Maryanne Riebling quickly glanced back to her five year old daughter to confirm her booster seat was fastened before cautiously proceeding as the light signaled green.
Behind them lay incomprehensible carnage, literally, starting around the time Jinsue’s daddy Lev had succumbed to the plague that had transformed their colorful urban enclave into an actual morgue city, a landscape of the cruelly dead, box trucks marked “Refrigerated, for fruit” that actually contained the now seemingly countless victims of the plague. So many. There wasn’t room for so many dead, lost to the catastrophic tragedy that had transformed everything.
Now, continuing to navigate Jinsue to her grandfather’s home, Maryanne enthusiastically continued her and her daughter’s sing-along.
The idyllic tableau of the sing-along, this strawberry blonde haired, nearly forty aged single mother, ponytail swaying as she bopped her head to the upbeat music, her smiling daughter giggling as she sang along with her mom in unison, emphasized their emphatic hopefulness as a trail of melody wafted in their wake, on a late bucolic December morning.
The city that was getting further and further away from them as Maryanne drove calmly along the two way, grass lined road, lay in shambles.
It had not been just the plague, which had taken Jinsue’s daddy very quickly, it was the scale of the sadness and anger that had affected, it seemed, everybody. The morgues had run out of space and the refrigerated fruit trucks had been stealthily deployed, lest the numerous dead literally litter the streets. Maryanne experienced a fleeting memory of her daughter’s now deceased daddy as she calculated two, perhaps three hours before she would arrive to her childhood home in Rhode Island.
Maryanne had never disclosed to Lev that their brief romance had left her with child; they had had a very good time and Maryanne had ghosted him long before she had learned her daughter was coming. And, in fairness, Lev hadn’t made much of an effort to stay in contact with Maryanne either; months turned into years without contact and then one day watching the news on television Maryanne had been quite startled over breakfast to learn that Lev had died. She had looked over to Jinsue, obliviously eating her cereal when Lev’s image flashed onscreen during the newscast: a doctor of some renown, felled by the plague that at that time had taken hundreds, not yet millions, of lives.
In telegraphing its cruel path, the plague took the doctors and other healthcare workers first.
Maryanne cast her eyes downward as she remembered the evening they had met.
Maryanne, still in her costume, had been making her way home from a Halloween party in the courtyard of one of her neighbor’s beautiful, historic homes. She was a few blocks from the party, almost a quarter of the way home, when she'd removed her mask. Just after Maryanne turned the corner she had nearly collided with a handsome stranger about her age. He was in street clothes and clutched a clipboard which held a patient’s chart. He had been speaking into his cellphone and Maryanne had heard him when he crisply said “I will call you back.” That’s when his piercing gaze had descended upon her: “Please accept my apology, I was too distracted.”
He was really handsome, though not in the way her last boyfriend had been and Maryanne thought, “Great, finally a decent looking guy and here I am in a ridiculous Halloween costume! At least I am not wearing a mask.” Out loud she said: “It’s totally okay, happy Halloween, good night.”
Sensing an opportunity the doctor sprang into action. “Please, let me make it up to you, how about a drink later?”
Maryanne, who had now come to a complete stop, stood, in her ridiculous Halloween costume, and looked at the incredibly handsome stranger with increasing skepticism. He continued, “I’m Dr. Gizmo Leandro Tigre, by the way. I work over there.” He nodded toward the health sciences center in the new building across the street, and Maryanne’s skepticism abated. “My friends call me Lev.”
"Well, okay, since you’re a doctor, I guess it’s okay? However, I just can’t tonight.” She tried to mask her sense of awkwardness and amusement.
“This weekend? We sponsor a seasonal renaissance faire. Come with me? On Sunday at 1:30? You can meet me right here, on Sunday at 1:30. You don’t have to be in costume, however if you want to go in costume, what you are wearing right now is perfect… Yes? I’m usually just not that careless.” Lev smiled kindly.
Maryanne had thought that if he’d ever reached out to her she might tell him she and he had a daughter, however up until that moment at breakfast she had avoided the issue and it hadn’t really come up, much. Her friends had never met him and she had been functionally estranged from her family until recently.
She was not actually estranged from them. They financially supported her; Maryanne had just stopped coming home for the holidays years ago, and they had never visited her home in the city, and eventually the only communication they had was the ongoing financial arrangement. Maryanne was now going home for the first time in sixteen years.
After Lev died she had concluded to try harder with her family, now also dwindling. She wanted Jinsue to have at least one man in her life who loved her unconditionally and Kineth had never been truly terrible to her.
Maryanne had left home when she had started college and had never returned. She had lived in four different cities in the past eighteen years, made few permanent friends and had mostly dedicated herself to her career as a leisure and hospitality researcher.
