gifts delivered
sakshi sawarkar

Chapter 1 - The Ache: Mara Wakes with a Mission

She woke because the ache had no respect for schedules. It sat under her sternum, a small, obstinate thing as precise and insistent as a metronome: deliver. Her apartment smelled of leftover coffee and the damp cotton of her scarf. Outside, a garbage truck rattled past like a slow percussion, and somewhere two floors below a baby demanded an answer in a high, uncompromising vowel. Winter had pinched the city into a sharper outline—glass towers threw cold light like knives—but in Mara’s head the edges were softer; she could almost see, for a breath, tiny gasps unspooling under blankets, the hush when a child recognized a secret. Those moments were precarious and urgent. Someone had to make them happen.
She pulled a red thread from a sewing kit and ran it between two fingers until it caught on the seam of her planner. It made a sound she had always liked: a faint, scraped whisper. She looped the thread through three punched holes, tied it small, then pressed the knot flat with the pad of her thumb. The motion steadied her. Maps were control. Thread was ritual. She did both.
Her desk was a contraption of intent. Lined paper with routes sketched in ink. A laptop with the prototype app open—its lines and nodes pulsed like veins on a map—routing tables that promised to knit the city’s neighborhoods into one efficient organism. A box with brass bells she’d bought that morning, each bell cradled in tissue paper, metal cold and bright under her fingers. A small stack of paper manifests, old-fashioned and stubbornly human, for the addresses that would never permit themselves to be reduced to a database. Glue skin on her fingertips where she’d tested tape and labels; the smell of adhesive hung like permission.
She tapped at a cell on the spreadsheet and the numbers rearranged themselves in a satisfying, indifferent order. Drone battery life: ninety minutes per flight in clear weather; one-third less in wind. Van rental: quotes from three companies, one of them grudgingly philanthropic if she could promise naming rights. Loading dock availability: two boroughs away, window at 2 a.m. Cost of overnight security: a line item she added and then stared at until she could justify it. The plan had a humor to it; the city’s ordinances did not.
Her phone buzzed. It was Luis from the café where she had started volunteer sign-ups the night before. He had wrapped two loaves for pastry donations and a sticky note with, I’ll come. On the screen his thumbprint icon looked like a small, stubborn sun. She smiled at the icon and then frowned; there were patterns inside that smile she did not acknowledge—how easy it felt to be useful, how crowded usefulness could become.
Mara dialed the municipal liaison before she left for the day. Jenna’s voice picked up on the second ring: clipped, official, like a stamp. She was the small, clean machine that made city bureaucracy move; during office hours she could disassemble any enthusiasm into the components required by law.
“We received your preliminary filing,” Jenna said. “You’ll need liability coverage for drone operations. There’s also a permit for after-hours entry into public housing. For that, we require a security plan and a list of participating volunteers. And Mara—background checks.”
Mara felt the breath of annoyance rise like steam. People thought of bureaucracy as obstruction; Mara knew its other face: slow, yes, but legible. It asked the difficult question—who would be responsible when something went wrong? It demanded that generosity answer for itself with paperwork.
“I’ll get the insurance,” she said. “Tell me the forms. I’ll prepare them.”
“We have a deadline for placement on the first-night roster,” Jenna said. “We need the files by Friday.”
Mara’s planner sat open like a small altar. Fridays were dangerous—too close to the event she had imagined and too far away for a city to rearrange itself. She typed the deadline into the app, watched it blink like a metronome into existence, and kept her voice level.
“Understood.”
When she hung up she could feel the plan crystallizing. There was always a stage in any large endeavor where the work looked like faith—lines on a map, volunteers signed up on a Google form—but it was still work. She could see routes like arteries, the feeding of neighborhood by neighborhood, the arteries narrowing into capillaries where the streets went narrow and stairs replaced ramps. She liked that idea: a delivery network that thought like a body.
Her first stops were practical. She booked the loading dock and paid the deposit for rental vans, entered credit card numbers with the bored concentration of someone who had reconciled moral urgency with budgets. She printed labels on cheap paper and folded them neatly in stacks; folding calmed her as surely as it had calmed her mother, who’d made a life of folding laundry until the folds looked like vows.
