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The Sun Globe

Heather Shaw & Tim Pratt

 

Grace Morley was singing “Silver Bells” under her breath — it was part of the winter pageant she was organizing, and she’d heard it a hundred million times in the past few weeks — when she saw the handmade sign reading POP-UP HOLIDAY MARKET, ONE DAY ONLY! on a brick wall, with a zig-zagged arrow pointing down an alley she’d never noticed before.

She was on the outskirts of downtown, where there were still more empty storefronts than full ones. People said the area used to be nicer, before lockdown had forced so many businesses to close. The city was constantly trying things like this, one-day festivals and events, in an effort to bring traffic back to the neighborhood. Two weeks before Thanksgiving seemed a little early for a holiday market, but she had nowhere else to be that Saturday afternoon, and it gave a serendipitous twist to her afternoon walk.

The alley was so narrow, with tall brick buildings on either side, that it felt like dusk as soon as she stepped inside. As she dodged around a fetid puddle, she thought briefly of a picture she’d seen on the internet once: a decrepit, abandoned house, with the words FREE HUGS spray-painted beside the gaping doorway. It would take some pretty inventive muggers to try to lure victims to a fake market —

The sour smell of the puddle evaporated and the scent of roasted chestnuts had just started to tickle her nose when she heard the music, a piano rendition of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” she recognized from a Chilly Gonzales album, and couldn’t help but smile; she loved that one. Grace stepped out of the alley into a dazzle of sunlight, and once her eyes adjusted, she beheld a wide cobblestoned plaza, filled with tables and tents and booths and pavilions, all bedecked with garlands and holly and pine boughs, and strung with silver and gold tinsel. The scent of mulled cider joined the roasted chestnuts and the air filled with holiday cheer. Grace grinned: she’d always been a Christmas girlie, and even though at age 25 on a teacher’s salary she would have to make do with a little artificial tree and a few twinkle lights in her studio apartment, she was rich in the holiday spirit, and the sights and scents lit that familiar kindling in her chest. Yes, it was getting cold and dark, sunset coming before 5 p.m. already, but that was all the more reason to sip warm things and fill your life with light, right?

The market wasn’t very crowded, with scarcely more shoppers than vendors, so Grace easily moved among them, browsing and smiling. There were people in colorful saris, dark suits, and elegant headdresses, and she heard half a dozen languages in as many minutes — she loved living in the Bay Area, it was so multicultural, so different from the small town where she’d grown up. She lingered over delicate blown-glass ornaments in a rainbow of colors, vintage jewelry, music boxes, clever origami animals, miniature sculptures, carved wooden masks, and all manner of decorative bric-a-brac, but none of it demanded to be taken home. That was fine — browsing was a pleasure, and she didn’t have a lot of shopping to do anyway, or a lot of money to do it with. She needed something for her parents, her older sister, and her little niece, but she’d only been in the city for six months, didn’t have close friends, and wasn’t seriously dating anyone. Teaching music to kindergarteners through fifth graders ate up a lot of her time anyway, and swiping the apps was definitely a thing of the past until the winter pageant was over.

She paused at a table selling beautiful handmade instruments — recorders, tambourines, maracas, guiros, mandolins, and hand drums — but couldn’t justify the prices, tempted as she was. Her house was full of instruments she could barely play; the only thing she was really good at was piano, thanks to years of lessons. Fortunately you didn’t have to be a virtuoso to teach elementary school kids the rudiments of making a joyful noise. She complimented the man who’d made the instruments, though, a rotund bearded fellow who beamed at her in reply.

Grace bought a cup of hot cider with a swirl of caramel, one sip taking off the chill of the afternoon. She looked around the plaza, making sure she’d browsed at every booth — and then noticed another alley, on the other side of the market, with a handmade sign on the bricks that read:

ANTIQUITIES AND TANGIBLES

RARE FINDS AT FAIR PRICES

She peeked down the alley, a short passage that dead-ended in the back of another building, and there was a single booth set up near the end, a simple wooden construction like a kid’s lemonade stand, with a few glittering objects laid out on a bare wooden table. A serious-looking man with a white shirt buttoned up to his neck stood behind the booth, and a woman with long hair the color of beach sand sat on the end of the table, kicking her booted feet beneath her skirts. She gave a wave and said, “Come have a look, then!”

