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Homes for the Holidays

by Heather Shaw & Tim Pratt

 

I stood on the slumlord’s doorstep and took a deep breath — one of the last I would take in this body, which had served me well despite being treated badly. It’s not the body I was born with — I don’t think I started with a body at all. I don’t know what I am, or where I come from, just that I need a human body to host my own consciousness.

My current body wasn’t totally worn out yet, but sometimes I switched for strategic reasons, like now. Even if I want to settle in, I’m forced to take a new host every twenty years or so. Maybe that sounds like a lot compared to a human lifespan, but since I’m immortal (so far), twenty years is a fraction of a fraction, and it feels like I’ve barely settled into a new skin before I have to go looking for a new one. Even when I pick a young, healthy body, something about hosting me puts unusual strain on the brain, and they usually pop an aneurysm, even if I take good care of them.

I hadn’t taken such good care of this latest body. But I was trying to do better.

You can only hover on someone’s doorstep in a suburb for so long before you attract trouble, so I knocked on the door. Someone shouted something garbled and hostile from inside, and then an old man awash with gray stubble and wearing a misbuttoned cardigan opened the door and glared at me. He didn’t even ask if he could help me.

“Marvis Sims?” I asked.

“Who wants to know?” His voice was raspy and his breath was heavy.

I briefly felt guilty for making him come to the door. Then I reminded myself who he was, and why I was here, and straightened my spine. I could have jumped right into him . . . but I needed to be sure this was Sims, and not his elderly father or something.

“I’m —” I began, and then a woman in her thirties approached, her expression more curious than hostile. She was wearing a headband with reindeer antlers on them, the antlers festooned with little blinking lights. It wasn’t Christmas yet, but it was coming.

Ho, ho, ho.

“I need to find Marvis Sims,” I told her.

“You found him,” she said, nodding towards the man. “What can we help you with?”

The old man turned to scowl at her, and opened his mouth to say something that wouldn’t have been in keeping with the holiday spirit, so I jumped into him, and let my old body crumple dead on the steps.

I know. That’s not in keeping with the holiday spirit, either. But here’s why I did it:

---

Listen, I’ve been around a long time, and I used to be fairly callous about my whole deal. Yes, when I take a body, the original inhabitant seems to vanish, or get overwritten, or whatever. And it’s no picnic for their loved ones, either, since those people are meaningless to me. I usually cut all ties with them via faked head injuries, amnesia, religious conversions, midlife crises, or just straight-up ghosting (though I do keep the bank accounts). I realize that living as I do seems reprehensible. But what am I supposed to do? Gazelles don’t much like lions, but lions have to eat. If I try not to take a body, I float on the breeze without control until I get close to one, and then I take that one. At least this way, doing it deliberately, I get to choose.

For a long time, I chose the richest and most privileged, because when you’re in a body, you can experience pleasure and pain, and pleasure is preferable. Of course, nowadays the average middle-class worker lives a life that a monarch two centuries ago would have found inconceivably luxurious — indoor plumbing, temperature controls, TVs, refrigerators, take-out delivery, video games, a credit line high enough for plane tickets to Aruba. I don’t inhabit presidents or the ultra-rich to get what I want — they’re under too much scrutiny and demands. It’s not necessary when a 27-year-old programmer can order all the burritos and opioids a psychic parasite could desire.

It’s surprisingly easy to pass a few centuries in a blur of sensual pleasures, jumping to a new body when the money runs out or the consequences catch up, but when you live as long as I do . . . you get bored. So this last time, when the (now laid-off) tech worker I was living inside in Oakland hit the end of their credit line after about five years, and those envelopes with red letters on the front started to pile up, I didn’t ditch into the body of one of my more prosperous neighbors. I thought, Let’s see how this plays out.

How it played out was, that jerk Michael started calling a lot, and when I threw my phone off the balcony, he started showing up at the door. Michael was the landlord, and he wasn’t happy that I abruptly stopped paying my rent. He was a little older than my own body, mid-thirties, losing hair and gaining belly, and he’d always been useless — if an appliance broke down or a drain clogged he’d insist it was my fault somehow, and once he finally got around to sending a repair guy, it was never someone bonded and licensed, but just some random handyman acquaintance who usually left things either worse or just differently broken. I cursed him to his face, and told him to leave me alone.

I came back from a walk around the neighborhood to find Michael changing the locks on my door, so cheap he was doing it himself and just installing an entirely new doorknob. He looked at me and was about to start yelling so I thought, Nah, and took his body, letting my old one crumple to the floor, empty. (Which is to say: dead.)

