A red, white, and blue banner behind them screams YOUR AMERICAN HEROES, but Santa is a bigger draw, with his fake snow and plywood candy canes. It’s Christmas, after all! Mommies in sweatpants and stained T-shirts drag their children past the table and into the castle, where an elf will snap a Polaroid to send to Grandma or maybe Daddy and his new wife, while the astronauts, ignored, sip from cans of soda and dream of Thai bar girls. One of them cups his ear whenever anybody speaks to him, an old man with a face like the end of an orange. He once walked on the moon — the moon! I watched it on TV as a kid. Fucked me up for years. I couldn’t wait to blast off. He must have some answers, the ancient astronaut. If I could muster the energy, I’d get up off this bench and ask him why my hands sometimes feel like they belong to somebody else. I’d sing along to the Christmas carols and take the See’s candy lady dancing. Or maybe I’d fill a bottle with gasoline, stopper it with a sock, and set fire to this circus.