Grace stepped into the alley and approached, curious. The woman kept talking: “We have a little shop, brick and mortar, but it’s a little out of the way, so sometimes we hit these markets and fairs to meet new people.”

“That’s her idea,” the man said. “I was always perfectly happy to wait in the shop for customers to find me.”

“Don’t mind Martin, he’s an old grump.” The woman hopped off the table and offered her hand. “I’m Eunice, but you can call me Eunie. Why don’t you see if anything here catches your eye?”

“Oh, hello, lovely to meet you.” She glanced at the table, which only held about half a dozen objects, expecting garage sale junk, but —

She knelt to look into the eyes of a life-sized crystal skull. “That was made in Germany in the 1800s,” Martin said. “It was passed off as a pre-Colombian Mexican artifact, part of a whole series of hoaxes that managed to fool everyone from college professors to the British museum. Ironically, they’re actual antiques, now. And the whole curse thing is way overblown.”

“It doesn’t really scream ‘holiday season,’ though, does it?” Eunie chimed in.

“She wanted me to put a Santa hat on it.” Martin gave a theatrical shiver.

Grace chuckled and considered the other objects. There was a milky-blue glass bottle that caught the light strangely, making it seem like something moved inside. She was more taken by a shofar, a long curling ram’s horn that she longed to blow into to hear the sonorous tone. Beside the horn there was a small blue pot that held a perfect miniature evergreen tree no more than a foot and a half high, the cheery scent of pine making Grace realize this tiny tree was not a replica. “Is that a . . . bonsai Christmas tree?”

“A Japanese pine,” Martin said. “Eunie wanted me to put a star on top of it. That tree is 700 years old.”

Grace laughed, torn between shock and disbelief. These things must be priceless, and they were just out here on a wooden board in an alley! “I couldn’t possibly afford any of these things.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Eunie began, but then Grace spied something next to the pine, half hidden behind the pot, and picked it up.

“What a beautiful snow globe.” Grace held up the heavy glass orb, as big as pomegranate, resting on a bronze base etched with curlicued designs. There was a mountain inside the globe that looked exactly like Mt. Diablo, where she’d gone hiking a few times when she first moved to the East Bay. She gave the globe a shake, but frowned: there was no swirl of flakes, or glitter, or anything at all.

“Eunie, did you, ah, bring that?” Martin’s voice sounded oddly strained.

“You know I didn’t,” she snapped. “Dear, you should put that down, if you can —” She reached out a tentative hand.

Grace half turned away, shaking the globe harder and frowning. “Why doesn’t it snow?”

“It’s not a snow globe,” Martin said. “It’s . . . a sun globe. I wasn’t aware we had one in inventory. Though I suppose it has to show up somewhere. And it looks like it’s here, now, for you. I’m so sorry, Grace.”

It took an effort to tear her eyes away from the miniature mountain and look at the two shopkeepers, who shared identical looks of pity. “Wait. How do you know my name? No. Never mind. I’m leaving.” She meant to put the globe back down on the table, but . . . she didn’t. Her body simply ignored the order from her mind.

“You can’t leave until you’ve paid, love,” Eunie said. “But . . . you deserve to know what you’re buying.”

“That globe contains the unconquerable sun,” Martin said in a lecture-y voice. “I know it doesn’t look like it now, but on the winter solstice — that’s December 21 this year, a month from yesterday, at 7:03 a.m. local time — the sun, the actual sun, will rise from behind that mountain. At that moment, if you shatter the globe, the sun will return from its long winter slumber, and the days will start to grow longer again, taking us to spring and on to summer. Someone has to break the sun globe every year to make that happen. This year . . . that someone is you.”

Grace concentrated on putting the sun globe down, and simply couldn’t. She wasn’t paralyzed — she could hold the globe closer, easily — but she couldn’t rid herself of it. “What are you saying?” she asked. “None of this makes sense.”

“Ah, well, it’s mythic, isn’t it?” Martin said. “More dream logic than proper logic, I’m afraid.”