I walked off in Michael’s body, whistling and jingling his keys. He lived on the site, in a nice big apartment on the top floor, and I decided I would ruin his life, even though the person whose life I wanted to ruin was already gone. What can I say? I was a lot more petty back then. (Which is to say: several months ago.)

But it turned out the best way to ruin Michael’s life was to help improve the lives of others, and that was strangely appealing to me. I’d found the demands for back rent, the threats, and the fists pounding on the door at all hours incredibly stressful . . . and I’d always had the option to escape and hide in another body. What about my laid-off neighbors, who were trapped in their bodies and, thus, in their dwindling circumstances? I’d never given much thought to alleviating human misery, but I was in the position to do so now, and why not? If nothing else, it would be an interesting change from my usual lives.

See, it turned out Michael didn’t even own the building, he was just a property manager, and that meant I could get him fired and improve the lives of others. First, I approved all the pending repair requests and authorized brand new, top-of-the line appliances for every tenant under my care (which included a couple of other buildings, too). When people asked if they could pay rent late, I told them they could skip the month entirely, and when word from on high came to raise people’s rates, I just ignored them. I adjusted the terms of new leases to give more power and lock in long-term cheap rent for the tenants. Eventually I stopped collecting rent entirely, and in a flash of inspiration, faked some records and destroyed others to create a total muddle that would make it impossible for the powers-that-be to figure out who really owed what. I couldn’t play games like that forever, though.

So some months later, Michael’s body was the one standing outside his apartment with a key that didn’t work anymore, and a bunch of pending legal action, so I just decided to . . . walk away.

I was wandering around the city, thinking about where to sleep that night, and that’s when I really noticed the tents that had started popping up lately. Rents had risen and evictions were rampant, and the manufacturing jobs were long gone. The homeless encampments were full of people who’d done nothing wrong, but simply lost their jobs, gotten evicted, and had no one to catch them when they fell. I’d helped my tenants as a way of screwing over Michael, as revenge, but it occurred to me that I might have saved a few people from ending up on the streets — given them a couple of months to find new jobs or sort out their situations, when the original Michael would have turfed them out.

Normally in this situation I would have jumped bodies, but this time . . . I don’t know. I walked down a side street past a tent with a blue tarp strung haphazardly over the top as a makeshift shade structure and exchanged nods with the tired-looking man sitting on a milk crate, and I thought, I wonder what that’s like? Maybe I was developing a conscience. Maybe I’d gotten bored with the high life and wanted to experience the other side of life. I know now that’s like a rich kid going to live in a hippie squat or something, all while having mommy and daddy just a phone call away: when you know you’ve got an escape catch, you can never really know what it’s like to be desperate.

I had a car that the landlord-body had owned, and I parked it on a street alongside an encampment that, it turned out, housed some of the people Michael had evicted before I’d taken over his body. I should have moved on when I realized some of my former neighbors were among my new neighbors, but after all, Michael had just been following orders, so why would they hold their lot against him? That was stupid of me — after all, I’d hated him enough, personally, to steal his body and wreck his life.

Someone set fire to the car while I was sleeping in it, and when I woke to smoke and heat, I almost jumped into a nearby unhoused person out of pure fear. But I managed to scramble out of the car, and I stood across the street and watched the only home I had left burn, along with my meager possessions. It took emergency services a long time to arrive, and the residents of the encampment had to waste precious water putting out the flames that had jumped from my car to a nearby tent.

People were mad at me about that, as if I’d set fire to my own car, but I knew they weren’t really angry at me: they were angry at Michael. And they weren’t even really mad at him. I’d learned a lot about Bay Area real estate in the prior months, and I knew there weren’t that many actual landlords left, as in, individual people who owned and rented out property. Almost all the apartment buildings were owned by corporations, owned by other corporations, with life-and-death decisions handed down by people who’d never even heard the names of their tenants. So I didn’t get mad at them.

I had nothing to my name any more, just the clothes on my back, and they smelled like smoke. This was one of the very worst experiences I’d ever had, especially in a body that had some privilege to begin with. It was my fault for trying to mess around in human affairs — this kind of thing never happened when I simply enjoyed the benefits the host body had to offer. I sat on the cold concrete by the ashes of my car, hungry and thirsty and aware of the glares from my neighbors, and considered going into San Francisco and finding a wealthy tech bro to jump into.

But when you’ve lived as long as I have, novel experiences are a rare thing, and despite the discomfort, are interesting. So I stayed put. I wanted to know what happened when a person reached their lowest point, because I always left before things got anywhere near that bad.

