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“Please, I beg of you, speak of it.”
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Lottie and Ebenezer Scrooge sit in a small rural graveyard. Fresh white snow dusts the rocks and trees and dirt around them. A monument rises at their backs, and the granite face of a gentle pony gazes at them from on high, stone eyes showing more emotion than Scrooge has shown in his entire adult life — until this moment. He draws a deep breath, and speaks.
“Given the time again, I would not be myself... I would be someone else, someone better...” His face screws up, the lines and angles struggling to contain feelings larger than any this skin had attempted to display previously. “Lottie, why couldn’t our father, my father ... be someone else? Someone kind, someone loving...” Another breath, in and out, and a tortured mind counting the beats.
“Why did he beat me?” As he speaks, Scrooge focuses on a speck of snow that has fallen onto the tip of his slipper. The words sound like they’re coming from someone else’s mouth, yet he knows it is his own voice he hears. “Why did he make it so the only time I felt his touch was through his fist against my jaw, his backhand across my face? His cane against my shoulders and back and any other part of me unlucky enough to be in his sight? He would come into our home like a twisted Father Christmas, stinking of cheap whisky, and instead of trinkets and tidbits he brought pain and fear. And why did he eventually tire of even that terrible, brutal contact and send me away to...”
Scrooge swallows, the deluge of suppressed memories threatening to choke him, to drown him under their waves. “Why did he let that ma— no, no I shan’t call it a man... why did he let that BEAST ... defile me? Let it take me into its bed and into its hands and its mouth and—and—and—” Scrooge stutters to a stop, rage mixing with bile at the memory of the headmaster’s touch. He pauses, and anger wins the struggle and rises to the surface. He turns to face Lottie, his face set in a frightening, furious mask.
“Our FATHER,” he spits, as if the words were poison in his mouth, “took every shred of innocence I had and spent it like the coin he had lost, and just as freely. He treated me worse than chattel livestock. He used me as a target for his fits of rage, and when he finally tired of that he sold my body to the worst of humanity — and with it my soul. And when you came... when you finally came... It was too late. You came with your carriage and your gun, and it was too late.”
At this revelation, the mask cracks. Shoulders slump fractionally, Scrooge’s head drops to hide his face, and a hissing sound escapes his thin lips. It takes a moment before Lottie recognizes it as the sound of a man trying desperately not to cry. She removes her glove and reaches carefully for her brother’s hand. Her baby brother, her Ebbie. They sit like that for a time, the only sounds Scrooge’s increasingly breathless fight against the inevitable. She waits, knowing what is coming.
“Lottie...” When he finally speaks his voice is gravel, as if he hadn’t spoken for very long time. A small portion of his mind wonders how that could be. Perhaps they had been here for hours, perhaps days. Time was passing without meaning or context here in this graveyard. Perhaps they had been here long enough to relive his entire existence and he would soon die. Scrooge feels an odd twinge of comfort in that last thought, but finally he pulls that part of his mind back to the present, or whenever this is, and turns to face his sister once more.
“Lottie... Why couldn’t he love me?” A small hitch in his breath, as he steels himself to continue. “And why couldn’t I love you?“ At this, he meets his sister’s eyes. She smiles gently and squeezes his hand. A dam finally bursts, the anger and pain of nearly 50 years breaking through the carefully constructed walls of his damaged psyche, and Scrooge collapses into ragged, bitter sobs.
The graveyard is hushed. The voices inside the church have faded away like ghosts. The granite pony looks down on the two souls seated below it and watches as one of them leans entirely into the embrace of the other. The pony watches as long festering wounds are finally opened up and allowed to breathe. A snowflake lands on the stone face, melting into something like a teardrop — a mirror of the man beneath it, who just might be starting to lose his own harsh granite exterior.