Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups Read Online Free PDF Page B

would pull the skin tight over her bones, blow away her aches and pains, and breathe the buoyant winds of rejuvenation through her limbs.
    It didn't help matters, she thought, to live with a man whose energies never flagged, who sacrificed sleep for toymaking, often disappearing for days into his workshop and emerging brimful of vitality, a sly hint of marital urgency lighting his eye.
    It pained her to remove, night after night, Santa's speculative hand from her flannel thigh. But menopause had claimed Anya way back in the fourth century when they dwelt in Myra and had not yet become immortal. Since then, her carnal urges, never very strong even at their zenith, had dwindled to nearly nothing. It was a banner year if they made love a handful of times between one Christmas and the next.
    He was a good man, Claus; the best of men. Sometimes it was a trial being married to him, feeling the need to prove herself worthy of his goodness. Among his many fine qualities, she counted his saint's measure of patience with her; the way he treated his helpers, paternal yet not patronizing; his wholehearted dedication to the children.
    In the distance, a silent ruckus began. Flurries of snowballs flew in wide white arcs between two impromptu armies.
    "Land sakes, where do they get all that energy?" With a shake of her head and a cluck of her tongue, she resumed her knitting and lost herself once more in the rhythm of the rocking and the clicking of the needles.
    *****
    Fritz dashed across the commons toward the skating pond, kicking up powdered snow as he went. He wished, just once, that Mrs. Claus would leave the cozy confines of her cottage and join in the festivities.
    "Fritz! Look out!"
    Knecht Rupert's high-pitched shout rang out too late. The whoosh of a snowball—the smack of it against his forehead like the blow of a frost giant's fist—came out of nowhere. Down he tumbled, backward into the snow, and the gleeful taunts of the others washed over him.
    He felt his face redden. Johann the Elder and Gustav, Rupert's perennial sidekicks, gave Fritz resounding backslaps of encouragement and bent to the business of turning the gifts of nature into weapons. Then Rupert's strong arms helped him up and the battle was joined.
    His allies loped about him, scooping up handfuls of snow and packing them tight, then letting fly toward the porcelain doll contingent which swooped in on the right. So many years had the dollmakers worked together at their specialty that they were almost identical sextuplets. Though their faces were blunt as bulls and they sported long black beards, their lips were bowed like the painted lips of the dolls they made and their voices strained high and tight in their throats.
    Everyone called them Heinrich. It was the name they all answered to, and none of them had ever tried in any way to distinguish himself from the others.
    Heinrich, then, a twelve-armed wonder, lobbed his battery of snowballs into Fritz's beleaguered group, downing Gustav and smacking Fritz on the ear. Fritz raised his fists to the skies, howling. He stooped and threw like a madman, shaming the restraint of Knecht Rupert and his companions. After an initial flurry of misses, Fritz's canny arm remembered trajectory, adjusting for wind speed, anticipating moving targets. The ensuing barrage turned Heinrich's unstoppable onslaught into first a standoff and then a rout.
    "After them!" shouted Fritz, heading for the woods. But as he and his comrades-in-arms pounded closer to the snow-laden firs, reinforcements for Heinrich popped up from behind a great outcropping of rock. Fritz identified the two instigators of this new assault as his bunkmates: Karlheinz, he of the rolling-thunder snore, and Max, whose occasional bedwetting had consigned him, by a two-to-one vote, to the lower bunk. These turncoats descended upon him, flanked by elves from the rocking horse contingent, tubby little men with arms that flailed as they ran and wide eyes that flashed