Bearing Gifts, They Traveled Far
Written by Emma McCoy
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Hi everyone! As some of you may remember, I did a series last Easter that consisted of short stories from the perspective of a little boy from Jesus’ time. This little boy witnessed the events of Easter and struggled to make sense of them.
For Advent this year, I want to do something similar. But rather than take us back to Jesus’ time for his birth, I’m going to situate us in modern day. Follow along these short stories as I take us through a familiar story in an unfamiliar way. Can you identify all the parts of the Advent story? Here’s a hint: the narrator is an outsider, watching everything from ‘outside’ the story.
This will be the last story! Even though we’re past Epiphany, this is when our First Look Friday falls. Thank you for coming along this journey with me! For your convenience, “previously on the Advent stories”:
Our narrator, a lonely career man, traveled to Maine one Labor Day weekend on a whim. While there, he saw a young immigrant couple turned away from his hotel. That night, plagued by insomnia, he visits an all-night gas station, where the protective clerk has helped the young couple give birth to a child. While the narrator is there, migrant workers show up, claiming to have received a message from an angel telling them to come see the child. A year after this bizarre night, our narrator returns to Maine with the ridiculous hope of finding the child again.
Bearing Gifts, They Traveled Far
One year later
I put the rental in park and sat back. The gas station was the same, but it looked different in the daylight. The neon sign wasn’t quite so garish, the advertisements for slushies easier to ignore. There were a few other cars in the parking lot as well—some filling up, others grabbing drinks and snacks inside. The thick pine trees bordering the convenience store weren’t bending under a gale. Everything looked stunningly normal.
What was I doing back in Maine. I felt foolish. This wasn’t a new emotion; over the course of the past year pretty much everything had felt silly and strange. After I’d left this very convenience store in the early hours of the morning, the sky starting to crack into deep, deep blue, I’d slept most of the day. Then I checked out early and returned to my apartment. The emptiness of it shocked me. It was as if I’d walked in for the first time and seen how a stranger was living: one chair, one couch, minimal decorations, no color.
Within a month, I’d sold the apartment, handed in my notice, and moved across the country. I almost picked San Francisco because my family had gone there once when I was a child, but it didn’t feel right. The aching hole in my chest, made both better and worse by seeing that child in the gas station, told me I wasn’t chasing another city. So, with enough doubts make even the most steel-nerved person nervous, I moved back to my hometown. My parents were thrilled, showing more emotion than I’d seen from them in years. I caught up with childhood friends, regretted some of those meetings, and joined a run club to make new ones. I wrote two stories, both of them terrible. I found a house down the street from my sister, which she hated, but she was cordial at Thanksgiving. I started seeing a counselor, and I found a language to talk to my family with. My new job didn’t pay well, but I didn’t mind (after a while).
It was the strangest thing. I changed everything and was, by most definitions, settling. Unsuccessful. But I felt raw and alive. I’d been sleeping, and now I was awake.
Which had led me back to this convenience store in a small town in Maine. I was humming, buzzing, like I’d touched a live wire. I wanted to share something, or do something, but I wasn’t sure what. I needed to try and find this family again, and hundreds of dollars later, here I was.
“This is stupid,” I said to myself. I got out of the car anyway.
Inside, a clerk I didn’t recognize gave me a suspicious glance before going back to her magazine. My heart did a sad backflip.
“This is going to sound very weird—” I started.
“No drugs here,” the new clerk said, turning a page.
“No, that’s not what I—”
“No propositions, either. Get a snack or leave.”
“Look, that’s really not what I’m going to say. I’m just asking if—”
She glanced up. “Bathroom code is 9009.”
“About a year ago a baby was born in the back room?”
That got her attention. She set the magazine aside. “Are you a cop?”
“Definitely not. Look, I was here with the night shift clerk. It was…I don’t know, and it’s a long shot, but do you know what happened to that family?”
The clerk gave me a searching look. “Why do you care?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. “It made a difference to me,” was all I said.
“Hm,” the clerk replied. “Well, lucky for you, Luke mentioned you. Here’s a number you can find him at. I think he knows.”
Lucky for me again, Luke the night clerk answered on the first ring. After going through the ups and downs of who I was and what I wanted and why did I care, he acknowledged that it was an odd that had happened.