At the café, volunteers stood in a small, earnest cluster around the espresso machine and an overstuffed couch. Luis—tall, quick hands—had a ribbon still stuck in his apron; he’d wrapped a package for his niece in two colors and refused to choose one. Evelyn, the retired teacher with the slow laugh and the habit of knitting mittens in church basements, pressed a palm to a bell as if to test its truth.
“You don’t really need a sleigh, right?” Evelyn said, half-teasing, half-expecting an answer she already had.
“No,” Mara said. “Not a sleigh.” Her mouth felt dry. Conjuring the image of a sleigh in the city felt like sentimental sabotage. “We need a network.”
A kid—Tess, who worked afternoons bussing tables—looked up from her phone. “Is it like Santa?” she asked. The word had that odd adult-child friction; Tess’s eyebrows arched with the question. A myth in a hoodie.
“It’s like making small miracles,” Mara said, and she knew the phrase sounded like something she’d seen on a nonprofit website. She wasn’t sure what language to use anymore; the vocabulary of logistics and the vocabulary of wonder tangled in her chest the way the red thread did with her fingers.
“You really think you can reach them all?” Luis asked, more curiosity than cynicism.
Mara pictured millions of bedrooms, outlines of cups on bedside tables, the electric buzz of night lights. She pictured the small, incandescent hinge of a gasp. Her mouth tightened. “Not all,” she admitted. “But many.”
The café’s fluorescent hum and the hiss of espresso machines felt suddenly marginal to something larger. Mara carried boxes of bells to her car, the brass cool, heavy, like a promise. She thought of the bells against a child’s palm—not theatrical, not spectacle, but small and precise. Bells were a ritual she knew how to deploy.
The municipal office sat in a bureaucratic building with stainless-steel doors and a smell of copier paper and disinfectant. Jenna took Mara into a small conference room and put a stack of documents on the table: liability forms, ordinances, a poster for the municipal donation drive with a smiling, corporate-branded Santa whose beard looked like cotton candy.
“We support community generosity,” Jenna said. “But the city cannot expose itself to risk. There’ve been complaints about solicitations at night, and we need to protect families’ privacy.”
Mara fingered the edge of a permit form. “What kind of complaints?”
Jenna tapped a clip on her desk. “Someone posted a neighborhood watch alert. They’re concerned that lists of addresses are being compiled. We can’t have families’ information circulating.”
The words hit like a small, unexpected cold. She’d thought of data security the way she thought of drone battery life—a constraint to engineer around. She had not imagined the moment someone would claim her list as a threat.
“I’ll anonymize,” Mara said. “We can use pickup points. Libraries, schools. Consent-first.”
“Good.” Jenna’s tone softened. “We’ll need to see that protocol before issuance. And Mara—large donors.” She touched a paper casually. “We have a foundation offering funds. They would like brand placement and a PR Santa for a high-visibility distribution in the south lakeside neighborhood.”
Mara saw the photograph in Jenna’s hands: a corporate logo draped next to a Santa with a hairline like a stage prop. She imagined that headline—gifts under a banner—and felt a small, nauseous hollowness.
“They want access to the hottest zip codes,” Jenna said. “Sponsorship isn’t always bad. It moves things. But it does come with optics.”
There was a trade-off in every line item: scale or soul. Mara had always thought logistics could be ethical; now the city presented the ethical calculus like a spreadsheet she hadn’t prepared for.
When she left the office, the cold felt sharper somehow. She cradled a paper manifest, the old-fashioned kind, in her palm. The paper seemed to carry the memory of ink and pencils—edges soft with handling. Someone had once used pencil on it, then rubbed the marks into smudges. The manifest looked like a map’s worn border; it was intimate.
He introduced himself with a hand callused from paper and a smile that did not show his teeth at first. Nick Holroyd had the half-mythic presence of a man who’d done one peculiar thing long enough to be believed. He wore a jacket that had seen too many winters and smelled of peppermint lozenges and cigarette smoke; when he laughed, it sounded like a bell that had been polished too often.
