Explaining Depression to a Six-Year Old

"So, you know how it feels when you feel sad?" "You mean like when I fall and hurt myself?"

"Not like hurting yourself, well, not like hurting your body. But something that hurts your mind. Ummm..."

"Maybe when I couldn't find my Ninja Turtle blanket and really wanted it?"

"Kind of like that, yeah. So, it's like feeling sad like that, but all the time."

"Always?"

"Well, sometimes it's all the time, and sometimes it's not. But when it's really bad, it's all the time."

"You should do something you like to be happy. Like play video games."

"I do that sometimes. And sometimes it makes me happy. But a lot of the time, it just distracts me from feeling sad. It's not what will really make me happy."

"You could do the thing that will really make you happy. What is it?"

"Heh, that's a good question. I have a lot of trouble figuring that out myself."

"Maybe you lost something you really like, like my blanket?"

"In some ways I did, yeah. Maybe if I knew what was missing I could try to find it."

"I'll help you look."

"Thanks, buddy. You're helping me just by being here."

The Whipping Tree

When he failed, the boy did not cry. He'd learned that early on. He took a quiet moment and walked into the woods nearby. With a stick from the forest floor, he laid into a young oak tree, lashing at it over and over until its bark was torn and its flesh dripped sap. The boy hurt the tree until he no longer had the strength. He returned to the weighing eyes of his father tired and dirty from the woods, but never with his face streaked from tears. Each time failure threw him down, he suffered, and the tree suffered with him. Each failure marked the tree with scars and streaks of residue sap the boy spilled. He continued to pass his failures on to the tree, fewer each year, until he stopped striving, stopped driving himself to be something more, just to avoid the pain.

Years later, the boy returned to the tree a man. What had once been a young oak was now a mature tree, tall and strong despite its wounds. The man touched the bark, feeling the marks he had left on the tree so long ago, and cried, mourning the boy who had tried.

Good Party

It was midnight on January first, and the first fireworks over London cast their colored flares on the spaceship that appeared out of space. It looked like a matte-black, upside-down pineapple, and its descent stopped meters above Waterloo Bridge. People flocked to it. Before the sun rose on England in the new year, tens of thousands thronged on the bridge, in the streets, and in boats on the Thames. They cheered the visitors as they would a messiah, a beloved head of state, or one of the Beatles. When the sun peeked over the horizon, a bright, green spotlight singled out one person below the ship and an alien descended from the ship: an oblong head atop a thin lampshade with maybe some feet at the bottom.

"We are come here to honor celebration," the creature said in halting English.

"You, you're here to celebrate the new year?" asked the person in the spotlight, of no general importance whatsoever.

"New yahr? Do you no celebrate alignment of the seventeen Holy Galaxies?"

"Uh, no?" The person looked completely uncomfortable.

"Shit," said the alien. "Got to find good party." It returned to the ship. The ship returned to space, never to return.

Falling for You

David leaned in over his book, his eyes greedily drinking in the descriptions of the life medieval. The politics made him wish that he could with boldness and wit maneuver through insults and intrigue. Each battle command heroic Lord Arvon issued and every thrust of his blade made David lean in closer, imagining himself possessed of such a confidence and skill as the person through whose eyes he saw the world. As the protagonist excused himself from a treachery-fraught soirée for a moment of solitude, David fell into the book.

Lord Chester Arvon closed the door on a party putatively in his honor, and thus on ceaseless bickering and sniping among those seeking his favor. Opening up a book of accounts, he took out the tome concealed within: a story of high fantasy. He relaxed into the tale of a young man in a magical world of impossible leisure and instant knowledge. The boy's struggles — to find love, to find purpose in a world of leisure, to be more like the heroes of the books he reads — echoed in Chester's own heart.

As the protagonist set down his book to leave for work, Chester fell into the book.

Crazy or Brilliant

Afterward, they lay in bed, holding each other close. "You know," she said, "penises are weird. They're so... alien. Like they're a little space invader—"

"Shh!" He clapped a hand over her mouth. He shifted so she could feel the warmth of his lips on her ear, and even then she could scarcely hear his whisper. "Don't say that. You don't want them to know we're onto them."

With his hand on her mouth, her what came out "Mwuh?" Her eyes said what her mouth couldn't, looking at him like he might be a dangerous kind of crazy.

"Look," he whispered, "it heard you. It's perking up and paying attention." She followed his gaze down. Surely enough, it was extending, like a telescoping radio antenna. "We're going to have to distract it." His murmur tickled her ear, and she watched it finish its extension pointing directly at them. "Do that thing it likes."

She pulled away and looked at him with disbelief. "Seriously? We just—"

"Quick, we don't have much time," he hissed. "Hurry, before it realizes our suspicions and tells the others!"

"Ohhhhhh-kay," she said. While she distracted the alien parasite, she wondered if he was crazy or brilliant.

Merry Nemesismas

Scarecrow-thin and leaning on a harnessed reindeer, he limped from the mist. A blood trail paralleled his footprints in the calf-deep snow. "Well, we had a good run, Dancer." His breath misted in the cold, and blood ran from the wound in his side, dark on his red-furred coat. Santa fell. Dancer knelt, and the old man lay against him. "I figured I would die in the snow." Santa watched the swirling constellations of falling flakes from the moonlit sky above. Dancer looked away. "But I never thought it would be the frost that killed me. Ey, Jack?"

A boy swathed in white appeared from the shadows. "I got you, did I?" Jack leaned in close to Santa's face. He listened to his belabored breathing, felt the heat of his bloody wound, saw the mourning in the reindeer's eyes. "I did!" Jack jumped up. "After all these years of.... I got you!"

Santa coughed blood. "You couldn't stop this year's gifts."

"Who cares? This is the end! Finally, winter is mine! All mine!" Dissolving into a snow flurry, he blew away.

Santa smiled. He switched off the stage blood's pump and closed his eyes for a nap. "Merry Christmas, Jack."

The Savior's Sacrifice

The invasion was subtle. Aliens from beyond the stars, they had come to Earth secretly, quietly, over millions of years, until they numbered millions, billions. Then the Earth natives discovered them, fought back, killed them. First a few at a time, then in great numbers. It seemed like the humans were methodically sweeping them off the planet. People of Earth used the invaders' corpses for crafts, incorporating them into vehicles and weapons, works of art and forms of communication. Horror swept through the remaining alien population, and they feared extinction.

Some of the humans called for clemency, to allow the two species to live together in greater harmony. Few listened. The massacre only grew worse, the aliens' ichor sticky on the hands and weapons of their oppressors.

A savior appeared. Having grown among both the aliens and the humans, the alien knew how to appease the natives of their adopted planet. It gave itself up to them, a sacrifice to honor the humans' craft and power. The savior's sacrifice granted the aliens a respite, but the humans demand more sacrifices year after year. The aliens still fear.

And now you know where the tradition of the Christmas tree comes from.