“Bringing back the sun is what most of these winter festivals are about, down at the bottom of everything,” Eunie put in. “Pushing back the darkness. Lighting fires, singing songs, all to entice the sun to return, to rescue us from darkness. There were rites for the old Roman god Mithras, of course, and a thousand other deities, but even Christ is called the Light of the World, and they choose to celebrate his birth in the dead of winter for a reason.”

“In some places, they did human sacrifices to bring back the sun,” Martin said. “Now someone just has to buy that globe and break it.” He shrugged. “Capitalism.”

“You’re saying I have to do some kind of ritual? That’s ridiculous.” She moved the globe from hand to hand. She could do that. She just couldn’t throw it at the wall or drop it on the ground.

“Many things are ridiculous, aren’t they?” Martin sighed. “But if you don’t break the globe on the solstice, well, the days will keep getting shorter, and shorter, until night is eternal.”

Did they think she was a fool? “That’s stupid! The sun is up right now. And in the Southern hemisphere it’s spring, and our winter solstice is their summer solstice.”

“Then the sun will probably get stuck on their side,” Eunie mused. “And their days will get longer and longer until they no longer experience night. Which is just a different variety of terrible, really.”

“It’s best not contemplated,” Martin said. “We should talk about what you owe, for the globe, Grace. What you have to pay.”

He’d said something about human sacrifice, hadn’t he? Grace tried to back away, but her feet seemed stuck to the dirty alley floor.

Eunie widened her eyes. “Heavens, no, not your life! No one’s asking for that.”

“It doesn’t work if you sacrifice yourself, anyway,” Martin muttered. “Too easy. Death is the end to suffering, and you have to suffer to save the world. No, you just have to give up something that’s crucial to you. Essential. It has to be a meaningful sacrifice, you see, if you want to bring back the sun. For you, that would be . . .” He cocked his head and squinted, then exchanged a glance with Eunice, who nodded.

“Music,” she said. “I’m sorry, dear. But you have to give up music.” Eunie reached out her hands, the fingers of one hand twisted into awkward claws, the other holding a small glass jar. She mimed pulling something from the air, stuffing it into the jar, and then stopping it with a cork.

Grace had a sudden overwhelming moment of vertigo, swaying on her feet, and Martin reached out a hand to steady her. She jerked away from his touch on her shoulder. “What? No, I don’t want this thing, take it back!” She tried to thrust the globe at them, but only ended up cradling it against her chest.

“The deal was struck when you picked up the globe,” Martin said. “I’m sorry, miss. It’s not fair. But know that, thanks to your sacrifice, the crops will grow, children will laugh on beaches, and billions of people will get to keep enjoying sunrises and sunsets.”

“I don’t want any part of this!” Grace cried. “If it’s so important, why don’t you do it?”

“I wish we could,” Eunie said. “But we can’t. For the same reason reindeer don’t make toys and elves don’t pull Santa’s sleigh. It’s not our job. We have a different job. Martin’s right, though. Try to take comfort. What you’re doing matters.”

“This is nonsense,” Grace began, and then blinked, because there was snow swirling all through the alley, thick flakes, and it didn’t snow in the Bay Area, that was half the reason she’d moved here. The snowfall whipped in all directions, up and down and sideways, obscuring the booth from view, and Martin’s voice said, “Remember, 7:03 a.m., on the dot!”

She stumbled to one side, blinded in the whiteout, and found a brick wall to lean against.

As suddenly as the snow began, it stopped, flakes melting from every surface, until nothing remained but damp patches on the bricks and asphalt. The Antiquities and Tangibles booth was gone as if it had never been, and when she lurched out of the alley, the holiday market was almost empty, just a couple of vendors left packing up, including the man with the wooden instruments.

The air was full of some horrible noise, a discordant, high-pitched racket, and she said, “What’s that awful sound?”

The man cocked his head and frowned at her, holding up a bluetooth speaker. “That’s ‘Silver Bells.’ Dean Martin. You prefer Bing Crosby and Carol Richards? A defensible choice, but I wouldn’t call old Dino’s version awful.”

Grace stared at him, then closed her eyes and listened as hard as she could, trying to detect the melody she’d heard so many times before. The song might as well have been composed for smoke alarm and leaf blower and jackhammer.

