Tiina's smile (Festive flash fiction--with a twist)

Happy 2013

One day Tiina decided she was going to do something different. So, she put down her Ipad, picked up her favorite sword, jumped on her spaceship, and flew up from the hot dusty Juhu beach, in Bombay. On and on she went, all the way around the world, till she reached the icy plains of the North Pole, to have a few words with Santa.

She found him sitting by the fire. He looked morose, clad in a red nightgown featuring his favorite red-nosed-reindeer motive, and shoes made of a reddish brown leather.

“Why Santa?” She cried, her heart feeling as if it were as cold as Rudolph’s nose used to be. Frozen it felt about to shatter into a million pieces, and she with it. “Why?”

“It was written in the cards, my dear, nothing I could have done about it.” he replied.

“Surely you had a choice?”

“You had a choice too—“

“But—“ she protested, not liking the turn this conversation was taking.

“—yet , what did you do?”

She hung her head, “nothing,” she said through the tears which trickled down her cheeks, reflecting in the shards of her heart which lay all around her now.

“Whatever you decide to do has to be in the open now, do you understand?”

“It’s not fair,” she said. The softness of her tone belied the thinly veiled anger that curled, wisp-like from the bottom of her toes, up through her spine, filling her face until she exhaled to try to quiten it down. “Rudolph—“

“—is dead, and that was my decision,” agreed Santa. "I made my choice, but what about you?”

“They—“ she hesitated, not sure what she actually wanted to say.

“Some will understand” he went on, not paying her any attention, as if she was but a little particle of dust which had just floated down on his nose, and which he was about to bat away “you have to use your one life for something which really matters—to you.”

Tiina nodded. “Poor Rudolph, did he have to go that way.”

“We always knew it would come to this—the humans who destroyed the Earth’s resources, were selfish. They did not really think about what it meant for the reindeers, now, did they? 

Tiina hung her head. She was guilty too, she knew. No better than them.

“I don’t recommend meat from a centuries old reindeer though.”  

Tiina went pale at that. Not wanting to be in the same space as him anymore, she left.  Could she change anything by following her heart this time? 

When she reached Juhu beach, the sun was hot, high above in the sky. It was midday. Disembarking from her spaceship, she put down her sword on the sand. Then turning, without a second glance she walked away from everything she ever knew. Settling under the shade of a palm tree by the edge of the sand, she drew a smile on her Ipad. She never spoke again, only smiled at everyone, and the world smiled back.