“You’re Mara,” he said, as if he had known for a while. He folded the old manifest back into his breast pocket and straightened. “I heard someone was trying to scale wonder.”
“No,” she said. The word came out crisper than she expected. Her chest felt tight. “I mean—yes. We need—” Her throat closed on the rhetoric of plans. “We need to do it well.”
Nick’s hands were practical. He passed her the manifest without fuss. “This belonged to a woman who did this for twenty-eight years. She folded her lists like prayers. You can tell when a list has been prayed over.”
Mara smiled, a small, private thing that mixed embarrassment and relief. The manifest lay on her palm like an artifact; the pencil smudges looked like fingerprints.
“You’ve got an app,” Nick said. “Maps and nodes and routing tables. You can get a million addresses onto screens and never hear a single bedtime story. That’s not necessarily bad. It’s just… incomplete.”
The word landed—the accusation thin but precise. It had the flavor of a cautionary tale: all efficiency, no tenderness.
He told her stories in the way old custodians tell weather reports: matter-of-fact, anchored in observation. He spoke of a shelter where a coordinator had arranged for a donor to come in and drop off toys in the daytime; a mother, trying to shield her children from being singled out, had burst into tears at the sight. He spoke of a ten-year-old who had been terrified when an exuberant volunteer banged on a door he’d never opened to a stranger. He did not swipe at her plan with rhetoric; instead he named the practices that preserved wonder: consent, quietness, community. He insisted on paper manifests for the addresses that had to be kept human—where the algorithm could only suggest a plan, not the rightness of a knock.
“You can be clever and kind, not clever at the expense of kindness,” Nick said. He tapped the manifest, his finger tracing a list of names. “And you have to relinquish the idea you are the only one who can do this.”
Mara’s jaw tensed. The idea of handing over control felt like defeat, but it also felt like survival. She had sat up nights imagining herself a single figure moving from roof to roof; the image was seductive and lonely. Nick’s insistence that she not be the only one who could carry the weight was both relief and challenge. It asked for a distributed architecture of care—something she could code but not wholly command.
Back in her apartment she spread the manifest beside her laptop. The app’s interface glowed faintly, a promise of clean lines and ruby-pinned nodes. She started to pair entries—manifest addresses with route possibilities, nodes with volunteers. The map looked suddenly like a face under heat lamps, features shifting.
Then a notification chirped: a screenshot had appeared in a neighborhood watch group. Someone on the distribution list had saved a picture. The image was grainy but legible enough; the map she had shared in a closed forum had a laughably identifiable edge. The comments were immediate—questioning tone, accusations, the sort of righteous alarm that lived to be angry.
Her stomach lurched. She opened a browser and found threads, people speculating that an outside actor was compiling lists of children. A moderator had pinned her map as "suspicious." Someone called for the petitioning of the municipal office. Mara clicked through and watched the blue dots on her prototype die one by one like falling stars.
She called Jenna. The municipal liaison’s voice was shorter this time, threaded with a city’s reflex to contract against a perceived risk.
“We’ve had requests to halt permits pending an investigation,” Jenna said. “They’ve flagged your map. They’ve asked the city to step in.”
Mara’s fingers tightened on the phone until the plastic creaked. “I’ll anonymize the data. I can—”
“You need to stop sharing lists in public—or private—forums,” Jenna said. “There needs to be a secure channel. The city can advise on that, but we’ll have to delay the permit until this is resolved.”
Delay was a word that tasted like metal. She had the loading dock reserved, the vans lined—a network built on the swift promises of logistics. Delay threatened the whole architecture. She imagined parents told there would be nothing, children who had already set the shape of what might arrive on their mind’s horizon.
A new message came through a different vein. A foundation contact—she had spoken to them once—offered to underwrite the entire operation in exchange for branding on one distribution night and a celebrity Santa at the main hub. The message was generous and cadenced with marketable nouns: reach, visibility, leveraged giving. It was also an offer to convert wonder into spectacle and to trade trust for cash.