She stumbled away from the market, the sun globe clutched to her chest. She wanted to fling the horrid thing into the street, and suddenly knew that she could, she could put it down, or throw it away, or smash it on the ground . . . but she was afraid.

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The next month was hell.

Grace finally put the sun globe down, with great care, in her apartment. She wanted to doubt the reality of what had happened to her, but when she tried to play music on her phone, it was nothing but tinny noise. She had an old thirdhand upright piano, her prized possession, and even playing simple scales on it produced a howling discord that made her shudder. It wasn’t music: it was the sound of a car crash, a cat fight, parents fighting, a garbage disposal with a fork stuck in its teeth. The keys that should have produced the lowest notes made her bowels feel watery. She didn’t bother to touch any of the other instruments that cluttered the room; most of them hadn’t sounded all that great before. This was worse than being tone-deaf. Music was now actively hostile.

There was no school the following week because it was autumn recess, which meant she didn’t have to endure her music classes, at least. How could she possibly teach them? How could she possibly do anything? She’d been invited to a Friendsgiving by her co-worker the drama teacher, two years older than her and cute and a little flirty, but Grace claimed illness to avoid going, unable to face the outside world. Even the birdsong outside her windows sounded like disconnected whistles and shrieks. It gave her a headache until she dug her noise-canceling headphones out of her travel supplies and put them on.

She spent her days sitting on the couch, staring at the walls, failing to read, failing to watch television, barely feeding herself, not exercising at all, and thinking of the hour of sunset happening earlier and earlier even as the sunrise came later and later, the day being squeezed in a pincer movement by the relentless forces of the dark on either side.

And then the break was over, and it was time to return to school. She braced herself for the impossible task of teaching children to love music when she couldn’t even detect music. With the younger kids, it wasn’t so bad; kindergarteners were mostly just making a clatter anyway. The higher grades were harder, though, and it was difficult to fake giving technical feedback, so she focused on telling her students to try and feel the music, to find the rhythm, to hear the melody, though she could do none of those things. Her eyes watered from the exposure to so much unpleasant sound. Grace took to wearing earplugs in class, leaving her hair down loose so no one could see them, just to muffle the monstrous sounds.

Being back in class was worse than being alone in her house. There, she’d been able to avoid music. Now she was confronted at every moment with the reality of what she’d lost. She found herself looking forward to the parts of the day she’d once hated: the paperwork, the meetings, the administrivia. At least she could still do those things without feeling like an imposter.

She considered going to the hospital, but she knew there would be a battery of neurological exams that would reveal nothing, and a referral to a psychiatrist, and she simply couldn’t face it. This problem wasn’t medical; it was mythic.

Then there were the rehearsals for the pageant. Six classes — from transitional kindergarten through fifth grade — were involved, each performing a different winter-themed act, many of them musical, from the sweet choir of the fifth graders to the raucous drumming of the little ones. The drama teacher was helping with rehearsals, and a couple of the classes were doing skits instead of music, but most of the pageant was Grace’s domain. She could hardly drop the responsibility, either: she was still in her probationary period, and wanted to make a good impression, and moreover, she’d asked to take point on planning the pageant, because it had been a joy before. Now the rehearsals were a tedious horror. Grace ended up recruiting a precocious fifth-grader with a good ear to be her “stage manager,” asking what she thought of the performances and giving feedback accordingly. At least the kid blossomed under the attention, while Grace wilted. The experience of being subjected to music was now physically and mentally exhausting.

She dragged herself home after those rehearsals, and held the sun globe in her lap, gazing at the dark shape of the mountain inside, and thought: Who cares if it stays dark forever? Why should the world be bright again, when song itself is dead? Maybe I’d be happier in eternal night. Or at least numb and cold and frozen forever.

Grace started to sleep clutching the sun globe in her arms, to her chest, but the thick glass never grew any warmer. She dreamed of throwing the globe into the sea, or burying it in her back yard, or keeping it unbroken on a shelf forever. Let darkness reign. Let the light die for everyone as music had for her.

