.

She knows you’re lying, idiot. She just doesn’t expect anything more from a loser like you.

“Have you been taking your medication?”

He shrugged.

“John,” she said, making a small, exasperated grunt at the back of her throat, “Your depression won’t get better if you don’t-”

She stopped herself with visible effort and took a slow, deep breath.

“I, um, brought something to for you to look at,” she said.

She held out the three-ring binder. When John made no move to come get it, she looked down at the trash littering the floor as if deciding whether or not to wade into it.

“I’ll just leave it here,” she said, placing it on the chest of drawers beneath the television.

“Okay.”

“You want to know what it is?”

John ignored her, opening the map to check his progress towards the Ruins.

“So, I went to this seminar a few weeks ago,” she said with faked enthusiasm, as if John had said, Sure, tell me all about it! “Continuing ed, you know how it goes. I wanted to learn how to help my patients with postpartum depression, because P.P.D. is so common these days, but John, I really think you would find some of this stuff interesting. It’s called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.”

A circular area had appeared on his map for him to search. Apparently, he was close.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“There’s an entire treatment program for Depression in there,” she continued, gesturing to the binder, “It’s meant as a guide for administering therapy, so it’s written from a professional’s perspective, but the information is good and the exercises are great, just really, really helpful, fully backed by research. I thought you might want to read through it. Might be fun, you know? Like being your own therapist.”

Sure, fun. John had gone to a therapist two years ago, before he had deteriorated beyond all hope, and he had failed at that just like everything else. She had been nice, for the most part, but she had told John she couldn’t help him unless he started putting forth some effort. He had never gone back after that.

“Is that it?”

“No,” his mother replied. A tiny, almost imperceptible break in her voice foreshadowed tears.

Great, asshole. All you do is hurt her, you know that?

“Clark and Vanessa came a long way to be here,” she said, voice quavering near the edge of something. “They’ve both asked where you are. I know they would like to see you.”

The familiar ache opened inside him again. They wanted to see… John? John? Did they want to show him off to their significant others like some carnival freak, like step right up ladies and gentleman and feast your eyes on the incredible, the amazing, the unhygienic college drop-out boy! You’ve never seen hair this greasy before! Was that it? Or did they want to see him because they… they just wanted to?

Not that it mattered. John didn’t want to see them - he didn’t care about them at all, and they only pretended to like him because they felt sorry for him - but then again… Maybe being around his siblings for a little while wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Maybe just this once. And if he said no…

An image flashed into John’s mind of his mother, sitting alone on the steps outside, weeping.

Still unable to look at her, John lowered his head and nodded.

Her clap jolted him.

“You will!” she exclaimed with so much enthusiasm it burned, “Oh, your brother and your sister will be so happy! Go ahead and get dressed and come meet us in the living room, okay? We’re going to play charades!”

The door closed, and her footsteps receded quickly down the stairs.

John buried his head in his hands. Charades? How could he have forgotten about the Robbie family tradition of Christmas Eve charades? What the fuck had he gotten himself into?

Behind a rumpled, gray suit John wore to a wedding four years ago and a few coats John hardly used - because winters in Dallas weren’t that cold and he rarely left the apartment - two ugly-as-hell Christmas sweaters hung at the back of his closet like quarantined lepers.

The red one said “Blinded by an icicle” in embroidered lettering. The B.B. gun and broken glasses above it made the “A Christmas Story” reference clear, but unfortunately, John didn’t like that movie anymore. He had watched it with his father every Christmas Eve as a kid, like clockwork, but now… For whatever reason, it stung to think about.

The other one, a green abomination with Santa’s sleigh running over a bloody corpse, said “My sister got run over by a reindeer.” John smiled a little. Vanessa always got a kick out of that one. He jerked it off the hangar and pulled it over his head, then after a brief squeeze against his flabby torso, pulled it back off again. Yikes. John had been about seventy pounds lighter the last time he wore this. It was a sausage casing now. After a bit of strategic stretching of the sweater, John managed to tug it on without compressing all the air from his lungs.

“John Robbie,” he muttered, patting his stomach like a drum. “You are one. Fat. Fuck.”

A loud thud came from outside. Probably a garbage can blown over by the wind or something like that. Like most things that happened outside his apartment, John couldn’t bring himself to care.

