The Christmas Star

Chapter 1
Christmas Morning

Chapter Description: Ben is fed up with the hassles of Christmas.

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It just didn’t look right. Ben fiddled with the star atop the decorated Christmas tree to align it as best he could, trying to make it perfectly straight. It was no use. He sighed in frustration.

“Ben, would you stop messing around with the tree? Everyone’s going to be here any minute!” his mother yelled.

“This fucking thing isn’t straight!”

“It’s fine! And don’t curse so much,” she replied, rolling her eyes.

“It’s NOT fine, this thing always bothers me, why can’t we just get a new star, one that actually isn’t crooked?!”

“Because we’ve had THAT star since you were born, it’s a tradition! Plus, I’m not made of money, I really don’t care how crooked it looks, I do...“

“Obviously you don’t! It looks really stupid,” he said, annoyed, trying to bend the wire at the base of the star to change the angle of the ornament.

“C’mon, Ben, just try to have a nice Christmas.”

“Mom, I really don’t want to see the family, to be honest, I can’t relate to anyone, I’m in college! Half of our relatives barely finished high school.”

“You used to get along with them fine,” she replied.

“Yeah, because back then, I was just as smart as them! After I started going to school, I can’t even hold a conversation with them,” he said, throwing up his hands and grabbing the ornament off the tree.

Just as he was about to continue, there was a knock at the door. Ben’s older brother, his wife and two kids streamed through the door talking loudly, followed at the heels by his uncle and aunt, all carrying bags of brightly colored gifts. As Ben feigned surprise and greeted his relatives, his earlier claim was, as he thought, confirmed.

“Hey, hey, Ben!” his uncle exclaimed, grabbing his hand into a hearty handshake, “Where’s the old ball and chain, eh?”

“Huh? Oh, uh...we broke up about a year and a half ago.”

“Oh, jeez, easy come, easy go, huh?” his uncle laughed, patting him on back.

“Uh, yeah.”

After a bit of uneasy silence, he helped everyone out of their coats. After some quick catch-up with his relatives, Ben crept away upstairs with the ornament. As long as everyone’s preoccupied, he thought, maybe he could fix the one thing that’d been bothering him all day: that damned Christmas star.

In his room, he took the golden plastic star and laid it on his desk. He broke out a pair of pliers and laid them carefully on the glass desktop in his messy room. Vintage posters adorned the walls, complimenting the tastefully picked out furniture of a young adult. Ben went to his dresser drawer to look for glue and once he had retrieved it, he spun around to find the golden star lying on the ground.

“Hmm,” he thought, “that’s weird.”

As Ben reached over and reached out for the star, a spark of electricity jumped from the ornament to his finger, blinding him. Pure whiteness. No sound.