What happens is: you find new lows. I walked the streets in the bad parts of town, passing encampments, trash heaps, broken RVs, and other burned-out cars. It made me feel strangely relieved that mine wasn’t a unique experience . . . but how awful for anyone to experience that at all. These people couldn’t escape their circumstances as easily as I could, and loss of home and mobility all at once was something many wouldn’t be able to recover from.

I found a small encampment under the overpass of a freeway, and thought I might at least benefit from safety in numbers. In a horrible instance of small-world syndrome, I caught sight of Jerry and Lisa, two of “my” old tenants, standing in a group and talking. When I saw them I started to turn around — I didn’t have a car to burn this time, and I didn’t want anyone setting me on fire directly instead.

“Hey! Michael, right? You were our property manager.” He was skinnier than he had been last time I saw him, but still big enough to do me real damage. Except his voice wasn’t angry. He sounded . . . surprised? Sympathetic?

I trudged toward them, head down. “Yes. I’m sorry about —”

“No apologies needed, man!” He put an arm around Lisa. “You let us stay for months, even after we couldn’t make rent. I think we might have been the reason you got fired, when the owners realized you hadn’t kicked us out. You risked a lot for us. We really appreciate it. You’re good.”

I’d never had anyone tell me I was good before.

“You really lost everything, huh?” Jerry shook his head. “You look rough. Do you have a place to sleep tonight?”

I didn’t need to sleep, but my bodies lasted longer when I let them rest. “Not really. I was staying in my car, but . . . somebody burned it.”

“Oh shit, really? That sucks. Look, we’re not super organized like some of the bigger encampments, but we’ve got a good group of people here, we watch out for each other. I’ll talk to the others, but you’re welcome to join us.”

“I . . . thank you.” I was strangely touched. Here was a person with almost nothing, offering kindness to someone who had even less. My understanding of humans was mostly that they were callous, selfish, short-sighted, and cruel. Had I misjudged them? Certainly it was to my benefit to misjudge them — it’s easier to exploit people when you think they’re awful. But I’d also surrounded myself with a certain type of person over the years: the most privileged in society. It was possible they’d given me a . . . skewed view of the whole.

A couple of other people in the encampment remembered Michael from the time before I occupied him — they were friends of Jerry’s from back when they were all neighbors, and more experienced at life on the street . . . because I’d kicked them out. They were cold to me, but kept their distance. I tried to make it up to them by cleaning up trash in the camp and securing extra food whenever I could.

The novelty wore off quickly, though. I’d been in bad situations before (even the privileged suffer when there’s a revolution, after all), and they didn’t improve with repetition. I didn’t like sleeping in the cold on the ground, and being hungry, and though there was generosity and good fellowship in the camp, there was also misery and desperation. And yet, for some reason, I still didn’t jump. Had this become about more than just novelty? Was I doing more than just “roughing it” for the experience?

The weather got colder as November wore on, but I noticed that as my discomfort grew, so did the kindness and warmth of those around me. The folks who had been judging me by my body’s previous actions were starting to talk to me. “You seem like an entirely different person,”  a woman named Ellie told me around the fire one night. I shrugged and tried not to smile. If you only knew.

Instead I said, “I realized I . . . didn’t like the person I was. I decided I should try to live a better life. Be a better person.” I laughed. “Look how that turned out.”

“Yeah, Jerry told us you let him stay in his apartment even though he couldn’t make rent. He said you eventually lost your job over it, and that’s how you ended up here.” The woman shook her head. “I wish you’d found your soul before you evicted me, but better late than never.”

I found it amusing that I was given credit for “finding” my soul when I had evicted the actual soul that belonged to this body. It did make me feel better about taking Michael, though — maybe my “soul” was actually an improvement.

Huh. I’d never cared about whether taking a given body was justified or not. What was happening to me?

Ellie sighed. “You heard we’re getting evicted again, though, right?”

I stared at her, then looked around at our motley collection of tents and shelters. “They’re going to evict us from our . . . tents? But they’re ours. We don’t have landlords anymore.”

Ellie snorted and brushed her lank bangs out of her face. “You are new to this life. Yeah. The city sweeps the encampments pretty often. They say they’re cleaning up the city, that we attract rats and spread disease and all that bullshit, but it’s just a chance to let the sadists kick us when we’re down and take our stuff.”

“They steal from us?” I’d stolen plenty in my time, even beyond actual human bodies, but I didn’t steal from people who had so little.

She laughed, a hard bark with no mirth. “No. They throw the tents and everything inside them into dump trucks. Last year I lost everything — my meds, my food and water, even the few Christmas presents I’d managed to get for my nieces. All gone. The cops even force out the legal observers who come from community organizations to try and protect us. They’re not supposed to do that, but you know how it is. Down here on our level the cops decide what the law is.”

