Advent Calendar with John Price

Dec 1 - Operation: Advent

You found the box after evening chow, set squarely on your bunk like it had been placed with a ruler. No return address. No tag. Just khaki paper, a loop of red string, and the weight of something careful. Inside, nestled in tissue, was an advent calendar you'd never seen in a shop: little doors cut from old map sheets, numbers inked in neat block letters, edges stitched with red thread. The handwriting on the legend in the corner - coordinates, grid refs - was precise. Familiar.

Price's handwriting. Neat. Almost shy.

For a minute you just held it, breath fogging in the barracks' cold, listening to the background hum of base life: a distant laugh, the clink of a mug, the steady scrape of someone polishing a rifle. You told yourself it could be a joke, some morale thing. You told yourself not to assume. Then you lifted the little brass catch on Door 1.

A teabag lay inside, wrapped in wax paper like contraband. Next to it, a slip of map with a grid reference scrawled in pencil. The kettle room.

You didn't think. You tucked the calendar under your arm, shrugged your jacket tighter, and followed the map. Your boots whispered over frost that had crept inside like an extra layer of paint. The air bit your cheeks. In the kettle room, a chipped mug waited on the counter - one of his, with a hairline crack and a little painted robin. Under the mug, another folded square.

Door 2 gave up a tiny compass charm that ticked and swung and pointed you toward the map room, where you'd gotten lost on your first week and he'd found you pretending you weren't. The memory warmed you more than the old radiators did. On the table lay a single biscuit in a napkin, and beside it, Door 3's coordinates.

Each door was a breadcrumb and a memory. A paper star pointed you to the corridor where he'd taught you the base's shortcuts, voice low, kindness tucked under dry humour. A length of green thread sent you to the kit room, where months ago he'd patched a rip in your sleeve without comment, hands sure and gentle as he threaded the needle. A brass button led you to the range observation window, where you used to find him watching the field go blue with evening, quiet shoulders, eyes on the line like he was memorising the horizon.

Sometimes there was a note - not long, never flowery. Kettle's playing up; use the left plug. Mind the second step - it bites. Wind's turning. Wear the good hat. Little nothings that weren't nothing at all.

By Door 10 you stopped pretending this could be anyone else.

You moved through the base like it belonged to the two of you for a night, the calendar open in your hands, joy prickling under your skin like static. People glanced up as you passed, some smiling, some pretending not to notice. Soap lifted his chin from a card game as you slipped through the rec room; Gaz pretended to need something from a cupboard you knew was empty. If they knew, they were kind enough to let it be yours.

Door 13: a tiny sprig of pressed pine, resin-sweet in its little envelope, and coordinates to the motor pool. You remembered the week he'd insisted you take his gloves because yours were thin and he was "used to the cold." He hadn't been. His hands were red for a day, proud and foolish and tender.

Door 16: a strip of sandpaper, fine-grit, the kind he used on old wood when he thought no one was watching. That led you to the little bench behind the hangar where he whittled when sleep wouldn't come, curls of wood at his boots like shavings of moon. A knife sat there now, folded and safe, with a tag that said keep. Your throat went hot.

By Door 18 the base had settled into that quiet that happens before a snow. Your breath made ghosts. In the dark beyond the floodlights, the sky felt low, belly full of weather. Your fingers had gone numb in your gloves; you flexed them and kept going.