Christmas Wishes at Pudding Hall by Kate Forster

31

‘You have to make the chicken house,’ said Seth to Ethan.

‘I can’t make the chickens,’ Ethan stated. ‘But I can make the eggs.’

Seth considered it for a moment. ‘Eggs could work. We can pile them over by the trees.’

‘What are you doing, boys?’ asked Avian as she came into the kitchen.

‘Making a gingerbread house,’ said Seth.

‘Gross. Make sure you don’t eat it – it’s bad for you,’ she said, taking a bottle of water from the refrigerator and leaving again.

Ethan said nothing as Avian left but Seth groaned.

‘I want Christa back,’ he said.

‘So do I,’ Ethan answered. ‘Mom said she’s going to make broccoli burgers. Disgusting.’

Seth made a face. ‘What if we made a maze?’

‘We can’t cook any more gingerbread, not without Christa,’ said Ethan.

‘We could make it from cardboard?’ Seth suggested.

They found cardboard in the recycling and used the kitchen scissors to cut it, even though they knew Christa wouldn’t like them using them.

There was green paint from the arts and craft set they had never used and glue and sticky tape. It was quite a process as they worked, waiting for the paint to try and then sticking things down so they stood up.

Ethan drew a shape and then cut it out.

‘What’s that?’ he said.

‘Dad,’ he answered as he drew all the keys on the laptop. ‘He’s doing business.’

Seth looked at it closely. ‘Where are you going to put him?’

‘In the maze,’ Ethan answered.

Seth thought about it for a moment and then nodded.

‘You better make a Christa then. She can go in the maze with Dad.’

Ethan finished the effigy of Marc and put it down on the table and started work on Christa.

‘I saw them holding hands,’ he said to Seth.

Seth giggled. ‘They’re in love,’ he said in a singsong voice.

He took his pen and wrote in fine writing on the face of his dad.

Ethan looked at it and laughed and then wrote on Christa’s face and showed Seth.

The roared with laughter at their own jokes as they finally stuck Marc and Christa in the centre of the maze.

‘Now we just have to make a spell to bring her back to us,’ said Seth. He was serious.

Ethan laughed as he wiggled his fingers at the gingerbread house in what he hoped was a mysterious manner. ‘Come back to Pudding Hall and feed us,’ he said. ‘No more broccoli burgers.’

‘We need saving from the broccoli burger monster,’ Seth joined in and when they finished laughing they sat and looked at their work.

‘It’s finished,’ Ethan said. Seth adjusted the last monkey Marc had made that was hanging in a marzipan tree and Ethan made sure the antlers of a lopsided deer were stuck on securely.

They sat glumly at the table looking at their handiwork.

‘I hope Dad can get her back,’ was all Ethan said and Seth started to cry.

Seth was always the ringleader and the instigator of trouble, so for Ethan to see his brother, older by a few minutes, so vulnerable was unnerving.

‘I just want her back because Dad did stuff with us, and talked to us more and we ate dinner together and now we won’t.’

Ethan nodded and felt his own sadness well up and he wiped a tear away.

‘Wanna go to the maze?’ he asked Seth.

‘Nah,’ said Seth looking downcast and then, as though a bolt of lightning hit him, he looked up and smiled. ‘Wanna get some of Meredith’s dog poo and put it in Simon’s shoes?’

Ethan gasped. ‘Yes, let’s go.’

And the boys pulled on their coats and hats and, taking a plastic container and a pair of kitchen tongs, they went to seek their own form of revenge.