My stomach hurt, not just from hunger. This was a new, sour feeling.

“How could they be so cruel?” But I knew. I knew because I’d been doing the same thing — worse, even — for centuries: throwing a whole person, hopes, dreams, loves, and all, into the unknown. But at least I was doing that partly from necessity, because I had to live somewhere. The politicians who ordered the sweeps and the cops who enacted it were doing it to hurt people who’d already suffered so much. When they could have used those resources to help, instead.

It was a choice. Everything was a choice.

Ellie just shook her head. I knew she was thinking how naïve I was. But I wasn’t. I’d lived for centuries. I wasn’t naïve, not really. I just hadn’t thought about it.

Finally, after a long minute, she said, “They’re planning to do a sweep on Christmas Eve. The worst time of the year to evict someone. If these cops had found Jesus and Mary in that stable behind the inn, they would have dragged her out by her hair and thrown all their frankincense and myrrh in the garbage.”

The innkeeper had offered them that spot in the barn, as I recalled, but I took her point. “We should leave before they come, we still have time.”

“And go where?”

“There must be another spot, some other underpass . . .”

She shook her head. “They’ll just get us there, too. And it’s hard to move everyone, especially the older folks. Some people hardly ever leave their tents. We take care of them here. But when the city does these sweeps, the ones who can’t walk away get taken to facilities, and we lose them — sometimes for a little while, but sometimes we never see them again. Others get lost in the chaos and wander off, and by the time we find them, they’re sicker, or dying . . . or dead. Folks die every sweep, pretty much, but somehow, not knowing what’s become of someone makes it so much worse.”

I sat with that for a long while.

As the days turned colder, I reckoned with my history. I thought about my brief experiment with helping people. When I took over Michael’s body, I’d done so out of anger. Even when I decided to help people, at first I thought the landlord had the power to forgive late rents, to lower exorbitant fees, to prevent people from being evicted in the first place. I’d been embarrassingly wrong about that, but I’d still done some good. That was only my first try. Maybe . . . I could do better next time.

This thought of moving on gave me an uncharacteristic pang. The camp was starting to feel like my people, when I’d always been a tribe of one. My willingness to help out around the camp — and my excellent skill at cooking over campfires, a skill I’d mastered centuries before — had even endeared me to the ones who hated me for my past as a landlord. I’d lived a long time, and known many people, but never before had I truly belonged to a family. I wasn’t born into a family, like most humans are; I could only ever have the family I chose, and this was the first one I had chosen.

If I left, this body would die. Even if I took steps to improve their lives, they wouldn’t know it was me, the “Michael” they’d spend these months with. I wouldn’t get any of the credit, or at least, not as myself. I’d be their benefactor, but I wouldn’t be one of them.

I decided that didn’t matter. What mattered was helping. Even though I’d lose my place among them in the process.

I needed a new body, but it had to be the right body: one with the power to save my friends, and fast. My first thought was: steal the richest, most powerful person I can. But those people were often well guarded or, at least, not easily accessible. It wasn’t going to be easy to get within a few feet of a tech billionaire, and I wasted some time lurking around various corporate headquarters until I got run off; I looked pretty rough.

But I soon realized I was aiming too high. I didn’t need billions. Right now, I just needed to save the lives of fourteen people. A billionaire suddenly taking interest in this specific tiny encampment under the MacArthur freeway would raise questions, too. All I really needed was someone who owned an apartment building with a dozen empty units. Someone with the money to fix it up and let the residents stay for free indefinitely, or at least give them time to get on their feet; people are suspicious of deals that are too good. Maybe I could arrange a work trade on the property for people who didn’t, or couldn’t, work regular jobs.

November turned into December. I was sleeping rough, and didn’t have regular access to a bathroom, let alone a shower and a clean wardrobe. Even getting to a well-off property owner was going to be a challenge.

A shower truck rolled around two weeks before Christmas, and we all got a chance to clean up. I’d picked up a set of decent clothes from a charity, so I even had something clean to change into afterwards. We’d gotten a donation of razors and shaving cream, so with a shave and my hair combed, I looked relatively presentable. (Another reason I was glad this body wasn’t a woman’s: they have to do so much more to achieve what today’s society considers “presentable.” I wished I could do something about that, but: one giant problem at a time.)

I’d been doing research at the local library, trying to figure out a vile and viable candidate for my plans. A kind librarian — well, they were all kind, but this one was particularly helpful — pointed me to a website that listed the owners of every property in the area. That was a huge help, and I was grateful for the human ingenuity that led to the invention of the internet, even though I gathered that that same internet was responsible for putting truly horrible people in power.