Standing in front of his bathroom mirror, which was clouded and smudged for reasons he didn’t fully understand, John considered himself.

The last two years had not been kind. A greasy mop lay flat against his head, spilling in clumps past his eyes and ears. Chubby, acne-speckled cheeks boasted a shredded brillo pad of beard growth from his cheekbones all the way down to his adam’s apple. The face that once, occasionally, had described as “cute” by interested parties, now looked like it belonged on a sidewalk behind a stolen shopping cart full of John’s every earthly possession.

After a bit of searching, he managed to locate a hairbrush in the second drawer, behind an empty Doritos bag, a dozen or so unopened bottles of Effexor and, inexplicably, a fucking shoe. He tugged the brush through his nest. Pinpricks of pain followed the bristles as they pulled out follicles by the dozen, but after a few tries, he managed to complete a full stroke. Several clumps had now converged into a single mega-clump, flopping stupidly to one side of his forehead. He dropped the brush with a clatter and mussed his hair back to its original state. So much for that.

An itch at the back of John’s mind insisted he had forgotten something important as he opened his apartment’s front door. What was it? No matter how hard he tried, the thought wouldn’t come. Whatever it was, it was too late now.

Cold, evening wind - cold for Dallas, anyway - swept in and chilled his ears and nose. As he breathed in the fresh air it cleaned him out like Drano through clogged plumbing. How long had it been since he had regularly breathed fresh air? It was strange to think about because as Polaris, he was outside all the time. As himself, by contrast, he sat in a tiny apartemnt in a cloud of his own smells and dead skin flakes while an air conditioner tried to introduce a little circulation.

You are a sad little man, John Robbie, said the voice at the back of his mind.

Nervousness flickered in his chest as he closed the door behind him, leaving his own, private world for the world outside. The world outside, to John’s recollection, had never cared for him all that much. Vestiges of sun painted pink and orange across a suburban horizon, over which a handful of stars twinkled faintly in an already purpling sky. His parents’ house, which some might call a mansion, stood imperiously across a short expanse of concrete, scrutinizing all with its shuttered, judgemental windows.

“Let’s get this the fuck over with,” John muttered with a sigh.

As John took his first step down the stairs, headed for the ninth circle of Christmas hell with his nauseatingly perfect family, something stopped him. A twitch, coming from the corner of the small landing. When John bent down for a closer look, an invisible blade slid into his heart.

A bird, small enough to fit into John’s palm, lay on its back. One wing was clutched close to its little body, while the other, half-extended, twitched its terminal feathers like morse code. What wrenched John’s insides, however, was its head. The animal’s beak was facing the wrong direction. It must have crashed into his window and broken its neck, twisting it a full one hundred and eighty degrees. A shining, black eye stared up at John, pleading.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

With the back of a finger, John stroked the bird’s chest, not caring about the parasites or bacteria wild birds supposedly carried. Few would describe John as “decisive,” but no doubt touched him as he picked a large leaf from a creeping vine and sets it reverently atop the crippled animal.

“Godspeed, little one,” he said, then stomped down.

Feathers twitched through the unquiet of John’s mind as he made his way across the driveway. Two vehicles stood in his way, one of which he had never seen before. The unfamiliar one was a black Range Rover, its chassis reflecting the red and white Christmas lights of the house so brilliantly it might have just come off the lot. The UCLA decorative plate - chipped at the right corner from an errant driveway basketball five or six years ago - identified its owner, unmistakably, as Clark Robbie. Goldman Sachs paid well, apparently.

The other was an ancient Subaru Outback, sky blue. Its back windshield displayed a “COEXIST” bumper sticker, the kind made up of various religious symbols to suggest people of different faiths should get along instead of killing each other as they had for the entirety of human history. Vanessa’s, of course. She had placed the sticker on that hideous car the day she bought it used - with her own money - at 16 years old. The only thing you’ve ever saved for is Taco Bell.

Somehow seeing the cars simultaneously enflamed something within John and soothed something else like a balm.

John’s four family members, along with two people he had never met, were gathered in the living room, chatting congenially.

When John’s sandals clopped onto the hardwood floor, everyone looked over to him, and he narrowly won the battle against an overpowering urge to bolt in the opposite direction.

This was a huge mistake.