By the night of the pageant — two days before the Solstice — Grace was a sleepless mess, with bags under her eyes and a tendency to jump at unexpected noises. The drama teacher said, “You’ve pushed yourself to make this pageant great, I hope you can sleep for your whole break!” so at least people just thought her squirrelly affect was the result of overwork. Backstage, she herded children, adjusted costumes, solved problems, and did her best not to hate everyone in the world for hearing what she never could again.

When the time came, Grace went out on stage and fake-smiled at the people filling the chairs set up in the “cafetorium.” She thanked everyone for coming, made the inevitable announcements, praised the faculty for all their support, and concluded by saying, “All of your kids have worked so hard, and I think they’ve had fun, too. Let’s give them a big round of applause.”

Things went pretty well. No one threw up, no one fell off the stage and got injured, and the worst disasters were missed cues and dropped lines. Grace mostly kept her headphones in, blasting white noise in her ears, but she took them out often to check on the progress of the show, and the progress was good. The kids did great. The audience laughed and clapped and stomped their feet at the appropriate times, and the students were giddy with show-night energy.

When everything was done, and the students all crowded the stage to take their final bows, every parent and sibling in the audience was on their feet, whistling and applauding, and the children were cheering for each other, too . . . and though that cacophony was nothing like music, it still filled Grace’s heart with joy. And then her stage manager called for her to come out on stage, and the drama teacher presented her with a bouquet, and everyone applauded for her, and tears rolled down her face. Living without music was a horrible thing . . . but there were still good things in life, too.

Afterward, the drama teacher bumped her gently with her shoulder and said, “Want to go get a drink? You earned it.”

“I’d like that,” she said and she meant it, despite her impending mythic duties weighing her down. “But another time. I have an appointment I need to get ready for tomorrow.”

The next day, Grace dressed in her warmest clothes and drove herself and the globe to a campsite she’d reserved in Mount Diablo State Park, arriving in mid-afternoon to get inside the gates before they closed at sunset. Grace didn’t bother setting up a tent — she knew she wouldn’t sleep — and stayed up that long night, sitting in her car, holding the globe in her lap. The campgrounds were almost empty, anyway — this time of year, on this side of the hills, it got pretty chilly, and even the hardcore outdoorsy people were too preoccupied with the holidays for a camping trip. About two hours before dawn, she started up her car again and drove her rattletrap car from the plateau where the campsite rested the rest of the way up Mt. Diablo. She didn’t know if her location mattered at all, but being at the top of the landscape she could see in the sun globe felt right.

By the time she arrived at the Summit Visitor’s Center at the top the sky was already lightening, heralding the sun’s arrival, and it was hard to believe that breaking the globe would make any difference to anything at all. But it was hard to believe that a holiday market booth could vanish in a sudden snowstorm, or that music could become poisonous to her. She supposed she just had to take it on faith.

Grace pulled into the parking lot by the stone building. The air was crisp and cold, refreshing after sitting in the stale air of her closed-up car all night. She walked up to the low wall surrounding the Visitor’s Center that overlooked the valley to the east, and sat just on the wrong side of the railing, with her legs dangling, cradling the globe in her lap. She set a timer on her phone for 7:02 a.m., a minute before the moment of truth, and gazed at the sky for a long time, watching the horizon creep toward blue.

The alarm went off, and at least it was supposed to sound awful, an affront to the ears. It startled her enough that she almost knocked the globe out of her lap; she looked down to steady it and gasped.

Light blossomed inside the glass dome, spilling from behind the model of the mountain . . . if it was a model . . . as the morning brightened around her. She watched as the globe was suffused by the golden light, transformed into a sun held in her hands.

Grace didn’t even need to check the time. She knew the time was now, the sun was here, trapped inside cold glass, and she had to set it free. She was the reason it could be set free. No one but Eunie and Martin would ever know what she’d done, or sacrificed. But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was the light of the world.

She raised the globe high overhead, and hurled it down, and it smashed on the rocks below with an awful noise. She expected it to spray bits of glass and plastic and metal and water in all directions, but instead it flashed on impact, as bright as a firework, and she turned her face away with a cry of alarm, temporarily blinded. When she looked back down, blinking, there was no remnant of the globe on the ground.