On the narrow line between those two messages—one of alarm and one of offer—Mara felt her own edges calibrate. She had started this because the ache under her ribs would not leave her alone, because she had seen the hollow spots where wonder had been smudged away by adult comforts. Now she stood between two paths: accept the money and scale fast, risk turning the act into an advertisement; or slow, anonymize, fold in more hands, risk that thousands would go without this year while she built a system that might last.
She paced the small length of her apartment, the paper manifest clutched in one hand, the bells in the other. The bells made a soft sound when they tapped the table—possibility, small and metallic. She remembered Nick’s hands on the manifest, how he had folded pages like a prayer. She remembered Evelyn’s mitten-slowed fingers, and Luis’s awkward, earnest pledge. She could feel their expectations in the spaces of the plan like weight.
Rain started then, a thin, urban sound that filled gutters and made lights bloom into smeared halos. The forecast glowed on her screen: a winter storm system was moving in; travel disruptions expected. The city that had seemed like a canvas ready for routes narrowed into a place that could trap vans and stall volunteers. She imagined drone batteries failing in wind and drivers stuck on bridges that iced over by midnight.
Mara sat down hard at her desk. The room smelled suddenly of wet concrete and the adhesive on her labels, and the ache under her ribs sharpened into a line. She could do the paperwork, she could anonymize the lists, she could refuse the foundation’s headline Santa—but the permit delay and the storm made that polite plan impossible. The timeframe that had been a scaffolding now creaked.
She opened the manifest and smoothed a name with her thumb. Names were not data points. They breathed and spat and smelled like the city: the smell of a toddler’s hair when they’d just been carried; the particular stale sweetness of a hospital waiting room; the clack of shoes on a stairwell. She could not let the ache calcify into rhetoric. The work demanded choices with teeth.
Her phone rang again. This time it was an emergency line from a neonatal unit at the municipal hospital. Three mothers had been told, quietly, that there would be nothing this year—no one from family, no gifts. It was ten in the evening. The woman on the line spoke like a person who had been awake a long time; her voice had the thin, clinical patience of someone who had seen many hard small things.
“Do you have a volunteer who can bring a small box—just books, wrapped small?” she asked. “Something that won’t disturb the recovering mothers but will let the babies’ siblings have a minute. They said they’d take anything.”
Mara looked at her manifest and at the map with its nodes that now looked like an injured constellation. Her brain catalogued obstacles—permit delayed, storm, volunteer roster hemorrhaging with transit warnings—and then, in the small, stubborn place where the ache lived, a decision made itself like a muscle remembering a familiar movement.
She did not accept the foundation’s branded Santa. She did not, yet, cancel the volunteer lists. She picked up the manifest, folded it, and put it in the pocket of her jacket. She slid a bell into her palm and tucked the other bells into a canvas bag.
Outside, the rain had turned into a fine, wet snow, making the city smell like the specific coldness of laundromats and wet asphalt. She could feel the thread of the plan in her hands and the loose end of her life unfurling—friends whose texts she’d ignored, dinners she’d canceled. There would be an accounting later. For now the immediate was uncompromising: a neonatal unit. Three mothers who might weep at small kindnesses. A municipal office promising delay. A storm on the way.
She crossed the street toward the subway and the small flock of people huddled under umbrellas. Her phone flashed with new messages—volunteers asking if plans still stood, a forum threading itself with anger, Jenna’s terse note about the permit. Mara’s fingers hovered over replies she did not have the luxury to draft perfectly. She let them wait.
The city moved around her like an organism rearranging itself to weather. A driver’s horn complained at a delivery van stalled at a curb. A streetlight buzzed and split the snow into silver confetti. Mara walked with the manifest pressed to her chest, the page warm with the heat of her hand. She could feel the plan contracting to the size of her body. Maps were useful; bodies were immediate.
She looked down at the brass bell in her palm. It was small, nearly insignificant, fitted for a child’s hand. It caught the streetlight and rang when she pinched it gently—a clear, vulnerable note that did not pretend to solve anything. The sound settled in her chest the way the ache had.
