#cheesy0nion
To: @cheesy0nion
From:@erisofimladris
This is a treat for @cheesy0nion!
Santa was the best-known, of course.
When it came to Christmas figures, no one didn’t know Santa. Who could forget him when his face was plastered across every place on the whole planet to the point that she suspected the earth would grow a red hat and jolly beard every December?
And it had been getting worse in recent years. Hardly a November went by when she didn’t see his face everywhere, when she didn’t see her own face anywhere except in some doctor’s offices or on the backs of old, forgotten reports no one cared to read.
Unlike Santa, she didn’t have any followers. She would know if she did. She would hear their voices speak her name. She wondered, sometimes, how Santa could go through the winter months hearing his name so many times without his ears falling off. She was sometimes jealous and wished her ears would do the same, if only to avoid hearing the endless void of no one saying her name.
But Santa’s ears must have stayed on, for his legend rang out in every house in every land that she ever traveled to, and no one ever spoke of her.
It might have been that it was hard to capture her likeness in a form humans could create. How could they comprehend the precise way her nose wiggled when she got a good scent, the ratio of her eyes to her head, the way her eyes didn’t look like jolly balls of light but rather, like the emptiness of a dark sky with only a few stars too far apart to shed any light?
Someone had seen her, once. Gazed into the little dots in her eyes and tried to copy her shape. They knew no one would believe what they had seen, so they tried to recreate her in black and white, to show her image to those around them. But no one thought they were anything other than a fool. And while everyone guessed the craziest things, no one knew her.
She was no man, with a nose that ended so short and lips anyone would want to kiss under the mistletoe.
She was no butterfly, born to live such a short life that none would know or remember her. No, she was meant to endure forever, even if those who saw her only got the tiniest glimpse. Nor was she an actress, who could portray such a role if it was asked of her.
She was not a koi or a small boat floating in a lake. She was nothing other than herself.
Few knew of her. Her stories were not told the way Santa’s were, full of presents and joy. No one quite knew what she was meant to be, who made her, or why. She was just there. She was just Funyarinpa, her name as meaningless as her life.
She was prepared, as soon as Halloween ended, for the usual onslaught of Santa, to fade even further into the darkness until her beak could only pick up the slightest of smells of cinnamon-crusted Christmas dreams. She was prepared to live in obscurity, to get her only Christmas joy from the dreams she ate when food in the Field ran scarce.
But then, someone spoke her name.
It was the first of November. She was not doing anything at all. And someone spoke her name.
She could not recall the journey, for in her mind there was no time between the instant when she heard the word and when she appeared in the room, hovering by a golden door with an ornate pattern deep inside a warehouse in the middle of a desert.
Did she finally have a cult of her own? Santa didn’t have any cults that she knew of, but some of the other creatures had cults, and they would speak of it sometimes. Few beings dwelled in the Field to compare with, but she had seen enough of human culture that she knew some humans would pick a secluded place to worship something they could believe but not see.
There was silence after, as if speaking her name was enough to conjure her in her true form. She was unsure how to enter. Should she be bold, awe the humans until they fell to their knees in worship? Or simply watch and wait, siphon their brains for what they wanted and give it to them so they would love her?
“What the hell is a funyarinpa?”
Her ears rang again, this time from a woman in a dancing outfit, out of place among the others. Her nose twitched with displeasure and her ears burned with shame.
“What do you mean ‘what the hell is a funyarinpa?’ You mean…you don’t know?!” The same man who spoke her name the first time was pointing to a portrait. The one that had been drawn of her once by the person whose journey took them a little too close to madness, who saw her true form. Nose and all. Hanging in a frame like it was worthy.
“How the hell would I know?!” the woman yelled again. She wondered if the man was going to stand his ground, if she was going to defend him. In all the years, all the centuries beyond human comprehension, she never had a defender.
“How could you not know?!” he yelled back, then paused. “That’s… that’s practically blasphemous.”
