“Please stay dead” he whispers into the creature’s soft downy neck. “Please?”

It is Christmas Eve in the late eighties and Uncle Mort is on the number twenty two bus from downtown on the way to the transition house for grown men that is, for now, home. Held firmly under his arm and concealed beneath his winter coat is an overfed, glossy and mostly dead Canada goose. The mostly part is key. He has wrung the creature’s neck in the Halifax Public Gardens only moments ago before concealing it and stepping onto the bus in a wave of prickling December air. He knows how to do this correctly. You grasp the neck and swing the creature in a tight circle: Quick and humane. Some years, now, since he’s done it though and he feels it stir: a livid thrust, the last damp fervor of life. The flutelike knot of the bird’s chest bone now grinds against his own.

If the bus driver would only step on it. Christmas can win out. Witness the green and red wreaths. The friendly cast that the slick frozen streets taken on when strung with colored lights. Uncle Mort isn’t asking for a lot. Just to be part of something. The creature itself wants to be part of the order of things. Plucked, drained, dressed with love and simmering with butter, sage and allspice. All those tiny bottles now kissing glass in his pockets. Had he nicked them? Yes he had, but with no malice in it. He needs them for the goose; He will anoint and roast it exactly as they do in his little village in southwest Nova Scotia. A place that is the pump in his heart. A place where right now they might all be going Mumming or tucking into Christmas Eve rum. A place where he’s left all the skin of his knees and that knows his scent and each one of his scars and the cowlicks on his head. A place that has rejected him wholesale and to which he can never go back. Not even on... Not tonight, this is no time to get sucked in. He tells himself.

Just think of the bird roasting. The comfort in the smell wafting through the shared kitchen--jets of saliva shoot into his mouth—the smell alone will be a balm for himself and other men. All of whom, like him, hang white knuckled from the bottom rung of something. A roasted goose with the neck tucked under, ringed with baby carrots and potatoes, you never know, could change the direction of a fellow’s life. Cantilever him up an inch from rock bottom. If the bus driver would only pull away from the curb before the lady who has seen him snag the Canada goose from the public park draws abreast of the bus.

It might seem improbable, but what this career thief who’s spent vast tracts of his life as a ward of the state wants in the world is to give back. Shit went south, shit went to the shits as they say but if people knew him, they might also know him as the man who stood between a maniac with a loaded 22 and his sister’s kids on a different Christmas Eve, long ago. The man who scooped us all up and took us to his place in the trailer park to make an impromptu celebration and when the concern arose that: Santa will never find us! (because no chimney) very quickly built a makeshift hearth out of fish pallets for the fictional fat bastard to climb down. The man who not only built the pretend fireplace but festooned it with toilet paper roses, pine cones and tinsel borrowed from the neighbor. Then stuck money all over it. It was fabulous and fierce. Martha Stewart herself, were she a rural drag queen in the disco era, could not have done better.

So now the bird struggles under his coat. He has not done the thorough job of cleanly ending its life that would please his forebears. Do they glower down? Chaffed salty ghosts in fisherman knits and oil skins? Men who tug their mutton chop whiskers free of the ice and judge him as the blood of a wild thing improperly killed trickles into his boots? His toes are sticky and caked with it.

This is the last bus run of the evening. Uncle Mort is jammed in cheek-by-jowl with homeward revelers, their breath fogging the windows while they clutch last minute purchases between their knees and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen leaks from tinny bus speakers. How to squeeze the particular lemon that life hands us? Mort is an uncompromising big knuckled, good natured gay man who refuses to lower his eyes in shame. Has always thrown down and fought rather than suffer an insult to himself or the men he travelled with. That’s how the told it to us then. Uncle Mort always protected the men he was travelling with from attackers. And when the attackers numbered too many he nursed his lover’s broken ribs and reset his own broken nose with the other hand. Kept on trying to make lemonade but the lemons kept coming. And that’s the puzzle of life, isn’t it? Hold on, squeeze. That’s all there is. How can this bird be so strong?

So here is Uncle Mort, the man of Christmas on the number twenty two bus with a half dead goose and good intentions chased by the concerned citizen who saw him grab the bird. The woman in the park (later they will call her the witness) was reading her bodice ripper tucking into a ham on rye when she witnessed what she will later describe as The Murder and her scream lit up the night. Mort would have gladly spoken to her about goose overpopulation and how the birds are fouling the waterways. Told her of his plan to feed twenty men with one bird, but he was so ill used to the sound of a screaming woman and he panicked and fled. Caught the bus just as it pulled away. The driver wants to go home, the sidewalk is icy and the lady is middle aged. But fate has more in store for Uncle Mort.

Witness the woman’s illustrious past as a competitive middle distance runner. Her undying love for waterfowl. God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen, Let Nothing Ye Dismay insists the overburdened sound system. The bird, though fat and complacent from too many crusts on the water, it still wild thing and will not go gentle. Its wings are pinned but it has scratched him. He bleeds. People stare as the lady now catches the eye of the driver, distraught. This moment is somehow key to all that Uncle Mort will ever be. He looks down at his hands crusted red and black where the goose blood and his own have mixed.

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen...Through the fogged up windows the festive lights on the houses bleed into the whirling blue and red cherries atop the police cars that will dog him all his life.

Think of the smell, the feast, the all spice. The men at the shelter, waking up on Christmas and letting their noses lead them down stairs...

This is the story Uncle Mort should be able to tell them, but...No. He will not get to tell his story. Just like always this will fall to someone else. He will spend Christmas in jail and other people will do the telling of him, just as they always have.

The bird heaves, the bus hisses to a stop. Let Nothing Ye Dismay. The woman, outraged, points. The cops board the bus. Two of them. Tired and beefy. Does he have more fight in him? He does not. He will not resist this time. He relaxes his big knuckled hands—

He lets the bird go.