There were thousands of names on the city’s invisible lists; there were dozens who had already been promised. The permit that had felt like a hinge had been suspended by a municipal decision; the storm would complicate logistics in ways she could not fully predict. The city, which had once been a map she could plan across, had become a body she had to navigate—one heartbeat at a time.
She stepped into the open mouth of the subway station and pulled her collar up against the snow. I must get them there, she thought—raw, present-tense, a command that erased the polite hypotheticals that had occupied earlier days. The thought landed with the immediate clarity of a bell. It was not strategy. It was intention.
Above ground, the snow began to accumulate in thin, slow rings that blurred the edges of the world. Below ground her shoes squeaked on concrete. She folded the manifest into smaller pieces and tucked it back in her pocket, felt the smudge of old pencil like a talisman against panic. The plan had become smaller and more dangerous and, for the first time, painfully real.
She climbed the stairs toward the hospital, each step announcing itself with the crispness of responsibility, and the city rearranged itself beneath her feet: routes undone, permits paused, a storm knitting the night into slippery lace. The ache in her chest had not gone away; it had clarified. There was no ready answer. Only movement. Only decisions.
She walked faster. The bell in her hand rang once, twice—with no sleigh, no spectacle, only a small metal voice in the dark—and the sound felt like the beginning of a ledger that would be written one small delivery at a time.
Chapter 2 - Blueprints and Spreadsheets: Designing Delivery

Mara woke before her phone, as she always had when an idea pulled hard enough to unsettle sleep. The ache was already in her chest—small, precise, the way a bruise presses under the sternum—and for a half-second she tried to convince herself it was hunger or a dream. It was neither. It was the shape of an obligation: gifts to many children, and no way to get them there.
She lay with her hand on the thin mattress and let the city breathe under the window. A delivery truck idled on the avenue, diesel throbbing like a distant heartbeat; the building across the street traced a pale rectangle of light where someone had left a television on. The ache made maps bloom behind her eyes—streets braided with routes; rooftops as nodes; elevators and stoops like hands. If she could draw it, she told herself, perhaps she could fix it.
She dressed without thinking: a sweater that smelled faintly of lemon and printer toner, jeans with coffee stains on the knee, shoes that had been walked into submission. In the kitchen she untied a red thread from a jar of postcards and looped it around her planner until the leather cover puckered. It was a childish ritual—thread like a seam across a city—but rituals set a tempo; she needed tempo more than inspiration. She boiled water, made coffee that burned the back of her throat, and opened a blank spreadsheet.
Spreadsheets were where Mara felt competent. They took ache and turned it into a ledger: columns of addresses, estimated delivery windows, volunteer names, battery life percentages. She called the columns arteries. Routes would be arteries; vans and drones would pump presents like blood. The idea comforted her with its metaphorical cleanliness. She gave each route a number and a color and watched the city on her screen become a diagram she could read with the same kind of intimacy she usually reserved for blueprints and zoning
Chapter 3 - Recruiting Hands: Volunteers, Bells, and Noise

The first thing Mara noticed was the ache. It lodged itself like a paperclip under the sternum — small, metallic, impossible to ignore. She had woken with it the way one wakes to a smoke alarm: instant, insistent, and not negotiable. She lay in the dim of her apartment while the city pressed its glass and neon against the window and thought of the sound of small hands ripping paper. The image arrived with the clarity of a map: a child’s face, the moment the lid came off a box. That single picture magnified until it filled the room.
She could have cataloged the impulse: forty-two hours of cold work, margin calculations, a model of surge volunteers, the usual planner’s comfort of numbers. Instead she reached under her nightstand for the leather notebook she kept for impossible things and wrote one line in the margin in a hand that trembled a little: Deliver as many as possible. She looped red thread through the page twice, tied a knot. It was nonsense and it was prayer.