I had found several promising empty properties, but they were owned by big corporations. I found one empty apartment building owned by an individual, but it was a young woman who’d inherited the property and was struggling to raise funds to renovate it so she could use it as low-income housing. She was trying to do good, so I couldn’t take her.

Finally, I found a website that rated landlords. I could filter by rating, and quickly generated a list of one-star offenders. I highlighted the ones with the most egregious behavior described in the comments, and went down the list.

Corporation. Corporation. Corporation. These were all property managers, not owners. They were probably awful people, but they weren’t powerful awful people.

Then, at last, I found a small, run-down apartment building in a gentrifying neighborhood owned by a scumbag named Marvis Sims. He only had one tenant left in the building, and he ranted on landlord forums about how the “fascist” rent board wouldn’t let him evict her and “do renovations.” (There are only about fifteen cities in California that have rent control at all, and while they’re better than nothing, they’re not a lot better.) Sims really just wanted to kick her out, slap on a coat of paint, and triple the rent. I walked by a few times, and the building was almost perfect — sure, there was a tenant there already, and it was only a ten-unit building, but my people were used to close quarters. Some of them could double up.

Getting close to Sims before Christmas Eve was going to be tough. He lived in a bedroom community and rarely came into the city itself, sending his managers to his properties instead. I had to panhandle aggressively for days to get enough bus fare.

I said my farewells to everyone in the camp, telling them I was going to reconnect with some distant cousins who had a spare room and had offered it in a spirit of holiday generosity. Some were happy for me, some were angry and jealous, and Jerry worried I wouldn’t be able to make it back to camp if things didn’t work out. Ellie heard where I was going and made a big stink about how that (basically all-white) city was notoriously horrible to the unhoused: “They basically arrest anyone who lays down in public. The Supreme Court made it legal for them to do that, too. They sweep up a tent as soon as it goes up! And your cousins, whoever they are, probably applaud!”

Everything she said was true, apart from the applause of my imaginary cousins, but I told her family was family, and that once I got on my feet, I’d try to come back and help. Ellie just snorted and walked away, shaking her head.

Not the way I wanted us to part, but at least Jerry and Lisa hugged me.

It was maybe a forty-five minute drive to the Sims house, but everything takes longer when you’re broke. I took a train to the end of the line, then caught a bus, and then transferred to another bus, and then started walking. The Sims residence was a few miles from the nearest transit stop. It was getting dark by the time I got to his neighborhood, a suburb built in the 1970s but still in great shape. Much better shape than his buildings, anyway.

I walked up to the front door, and, well, that’s where we started.

---

I looked out of Sims’s eyes — his vision wasn’t great — at the slumped form of Michael. The woman beside me (apparently Sims’s daughter?) dropped and started doing chest compressions, admirably practical. Had scumbag slumlord Sims raised a decent kid? More likely his wife had.

I lurched out onto the steps, stumbling in the unfamiliar form. Sims was . . . not in great shape. I could feel his lungs laboring, his heart churning sludgy blood, his muscles aching, his joints cracking. I wasn’t going to get twenty years out of this body. I might not even get twenty days.

Twenty hours might do it.

I hadn’t considered that I’d have an audience for this, so I needed to improvise. I turned, looking around the foyer. There were keys on a little side table — to a Tesla, good lord — and I snatched them up and sidled out, around my daughter and poor empty Michael.

“I’m going to get help!” I shouted, and hurried to the low-slung car parked on the curb.

“What? Dad! Just call 911!”

“My phone’s in the car!” I yelled, hustling as fast as this old Sims body could. I was wearing slippers and didn’t have a coat, but that would only sell the story better.

“But it’s my car!” she shouted just before I slammed the door, jabbed the ignition button, and drove away.

Traffic was light, so I made it back to the camp in under forty minutes. It was full dark then, and I parked the Tesla about a block away from the camp. I didn’t expect it to still be there when I got back, but that was fine. I’d be leaving in an ambulance.

I stumbled like I’d had a few too many drinks, weaving all over and shouting just this side of incoherently.

“Merry Christmas to all!” I slurred. “Are you angels? Is this heaven? Am I Santa Claus? Bah ho hum!”

I lurched toward the camp, and Jerry and Ellie and Lisa and the others emerged, and then I stopped, stared at them, said, “I don’t feel so good,” and fell face-forward. It was so hard not to catch myself, and my nose breaking was the worst pain I’d experienced in decades, but I lay there, inert, while my friends fluttered around me and the one person with a charged cell phone called to report a medical emergency. They helped me up and sat with me and I looked at them, dazed, and said I couldn’t remember where I was or how I’d gotten there, and then I asked all their names and they humored and indulged me until the paramedics came and took me away.

