section from birthday season-edited out and unused.

The family routinely went to midnight mass every year, much to Wendy’s mother’s annoyance. She kept tightlipped during the whole affair, putting on the same emerald green cocktail dress despite her husband’s whispers of it being a little too “showy” for such a “gathering.” He himself had his hair perfectly combed and gelled, black and shiny. He resembled someone else Wendy felt she knew well, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

Wendy had gotten away with hiding in the back pew between her parents until this year. She’d been too short to see much over the heads, and colored in a nativity scene coloring book for the duration; she barely heard a word sung or said, lost in concentration, insistent that all colors were solid and without trace of which direction she stroked her lines.

This year, however, she heard the minister calling for all the children to join him at the front. She ignored this until she felt her father nudging her with his hand on her back. His green eyes were gentle, a lighter shade than her mother’s dress, which was less dazzling in the fluorescent light than it had been in the dim living room at home. Wendy eyed the limp prosthetic hanging loosely from his other side. He only wore it for special occasions. She got up just as her mother began to mouth that it was okay to not go.

She could feel him beaming as she made her way down the red runway, it was all that kept her body moving in her itchy velvet dress and tights. Settling down on the second step closest to the minister, she obediently gazed up at him, attention focused away from the full house of adults before her and the fellow children.

The white haired man greeted them with a smile. Wendy hadn’t noticed his face before. He was older than Santa Claus.

He cradled a black, shiny stapler in his worn hands.

“Do you know what this is, little ones?” he asked, voice soft but resonating in the large room.

They nodded, Wendy noticed a see of agreeable faces, none of them baring the confused look she felt creeping around her brow, which she quickly adjusted.

“This,” he paused, “is God’s work, my children,” he smiled.

They leaned in closer. Just as they all circled him, he clamped his hand down, stapling nothing, the snap echoing, jolting the children, who laughed in relief when they realized what had happened.

Wendy was frozen. She barely comprehended the rest of the speech, only hearing him reiterate, “This is God’s stapler,” before she completely tuned out.

She didn’t know what to think of this. It was a stapler. Wendy had no concept of how this related to a higher power she’d paid any attention to. Being only ten, she knew little in the way of metaphors. She felt the blow of the air conditioner above her, invading her ruffled cap sleeves.

After he’d finished speaking, a man in a Santa suit appeared with a large velvet sack. He began to pass out candy canes to all the children, most of them of average size but three were huge, the width of both of Wendy’s arms. She looked up in wonder when presented with a scepter like cane and clutched it to her chest, the plastic wrapper cutting into her chin. Why was Santa here now?

Did he make staplers too?

When the crowd began to clap, she robotically made her way back to her family’s seats. Her father patted her on the head, content. Her mother smiled red lips at her, grazed a manicured hand over the candy cane with pride.

As the service ended, everyone rose at once, the crowd as thick and unmanageable as the exit of an airplane. Wendy climbed atop the pew, and her father knelt for her to climb onto his back. She was careful not to touch his prosthetic, and held the candy cane over his chest, legs gripping his ribs.

A child in the same position as Wendy was, atop her father’s back, tried to wrestle the candy cane from her small hands, seeing an opportunity with the chaos of the crowd. Wendy’s father kept walking, ignoring it, his arm was starting to sag unnaturally and swing by his side. Wendy’s mother was weaving erratically, trying to escape and managing to lose them.

At one point a little girl with a face screwed into a strange expression yanked the candy cane away from Wendy, it clattered and snapped in two against the linoleum, the wrapper still in tact. Wendy cried out in anguish, berating the girl and nearly beating her father on the chest to turn back when he kept moving through the crowd, away from the fallen prize.

“Be quiet Wendy,” he muttered harshly in her ear as tears streamed hotly down her cheeks. “Don’t you see that girl is disabled?”

Wendy hiccupped. “No she’s not, you’re disabled,” she said in confusion.

Her father didn’t reply, setting her down as soon as they reached the parking lot. Wendy shakily got into the car behind her mother, who had finally reappeared. Her mother bent to straighten her daughter’s hair, wipe her tears, not asking what was wrong when she didn’t see the candy cane.

“Let’s just go,” Wendy’s father said. He unbuttoned his shirt once in the driver’s seat and pulled out the prosthetic, throwing it to lay in the floor of the backseat adjacent to Wendy’s feet. It waved at her, back and forth, like a pageant queen as they drove silently home.

That was the first night Wendy took something apart. She crept into the study when her parent’s were putting on their night clothes and stole his stapler. She brought it back into her room and turned off her light, took it into the closet and hid under the hot glow of the uncovered light bulb.

She pried the top away, trying to break the spring and separate the two pieces. She pulled at it every which way, pulled out the line of stuck together staples and crunched them in her hands until they dug into her palms, worked until each one flew around her closet floor and into the mouths of shoes. She laid all the parts she could disassemble around her in a fan, a silver rainbow around her crossed legs.

When her father called her from in her bedroom she pushed the metal pieces under a pile of t shirts, wishing she’d had a hammer and some time to pare it down to more and more pieces, until the very elements that created the metal were the only things left, hundreds of pieces unassembled to hundreds of smaller pieces. She could stand up from the middle of the pile, point down and around in a sweeping gesture and say, “This, this is a stapler.”

Her father was looking at her, face tired in a new way. “Thank you for tonight,” he said simply. He didn’t mention her comment on the way out of the church. She knew what he was referring to.

“Happy Birthday,” she put her arms around his neck, her nose near her fingers. They smelled metallic; she breathed out.