She began as planners begin: with maps. The city on her monitor unfolded like a sleeping animal—arteries of streets, muscles of expressways, little capillaries where alleys fed stoops and basement doors. She drew routes that looked surgical. She labelled pickup warehouses, calculated battery life for rental drones she did not yet trust, and penciled in rendezvous points under overpasses where cameras seldom lingered. Her screen glowed with green lines; the lines made her feel less ridiculous for believing in surprise.
The first volunteers came because people always answer a particular kind of call: the one that feels urgent and practical. A barista who wrapped pastries in spare hours; a retired teacher whose hands
Chapter 4 - A Rumor Named Nick Holroyd: Meeting Santa

Mara woke with the ache like a bruise behind her sternum, small and relentless, as if someone had left a coin there overnight and now the coin had edges. It sat with her as she swung her feet onto the cold kitchen tiles, as she scraped last night's sauce from a pan, as she poured coffee that tasted faintly of burnt sugar and ambition. She kept the brass bell on the shelf above her microwave. It looked absurd there—polished, circular, with a ragged red ribbon threaded through its handle—and when she picked it up the metal was the precise temperature of the apartment: lukewarm from the radiator, slightly sticky where she had rolled jam on her thumb the night before. She tinked it once. The sound was small and intimate, like the beginning of something that could be taken apart and put together again.
I need to deliver gifts to as many children as I can, she thought, because the ache named itself easily enough in the dark: deliver. It was not a plan yet. It was a hunger that did not have coordinates. She was a planner by trade; maps unclenched the rest of her. So she did what planners do. She made lists.
By nine she had a prototype interface open on her laptop—lines of code and boxes and the soft blue grids of a mapping tool. She traced routes with the tip of a pen until the ink smeared across her knuckles. The routes looked like arteries to her: main feeders on which hope could travel and capillaries where a volunteer might leave a mitten on a stoop. She bought a stack of mailing labels, a thermal printer that thunked like a small heart, and a roll of red thread that she looped through her planner as if plotting ley lines. When she did this her hands remembered being small—knees under the dining room table, paper maps spread like treasure blueprints while her father muttered about detours—and the ache eased just enough to make the coffee taste better.
Volunteers signed up in the first wave: a barista who said he wrapped packages for his little cousin; a retired teacher who typed in all caps that she would be “VERY GOOD”; a mother who could wrap a parcel while her toddler napped. Mara assigned them routes on a spreadsheet labeled DELTAS and RINGS, the names borrowed from the city’s service zones. She sent the municipal liaison an email that felt like an invitation and a dare. She filed for permits that required forms with phrases like "after-hours access" and "special delivery conditions" and a box to check acknowledging liability. She bought insurance quotes that arrived in neat PDF tabs and smelled faintly of printer toner and someone’s earnest optimism.
At the shelter the coordinator, Janice, looked at Mara and then at the schema and smiled with only half the mouth.
“We’re small,” Janice said. Her hands smelled of bleach and the metal of the desk. “We don’t want spectacle. We don’t want people complaining about privacy. We also don’t want a truckload of donated crap. The kids need books. They need socks. They need someone who knocks, gives it quietly, and leaves. Santa shows up loud half the time.” She punctuated the sentence with a short, sharp laugh that had been beaten flat by too many wrong deliveries.
Mara had expected Janice. She had not expected the municipal liaison to sound like a judge.
“We will need a detailed routing manifest,” the liaison said on the phone, voice buffered by a headset and municipal procedure. “Liability waivers for volunteers crossing private property. Liability insurance for drones exceeding twenty-five pounds. Nighttime access to public housing requires a security escort and a letter from the property manager. And, per ordinance 14.2(c), any distribution involving children must include explicit parental consent if surprise is involved.”
Mara swallowed. Consent—of course. Surprise was the jewel of the work but also a complicated ruby. She had not thought politically about hushes and entrances. She had thought about routes and bells. The liaison's sentences were neat tiles stacked into a wall.
“We can make those documents anonymous,” Mara said. “We can—”
The liaison cut her off with the professional patience of someone who had closed more loopholes than she had opened in a lifetime. “Anonymized lists are not bulletproof. Digital caches leak. Neighborhood watch apps are a thing. You understand the risk, Ms. Varma?”