I fell asleep at some point. I awoke the next morning, the day before Christmas Eve, in a hospital bed. My nose was set but throbbing. The daughter — my daughter, for a little while anyway — was sitting in a chair beside me. She grabbed my hand tightly.

“Dad! What happened to you? Are you all right?”

“I got disoriented,” I said. “I was trying to get help, got turned around, got lost, didn’t know where I was.”

“I know.” She laughed, a scattered sound. “You were found by some filthy pack of homeless people, you’re lucky they didn’t rob you and leave you for dead —”

I jerked my hand away from her. Maybe I hadn’t raised such a great daughter. “Those people saved my life. Lawyer,” I croaked. “Call my lawyer.”

“What? Dad, I —”

“Now.” I said it sternly, and Sims must have been the tyrant I reckoned, because she meekly brought out my phone, had me unlock it, and then dialed for me.

“I don’t care if it’s two days until Christmas,” I snapped when the recipient objected. “I almost died tonight, and I need to make some arrangements right now.” I talked to the lawyer for a long time, and my daughter argued with me, but then she came around. Eventually I received a set of contracts and signed them electronically, then forwarded the documents to my daughter.

“You’ll take them?” I said hoarsely. “Make sure they’re signed?”

“Dad,” she said. “If this is what you want, of course, and it’s very generous, but . . .”

“They saved my life,” I said, and I meant it, though not the way this daughter thought I did. “The least I can do is help improve their lives. Promise me you’ll do this.” I paused. “Please. It’s Christmas.”

“I never thought your heart would grow three sizes. Were you visited by three ghosts last night or something?”

“No, but I almost became one, which is more than enough.”

She kissed my forehead, then looked down at her phone and laughed. “How did you learn all their full names?”

I tapped my temple. “I asked them last night, and I remembered. My body may be breaking down, but my mind is still sharp.” I considered what last words I could offer my friends. I said, “Tell them I say thank you. Tell them I want them to have a happy new year.”

“I will,” she said. “I’ll come see you when it’s finished.”

She wouldn’t, but I didn’t tell her that.

My new daughter — I never did learn her name — went to take the leases I’d had drawn up to the people who’d saved my life. The paperwork promised them all two years in my apartment building, utilities included, rent free, starting immediately, and then favorable terms upon renewal. I’d even arranged for a moving company to help transport them and their possessions. I knew some of my people would have trouble getting their feet under them, even in two years, but the others would help. They were family. That’s what family does, when it’s the family you chose.

I’d made sure my family would get to spend Christmas Eve, and a whole lot of days after that, warm and dry and safe.

A nurse came in shortly afterward to check on me. I’d been diagnosed with dehydration and a UTI, which can cause confusion in older people, so that was a lucky bit of set dressing.

Before the nurse could leave, I said, “Wait, I had an old friend here at the hospital, been in a coma for a while, do you know who I mean?”

She hesitated, then said, “Are you talking about Stephen Marley?”

I nodded. “That’s him. Did anyone visit him? For Christmas, I mean?”

She sighed. “No, I’m afraid not. People used to come more often, but. Well. It’s been a while.”

I nodded. “Is he still in room 312?”

She cocked her head, frowning. “No, 516, two floors up.”

“Ah. Do you think I could go up and visit? Someone should, it’s the holidays . . .”

“You need to stay in bed,” she said firmly, and walked away.

So I waited until there was some commotion on the floor, everybody running for a code, and disconnected myself from the monitors (I’ve been enough doctors to pick up a few things). I pulled on a shirt and pants and made my way to the elevator, pushing my new old body hard. That would cut down the life expectancy, but I didn’t need Sims for much longer.

I made my way up to the fifth floor, managing to avoid notice — this close to Christmas it was something of a skeleton crew up there anyway — and found room 516. It was a double, with a privacy curtain in the middle, but the other half was unoccupied. I shut the door and sat beside Mr. Marley. He was pretty young, in his thirties probably, and breathing on his own, which was a good sign. There were no obvious wounds — no big dents in his skull, anyway. I could operate even grievously injured bodies; they just didn’t last as long. He would do, and this time, I wasn’t stealing anybody’s life, or at least, I was doing a lot less harm than usual.

I jumped. I opened my new eyes and sat up, pushing the slack muscles hard, and looked around. What was left of Sims was slumped in the chair.