When she looked up, the valley was limned with gold.

“Well done,” a voice said, and Grace was so startled she almost fell off the wall. She spun around towards safety, towards the parking lot, where a food truck was parked two spaces over from her car — how had she missed that — with a woman leaning out onto the counter.

Except it wasn’t a food truck. The words “Antiquities and Tangibles” were painted in a strange typeface on the side, yellow letters on red, and the woman was Eunie, from the holiday market. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Grace said, climbing down from the wall. She gestured toward the valley behind her, bathed in early morning sunlight. She could feel the warmth of the sun on her back, like turning near a fireplace on a cold night. “Did I really make a difference? Did I really bring back the sun?”

“You really did,” Eunie said. “Hey. Listen to this.” There was an old-fashioned wooden radio on the counter at her elbow, its shape an arch like a church window, with a dial at the bottom, and she began to fiddle with it.

Grace shook her head and covered her ears and said, “Oh, come on, please, no —”

The radio played a boys’ choir version “The Carol of the Bells,” one of Grace’s favorite songs, and she sat straight up, because it wasn’t sirens and fire alarms and crying babies and sinus pain, it was music, it was sweet, it was right —

“You had to believe you’d lost the music forever,” Eunie said, turning the volume down. She showed Grace the little bottle she’d filled at the market, held upside down and empty. “You had to decide whether to let your despair pull the whole world into darkness with you, or to bring back the sun anyway, for everyone else. Do you know, in all these long years, no one has ever chosen to let everyone suffer in the dark with them? Isn’t that a miracle?”

Grace began to cry for the second time in two days.

“The return of the light is also a time for presents, you know,” Eunie said. “The universe recognizes what you did. You’ll be gifted.”

“What do you mean?” Grace asked, but it was snowing again, that same impossible omnidirectional swirl, and when it cleared, the truck was gone.

Grace drove back home, in the sunshine, a rare December day with no clouds or rain. She let herself into her apartment, and sat down at her piano, and banged out “Jingle Bells” and “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” and “Christmas Time Is Here,” laughing all the while. She was so excited to hear music again, to make it again, that she picked up her acoustic guitar, even though she could barely play four chords on the thing. She began to strum . . . and “River” by Joni Mitchell flowed out of her fingers, as perfectly as if she’d practiced the tune a thousand times. She set the guitar down and picked up her dad’s old trumpet, with which she’d never learned to make more than squawk, but “What a Wonderful World” came flowing out, note-perfect. She looked at the other instruments in her crowded room — the ukulele, the flute, the clarinet — and her lips pursed, her tongue tapped her teeth, her fingers flickered, and she knew she could make them sing any tune she chose, now.

“I’m gifted,” she said, and burst out laughing, and made music until the sun went down, and for the rest of her days and nights forever.

 

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Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back, and that was “The Sun Globe” by Heather Shaw & Tim Pratt, and if you enjoyed that then check out their other holiday stories for Podcastle!

About this story, our authors say: ” We are so happy that the good people at Podcastle have chosen to continue this holiday story tradition once again. We love it; it’s the most wonderful time of the year!”

And about this story, I say:

When Devin sent me this story to narrate, my first thought was, oh no, I am slammed with deadlines–I had some writing work due as well as a holiday art fair rapidly approaching with the speed of something very fast. BUT THEN I read this story, and I totally teared up at the end of it, so I said, to heck with my deadlines, I cannot wait to narrate this story. (And then! Matt Dovey–thank you, Matt–was running a little behind for hosting, so I’m delighted that I basically get to bring you ALL the parts of this story; the narration AND the commentary.)

I can pinpoint the exact bit in this story that hits me right in the feels. It’s when Grace is at her lowest point, but she still decides to release the sun for everyone else. And then Eunie says, “Do you know, in all these long years, no one has ever chosen to let everyone suffer in the dark with them? Isn’t that a miracle?” And then Grace cries, and then I cry too. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? That we can be at our own lowest point–and still perform an act of mercy and kindness for someone else. And that this can happen, again and again throughout all of history. I don’t know, it’s the sort of beautiful moment that leaves me with some unexpected hope for all of humanity.