Lev had certainly been brilliant and undoubtedly fun, however Maryanne questioned if she could have abided his pompous nature for a lifetime. She had also felt uncomfortably dissonant imagining a conversation between Lev and her own father, Kineth. Lev had possessed the steely determination of one who had been in charge of many lives, and in this way, he and Kineth were alike.
Although the structure in which Maryanne had spent her first years was more castle than house, the Rieblings had lived simply. No one lived with her father at Rieb Damps any longer, not even a health aide. As a kid Maryanne had hated never having privacy from her parent’s employees; this had hastened her departure and then delayed her returns. Right about now though, she was looking forward to her father’s companionship and the weathered stone almost-castle. Maryanne wondered what Lev would have thought of it.
Kineth had sounded happy that Maryanne was coming home and he had not asked any overly personal questions about Jinsue, which had been a great source of relief for Maryanne.
“If you don’t have anything lined up, stay on through Christmas, New Year’s” her father had suggested, “It could be nice to have a child at the house again, especially over the holidays.”
Maryanne had listened carefully, reflecting on Kineth’s cautious, sober tone. That was the first time she had ever felt truly bad about not telling Lev about Jinsue.
Mother and daughter stopped for a late lunch at a rest stop about forty minutes from her childhood home before taking on the last part of the trip. Maryanne ordered an extra plate of food to bring home to Rieb Damps.
Although their stay was of an indeterminate length, Maryanne had packed light.
***
They had just finished setting up the Christmas tree when Kineth had suggested going out for a walk. “We’ll have s’mores when we get back.”
Rieb Damps had only one neighbor along the wetlands of the New England coast. It was a theme park and Maryanne remembered it from childhood. It had closed around the time she had moved away. There was cyclone fencing demarcating the property line between Rieb Damps and the theme park, running the entire length of the one side and the back of the estate.
Maryanne had long loved playing and lingering at the patch of plum blossoms on her side of the property line. She had used to hoist herself up in those trees and from there could see not just over to one of the theme park rides, a smallish roller coaster with a giant lion’s head at the entrance to the ride, she could also see all the way to the now abandoned haunted house attraction, further along, almost at the beach.
Even now, abandoned for years, she loved the sight of the theme park. It had become overgrown and ghostly and as Maryanne stood there with her father and Jinsue she thought of how much time had passed since she had distracted herself there for hours, with her friends from high school.
“MOMMY, IT’S KITTENS.” Jinsue shrieked with delight.
Maryanne’s father smiled quietly at his daughter as he addressed his granddaughter. “Let’s collect some branches for the fire so we can toast some s’mores, Jinsue.”
Maryanne quietly wondered if it was too cold for the kittens. Were they abandoned theme park kittens? Did they live on the beach? So many questions.
Abutting the theme park’s cyclone fencing on the Damps side was an eight foot tall stone and steel fence. It was stone from the ground up, and then at around the six foot point, black steel. Every ten feet or so along the fence, embedded into the stone was a marble bench, about two feet wide. When they’d erected the fence, they had skipped installing around thirteen feet of length, so as to not disturb the plum blossom patch. This was the only place along the property line from where one could see into the theme park from Rieb Damps just by looking through the gaps in the cyclone fencing.
“Mommy can I have a kitten, please!” Jinsue had her little fingers curled around the cyclone fencing, as she crouched under the plum blossom patch. Maryanne again glanced at her father serenely seated on one of the marble benches closest to the plum blossom patch. He motioned to a small pet shelter he had positioned within the plum blossom patch. Maryanne noticed it there for the first time. “Dad, do the kittens live in the plum blossom patch?”
“They sleep here at night. They were born a few weeks ago, and have started to come and go. I’ve been feeding them with the gardener’s help, for the last two weeks, after their mother never came back. He thinks he can find homes for them. They are usually all here in the early morning. Jinsue, we are going to come back here very early tomorrow morning and you are going to pick one to be your pet.”
Maryanne blinked back tears. How had she let so much time go without seeing him?
That night, after s’mores by the outdoor den fireplace, there had been a very noisy storm. Maryanne had thought she heard a ghostly howling and had struggled to sleep.
Early the next morning, coffees in hand, and a hot chocolate for Jinsue, they’d strolled back to the plum blossom patch and Jinsue had excitedly chosen a gray and white striped kitten with sparkling gray eyes, just as the gardener had placed the rest in carrying cases for transport.
“Do you already have homes for them?” Maryanne had asked him.
“The missus! She’s taking them over to our neighbors, their son is a vet; he has an entire rescue operation in place. Bye bye!”
That night it stormed again and Maryanne dreamed that she was lost in an abandoned theme park and that a giant, glowing, seaweed festooned goblin was chasing her. Jinsue’s screaming woke Maryanne.
“Mommy, it’s a seagoblin! It’s chasing me!”
🙀 "The Christmas Kittens. A Winter Tale in 3 Parts" is fiction. Part 2 November 28th 2025 🙀
