The Last Christmas Story

It was Christmas morning and a child played with his new toy, a “L’il Scientist” kit. There were test tubes and beakers, scales and diodes, a microscope and telescope, a mass spectrometer, and a pristine particle accelerator buried in the back yard.

He mixed up chemicals for awhile: turning water into wine and back again, learning the joys of vinegar and baking soda, nickel-plating his sister’s glass eye—until the fumes from the sulfur volcano he’d built caused his parents to suggest he play outside.

Disconsolately, he kicked around the faded clumps of grass in the back yard, sharp wind cutting through his hoodie like a knife through the frog he’s dissected and left in the bathtub. “I guess they ain’t found that yet,” he grumbled while kicking at a rock that turned out to be frozen dog poop. To get out of the cold wind he entered the particle accelerator’s bunker. Soon he was flipping switches and watching the readouts as a deep and delightful thrumming filled the building.

Suddenly, fireworks erupted as relativistic heavy ions collided.

“Let’s see what we got here,” he muttered while wheeling out his new double-ultra-microscope. Broken chunks of gold atoms littered his screen like jalopies at a demolition derby. “Cool!” he enthused.

Then he saw a speck of light. Focusing, he realized that it was actually a quickly growing bubble. “Outstanding!” he said, ramping up the magnification. Specks of light were embedded in the bubble like raisins in a muffin. “Imagine that,” he muttered, seeing tiny vortices. He focused on one of the little whirlpools and saw it was composed of millions of tiny sparks, some red, blue, orange, ultramarine and white. He chose one of the sparks near the edge, a yellow-whitish one.

He found that it had dark companions, small clumps of dirt and gas circled about it like horses on a merry-go-round. The big ones looked like swirly marbles and were cool enough, he supposed, but he quickly honed in on the one that had oxygen in its atmosphere and lots of water. He saw land, too, mountains, deserts, and verdant forests. He gasped—roads and buildings! He pushed his microscope all the way to its limit, wishing he’d asked Santa for the triple-ultra kit, until he was just able to make out a small building outside a village, where animals were housed—a barn or manger he supposed. There, three ornately garbed gentlemen offered gifts to a newborn child.

“Billy!” he heard his mother call, “Time for church.”

Reluctantly he turned off the monitor. Too bad, he thought, the bubble universe he’d accidentally created would be gone by the time he returned, evaporated back into the vacuum from where it had emerged. He’d just have to make another one tomorrow, he supposed, turning out the lights as somewhere a wise man noticed that the star that had guided him and the others to Bethlehem had disappeared.

And so will I.