She did. She also did not expect Nick Holroyd to arrive for the municipal charity's monthly meeting that afternoon.
He came in like a rumor. He was five-feet-ten, shoulders softened by winter coats worn for many years, hair the color of the grayish caramel that fills the gutters in late November. He smelled of peppermint and cigarette smoke and a small library of paper files—old man musk combined with sugared candy and ink. He had hands like soft cartographers, fingers ink-stained at the nails, and his parka was patched at the elbow where a pencil had once stuck. When he introduced himself he did not say, “I’m Santa.” He said, “Name’s Nick. I’ve been delivering for thirty years. I’ve worn a suit for a few of them, but the suit thinks too much of itself.”
There was applause from the municipal staff, the polite kind given to someone who had been doing a difficult job for a long time. Mara watched him watch her. He had a way of cataloguing people’s faces like he could note their routes as well as their names.
“You’re the planner,” he said, looking at her file. His voice was warm timber with a thread of ash. “You’ve got maps. That’s half the job, sometimes. The other half is not in maps.”
He unfolded a sheet from his satchel—soft paper yellowed along the edges, a manifest folded until the creases were soft. The list was handwritten. Names clustered together, pencil smudges like footprints. There were annotations in the margins: ‘prefers quiet handoff’, ‘no evening visits — mother works nights’, ‘ask Ms. G. about allergies’. The handwriting curved like a river charted by someone who had walked the banks more than once.
“This is what we use,” he said. “Not a database. A manifest. It’s messy. But it’s human.”
Mara felt a small, irrational heat—like the hardware part of her heart humming with recognition and irritation at the same time. She’d imagined Santa as an idea that arrived in a viral video or a choir of corporate Santas. She had not imagined someone who carried a manifest like a rosary.
“Why not a database?” she asked, because that was what planners ask in order to keep things moving.
Nick’s eyes pinched at the corners. “Because databases leak.” He tapped the list with a damp thumb. “Because when a name is in a machine it becomes a target. When it’s a note in a book, when someone has to earn the name—ask permission, meet the parent, make sure the surprise isn’t a harm—that’s protection. People think anonymity comes from encryption. Sometimes it comes from decency.”
He said it as if decency were a kind of weather: necessary and variable, not achieved by protocol alone. Mara felt the ache flare. It was a truth she had not wanted to meet: that systems could be efficient and still be cruel. That efficiency could hand out wonder like a one-size-fits-all sweater.
Conflict braided through the next days. A philanthropist, whose name glowed in Mara’s inbox with a subject line that read “PARTNERSHIP OPPORTUNITY,” sent a proposal with a clickable deck. The deck was beautiful: glossy images of children with celebrity Santas, branded ribbons, and the kind of leverage that could buy dozens of vans. The gift came with strings. “We will require brand visibility,” the email explained. “One billboard, two social posts, and a press event at compliance with city regulations.” The donation would ensure reach to the wealthiest zip codes—where television cameras liked to film small miracles. For a moment, the spreadsheet in Mara’s brain lit up with numbers and a map of coverage. But underneath the numbers sat a smell she did not like, the same as when a meal comes heavily salted so the flavor covers something less savory.
“You can’t put a billboard over someone’s moment,” Janice said when Mara described the proposal. “We have to keep the dignity of it.”
Mara called the liaison again. Each conversation with the office tightened her chest: a new regulator, a new requirement, a new clause about data protection and insurance. The liaison recited regulations in a cadence that made Mara imagine law books like lead-lined trunks. “We require a privacy impact assessment,” the liaison said. “We require a Named Data Custodian. Volunteers must be background-checked. We may grant conditional permits, but only for deliveries coordinated through recognized community partners.”
Her volunteer pool was enthusiastic and small. They began to argue, or rather to voice small, precise objections. A driver refused routes that took her into neighborhoods she did not know; a man who’d signed up as a wrap-and-deliver volunteer confessed he had children but could not bring himself to knock on doors in certain blocks. The city was a map of invisible borders—neighborhood apps that flagged outsiders, community histories that no map could show.