He knew! He knew she was real! She twirled in the air as he knew she was real and there - but what was he going to do about it?
“Say you’re sorry! Apologize to the funyarinpa! Goodness, you are such a rude woman.”
If she had a heart, it might have stopped then from pure shock. She was not someone worthy of an apology to most. She was not someone at all, to most. But she was someone to this man who could not coordinate his clothing to match and smelled of sweat and fear and a strange dream of reuniting with a childhood friend as her nose snuffled in his hair.
The woman thought he was “screwing around.” She started to tell another story as if the portrait showed a dog and not her magnificent form. But the man knew. He looked back. He spoke her name. He was hers.
And yet, the place was not one of worship. It was a prison, and he escaped it with the others, his dreams lost and confused in the following nights and weeks. But then a letter came, a strange, unexpected letter that made him rush off in such a hurry that she followed him at the same pace, not caring that the world was lit with ornaments and Santa’s face loomed around every corner.
She followed her follower to an apartment with a view of city lights sparkling in the window. She slid through the wall and found herself in a chilly room next to a plate of cookies, where a hastily-wrapped box in the corner let out a small noise no one paid attention to.
“Open this one first, Junpei,” said a young woman with brown hair who had not been there when she first saw the portrait of herself on the false cabin wall. Strong in the Field, so strong that she was surprised the woman’s eyes darted past her instead of looking right at her.
Junpei - oh, how sweet his name sounded as she traced the shape of its letters with her nose - reached out to the colorful package. It was wrapped in bright green paper with a red bow, the job somewhat sloppy but it did not matter for long, as he quickly tore through the colorful paper.
She was certain he would hear the snort that came out unwittingly when she beheld the sweater.
It was meant for humans, sized for Junpei in particular. It was knitted, woolen and warm like so many Christmas presents. And yet, this one was different. This one was perfect. Black on the sleeves, with white patches leading to her own image, her portrait, and he let out a high-pitched sound that she never knew a grown human could make.
“It’s the funyarinpa!”
Her ears buzzed with the sound, sending a vibration through her body. She soared through the air, emerging partially into the floor of the apartment above before drifting back down. She would have tried to smell Junpei’s dream on the way, but it was clear that his dream in the moment had just come true.
“You’ve been playing the stock market for over a decade, and this is what you spend your money on?” said the white-haired young man from the warehouse, now wearing clothes to look like Santa. But if they believed in him, she wondered, why would they also be honoring her presence?
It didn’t matter. There had been nonbelievers last time too, and Junpei was undeterred. He lifted off the sweater he wore, bedecked with Christmas bells, and pulled the woolen image of her over his head. Rolled his shoulders, widened his face into a grin. The woman at his side laughed, and soon the white-haired man was laughing too.
There was no fire roaring on a log in a fireplace, no mistletoe hung from the ceiling. The tree was minimal at best, the group of people small. But they were honoring her. The one who had seen her had brought her joy to his compatriots.
And then the box in the corner let out another sound as an elderly dog paced around the corner, followed and pounced on by a puppy that looked like her portrait. Black and white, spots in the right places. The white-haired man was rolling his eyes so far she thought they might fall out of his head entirely, but the puppy and the sweater matched and the little dog curled up in Junpei’s arms just like it belonged there.
She was not a dog. But she knew that humans could never comprehend her fully, and in all the years she had been waiting for someone to enter the Field and see her, no one had ever tried. Finally, finally, someone tried.
No one knew she was there as she hovered near the cookies, watching the humans exchange more presents covered in shiny paper. A book, a gadget of some sort. She didn’t care. She already had everything she wanted.
Her name was spoken many more times throughout the night. Not even the puppy, unnamed and with eyes full of the newness of the world, could see her. But they knew her, and that made all the difference.
Santa was the best-known. He probably always would be. But now she had a follower, and her follower had a family, and for the first time, she was going to have a merry Christmas too.