I yelled until some nurses came, and told them my friend Marvis had come to visit me, and his voice called me back to consciousness, and isn’t this a Christmas miracle? There was a lot of excitement.

Forcing those atrophied legs to move would shorten the lifespan of this body but I wasn’t interested in doing years of physical therapy. Doctors don’t like to let newly awakened coma patients walk out of the hospital, but if you’re calm and insistent and sign the right papers, and if nobody on your emergency contacts answers the phone because they’re out of the country for the holidays — then you can manage. I would have just run for it, if they’d tried to hold me much longer.

My first step would be dropping by my encampment, to observe from a distance and make sure the moving trucks came and Ms. Sims honored her father’s last wishes. I was fairly confident she would. If she didn’t . . . well, then that meant she wasn’t a very good person, and I’d take her body and make her be honorable.

As for what I’d do after that . . . well. There were a lot of camps. There were a lot of people who needed help, and a lot of people in a position to give help, who chose to dole out pain instead.

I was a parasite by nature. I couldn’t live without doing harm to others. Even with my heart grown three sizes, I had to admit that much.

But, oh, I could be a lot more careful when it came to choosing my targets.

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Host Commentary

Good morning, good day, good afternoon and good evening, and welcome to PodCastle, the flying castle of fantasy fiction. I’m your host, Matt Dovey, and it is my pleasure to present for your enjoyment, our annual Christmas original by Heather Shaw and Tim Pratt, a tradition stretching back almost uninterrupted for 14 years. This year is “Homes for the Holidays”, narrated for you by the nicest man in SFF himself, Alasdair Stuart. This story is, of course, a PodCastle Original.

And talking of traditions, forget ye not the traditional Escape Artists End of Year Fundraiser, which definitely counts as a tradition by time it’s happened twice! This year we have a matching fund of $7000 from some exceedingly generous, long-standing, and undoubtedly attractive, intelligent and charismatic donors, which means that for every penny you donate in the month of December 2024, this matching fund will double it. Imagine if every time you put a cake in the oven, two came out an hour later! Wouldn’t life be wonderful. Well, that’s us this month, except we need you to put the cake in, and then when it comes out we kind of donate it to people in exchange for stories you’ll enjoy and ANYWAY this metaphor has gotten away from me a little, but the point is that now is the best time there’s ever been in our whole 20 year history to donate, because your donation will be doubled and then we can make it go further than ever thanks to our shiny 501(c)(3) non-profit status which gets us all sorts of reduced fees on things like Paypal payment processing, Google for Business rates and what have you.

I think I mentioned some numbers earlier in the year, but in 2023 81% of our money went straight back out to creatives–either authors, narrators or crew–with about 10% on the fees we pay to Patreon and Paypal to receive all those donations, and the remaining 8% covering literally everything else–all our hosting, all our fees for sending money, all our tools and platforms… running an entirely donation-funded enterprise for two decades online means we have gotten incredibly efficient at using that money. So, for example, if you sign up to our Patreon for the first time this month, at the Premium Content tier for £4.50 a month (in UK prices), we’ll actually get £108 once the matching fund doubles it, and about 88 quid will go straight back out to paying people for the work they’ve done in writing, narrating or producing the actual show. That’s a pretty good magic trick, aye?

This doubling applies, as mentioned, to any new Patreon subscriptions this month–and remember that you can get an annual sub for 12% off right now too–and any one off donations through PayPal, Ko-Fi or any of the buttons on the front page of our website. We only get to be here doing this because the 1% of you go above and beyond in choosing to support us for what we give away for free, so thank you, thank you, thank you, and if you’ve not yet become a member of that elite and very excellent club, who I’m told all smell very nice and never make anyone feel uncomfortable by saying the wrong thing in small talk, well, now is better than ever, so please do consider it.

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…aaaaand welcome back. That was “Homes for the Holidays” by Heather Shaw and Tim Pratt, and if you enjoyed that then honestly, please, just go to our website, find the story post, click on Heather or Tim’s name then scroll down to the “Authored Episodes” bit, because this is the 13th such Christmas story from them, and there’s no point in me listing them all out here because it’ll all blur into one for you, so you can find the past 12 stories there, download them, and instead of giving all those birds to your true love, you ornithological weirdo, you can give them a Christmas story every day instead. Oh, except! Don’t listen to the Ghost of Christmas Possible from 2011 just yet, because you’ll get that next week as our tale from the vaults–primarily because we had Al reading today’s story, and that one was narrated by his dad Ian, and it all just felt very neat and meant to be.