“Yeah, I haven’t really stopped thinking about it,” he said, his voice thin through the phone. “I suppose I’m not surprised you came back. They’re good people. Make you feel less alone, even with the language barrier.”
“They’re still here?” I asked, shocked.
“Oh, yeah. I helped ‘em out after a few days, and there was this charity thing that was able to get supplies and funding and stuff. My boss found out and I coulda been fired, but then who else would work this job? Anyway, I don’t think just dropping by is cool, so why don’t we talk? My wife is making lunch. You in town long?”
I was. Or, I decided to be. Luke the night clerk’s house was small and cozy. His wife was blunt as he was, and we ate ham and cheese sandwiches and talked about the young family. For a clerk who’d seen it all, it was clear Luke had been as affected as I was.
The next two days I napped, walked around the town, which was starting to empty as the tourist season ended, and wrote more bad stories. I called my sister. Her youngest was teething, which could put the most patient of people on edge, and my sister wasn’t that.
When the weekend came, I joined Luke and his wife in their car. About ten minutes outside the town, we came to a stop by a small pink house with a chain-link fence. We weren’t the only people there.
“Huh,” Luke said, getting out.
“More visitors,” his wife commented.
“Is that normal?” I asked.
“No,” they both replied.
Inside, it smelled like sage, spices, and lemon cleaner. It wasn’t altogether that bad. Light streamed in through the windows, highlighting mismatched furniture and thick carpet. Luke’s wife walked further in, maybe to the kitchen, and I stepped into the living room.
My eyes were immediately drawn to the young woman holding her baby in an easy chair. It was the same mother and child I’d seen, pale and sweating and scared, in the storage room of the convenience store. The child was older now, holding his head up and grabbing at her clothes.
“Who are you guys?” Luke the night clerk asked. That’s when I saw the three others, two men and a woman. They were dressed like they were heading to a hippie conference, or maybe they’d just come from one. The woman had more piercings than I could count and wore a white gown with metal belts. Flowers were embroidered on it. One of the men had long hair and the other was shaven. All of them were covered in tattooes.
“We’ve come a long way,” the woman said dreamily. “Isn’t he perfect?”
“It’s, like, the most awesome thing ever,” the shaven-headed man said. “We’ve been doing this a long time, and no one’s star chat is like his. No one’s.”
“Exactly,” the other man cut in. “Now, do you have a present?”
“His wife has a casserole,” I said, when it became clear Luke wasn’t going to reply.
“Like I was saying,” the woman turned to the baby in his mother’s lap, “your son has the most fantastic energy I’ve ever seen. He’s going to be someone very special. You’re very special too, to get to be the divine vessel that brought him into being.”
The conversation continued in this vein for a while. I don’t think the young mother caught any of it, but she seemed calm and happy. At her feet, a couple things were clustered together. A silver mirror, saffron in a glass jar, and a solid gold deck of Tarot cards.
“How did you find these people?” Luke was asking. The young woman’s husband had come out and was translating as best he could.
“His star chart,” the shaven-headed man said. “Like I said. It’s never wrong. It takes, like, forever to do one properly, and I have to say, this kid is born under a totally unique sign. You follow the star chart, and here we are. And like, you should be grateful because no one had even saged in here.”
After I’d gotten Luke onto the porch to calm down, I sat in the living room and watched the three hippes interact with the baby. Maybe ‘hippie’ was the wrong word. They were more New-Age spiritualists. I bet they came from Portland. After a while, we all ate casserole. Neither the young woman nor her husband seemed to recognize me, but I don’t think they minded my prescense either. Just being there and sharing a meal made everything in me calm, like a puzzle piece had finally slotted into place.
Outside, Luke’s wife got in the car, but he hesitated.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You really came all the way out here for that kid?” he asked. “And they did too?”
“Is it hard to believe?”
“No,” he admitted.
My phone buzzed. My sister was calling. “What are you going to do?” I asked Luke.
“I don’t know yet,” he replied. “But it feels like I could do anything.”
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About the author
Spring Church member, Emma McCoy (M.A.), has two poetry books: This Voice Has an Echo (2024) and In Case I Live Forever (2022). She’s been published in places like Across the Margin, Stirring Literary, and Thimble Mag. She reads for Chestnut Review and Whale Road Review. She’s probably working on her novel right now. Catch her on Substack: https://poetrybyemma.substack.com/