On today’s story, Homes for the Holiday, Heather and Tim said: We’d like to thank our dear friend Todd Meister, founder of Bread and Thorns Mutual Aid Collective, for providing the inspiration for this piece by sharing stories of what life is actually like out there for so many unhoused people today; any details we got wrong are our own. If you would like to find out more about the collective, please visit them on Instagram @‌bat_mac and consider donating to their efforts at gofundme.com/f/bread-thorns-mutual-aid-collective.

Thank you, both, for one more Christmas story, and for the important outreach and awareness work. Homelessness is, somehow, an accepted part of our Christmas stories now–think of the pigeon lady in Home Alone, or the charity collection in Dicken’s Christmas Carol–and I fear it’s become part of the set-dressing rather than a moral abomination that sits ill on all the powers that be. Most people that end up unhoused do not end up there because of their own fecklessness or moral failing–though more on that in a moment–but because rents are astronomical, evictions are easy, and life is frequently a series of one unlucky event after another, any one of which could be enough to knock you off the knife edge that capitalism keeps us all balanced on, all the better to exploit us. Here’s a fun stat, and by “fun” I mean “utterly horrifying”: 2% of London’s population is unhoused[1], and it’s as much as 5% in some boroughs.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this book in an outro yet, though no apologies if I have, but I read Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman earlier in the year, which is a remarkable book in many ways and one I’d thoroughly recommend. Its basic premise is to demonstrate how all the supposedly blue-sky, it-would-never-work left wing ideals like universal basic income, 20 hour work weeks etc. are not only possible but actually make more sense from an economic point of view–which is the usual defence of the right in trying to dismiss these ideas as fantasies. And, indeed, one such topic is on homelessness, and how to solve it. Current systems have layers of temporary shelters, bureaucracy, patchy support and moral judgements, but do you know what the easiest way to resolve a homeless person’s problems is? It’s so laughably, grammatically simple: you give them a home. Literally that easy! You don’t have a home, okay then here’s a home. And when I say “solve their problems” I don’t just mean that you’ve now facetiously ticked that one box and abandoned them–no, giving them a home to live in rent-free, no questions asked, no requirements imposed, gives them the stability to then get their feet back under them and rebuild their lives: something that is frequently not possible when you don’t have an address to get a bank account to get paid into by a job you therefore can’t get to afford a home, which is just a perfect, awful trap, isn’t it?

Of course, such a carefree, carte-blanche approach to solving a problem must be exorbitantly expensive, right? Bzzt. Wrong. Because you are giving people the actual support they need, they end up only needing it once, and they’re pretty swiftly back into self-supporting circumstances: whereas right now all our approaches do nothing at all to actually fix anything, but are just a salve for our guilt, a way to sleep at night. That costs more than just fixing the problem properly for folk would. How utterly, completely absurd that we do anything else but this.

I said I’d come back to “fecklessness and moral failings” as a cause for homelessness. I’m about to tell you the most insidious, evil phrase in contemporary English, one repeated so often it has become a banality, a thought-terminating cliché, and you have stopped hearing it for what it actually says: “earn a living”.

Earn it? Earn a living?! If we cannot agree that the right to life is a basic sodding tenet of our civilization then what is even the point in this whole stupid edifice? “Earn a living”, for goodness’ sake! You earn luxuries, you earn respect; you shouldn’t have to earn the right not to starve or freeze to death on the streets! What awful, moral black hole is this at the centre of our economic galaxy? And yet, of course, it’s necessary and inherent to the current system as it’s only through the threat of withdrawing what ought to be our right to live in health, safety and security, that we can be coerced into accepting the working conditions, the pay, and the inequality that we do.

And so if someone has made some poor life choices–and I’m pretty bloody sure we all have, cos ain’t none of us perfect!–do they deserve to be punished so cruelly? Who do we think we are, to cast judgement on others for having made the wrong choice in a moment, for having been manipulated by the gambling industry, or for having sought solace from a miserable existence in drugs and alcohol?

Anyway. I fear I’m becoming a cliché of myself at this point, can’t even do a Christmas outro without getting upset about what a silly bloody corner we’ve painted ourselves into with capitalism. I’m on holiday for two weeks now, and I hope you’re getting a break too–and one of those actual breaks, where you aren’t permanently conscious of the emails piling up in your absence–and I hope you get to spend the time with those you love. Which leads me into this final dedication, though for the sake of discretion I’m afraid I won’t give more context than the episode itself already hints at: in loving memory of Orion Adey, born October 4, 1989, died September 28, 2023.

Merry Christmas, one and all.

[1] https://england.shelter.org.uk/media/press_release/at_least_309000_people_homeless_in_england_today#:~:text=London comes out worst%2C with,150%2C000 people to 167%2C000 people.