And then there was the leak. A volunteer saved a screenshot of a subset of the manifest on her phone—“just in case the app crashes,” she said. Someone took the screen and posted it to a neighborhood watch forum with the caption: "Is this legal?" The screenshot snowballed. Within hours, the forum thread had turned into a small witch-hunt. There were comments that called Mara’s work a fishing expedition. There were screenshots tagged and shared and saved in places Mara did not know how to reach. A privacy advocate wrote to her with a tone like an editorial: “You cannot be cavalier with lists that include children’s names.” The municipal liaison wrote back coolingly, “We are aware of the thread.”
Nick watched the thread and shook his head in that small, decisive way. “People will weaponize what they don’t understand,” he said. He did not sound surprised. He sounded older than surprise. “You can lose the story if you let outrage have the mic.”
Mara felt as though she were carrying the ache in public now; it was no longer a private bruise. She started sleeping badly. She ate cold dinners with volunteers in a warehouse that smelled of cardboard and battery acid, the fluorescent lights humming like a small stadium of insects. Her hands learned new languages: folding manifest corners, tying ribbons into tight bows, sticking labels with a precision that matched the tremor she felt in her fingers. She started waking at three a.m. to check the app. It was a narrow, wired version of prayer.
“You’re not sleeping, are you?” her friend Lena asked one evening. Lena had come to help stamp labels and had a way of seeing exhaustion as a personal affront. She wrapped her scarf tighter and laughed the way someone improvised calm. “You look like a person who’s memorized too many routes.”
“You had to see the manifest,” Mara said. “It was…Nick’s.”
“You gonna become him?” Lena asked, half-joking, half-concerned. She knew Mara’s history—how Mara had once tried to knit a charity project at university and burned through three volunteers in a week because she had expected people to be as detailed and devoted as she was.
Mara could not answer. The question lodged in her like a splinter. Was she trying to become Santa because she loved children, or because she needed to be someone who fixed things? Planners did not always need applause; sometimes they were soothed by the hum of a solution assembling into place. But the ache in her chest felt older than the need for accomplishment. It smelled of childhood, of the small domestic miracles her mother had arranged in silence. It also smelled of a more dangerous hunger: being necessary to people who were not her family so that her private life could be excused.
The storm came the week before the scheduled runs.
It arrived like a curtain: flat, heavy snow driven sideways by wind that tasted of iron. The city’s media flashed advisories. The municipal office sent terse messages about restricted access. The delivery app that Mara had built—the one that translated spreadsheet columns into live routes—depended on a set of cellular nodes that blinked across her interface like constellations. At midnight, the nodes quivered and then went dark. The routing tables froze. The map on her screen, once a neat lattice of arrows and times, ruptured into pale, unhelpful dots.
At the same time, the cached screenshot of the manifest erupted again in angry tweets. Someone had taken a screenshot and attached it to a thread about "suspicious lists." Overnight, people had matched names from the manifest to public posts. Volunteers started receiving private messages asking why a stranger knew their child's name. One of the neighborhood apps flagged an address in a public-housing building as “do not approach.” People began calling Janice at the shelter asking whether their names were on a list—parents, frightened, suspicious. Janice's voice on the phone was thin with fatigue.
“Someone’s calling every number in our intake folder,” she said. “They want to know who authorized your list. They want to know if we sold them anything. They want—you should see what they’re saying.”
Mara pressed her palms to her eyes until the lights smeared. The map on her laptop was a dead constellation. The volunteers were in transit, some trapped on trains that had stopped, some turned back by iced streets. The municipal liaison sent a terse notice: “Because of current risks and pending review of the data breach, all after-hours permits for tonight are revoked.” The words looked like a verdict.
She could hear Nick’s voice then, older and patient. “Maps are a comfort until they break. You read the city as a body, Mara. These are not lines and pins—they’re people with bone and history.”
Her hands shook so badly that she could not type. She called the volunteers she trusted, the ones who had said yes without hesitation. She told them to do something radical: to stop treating herself as a single point of failure and to be local Santas—take the parcels they already had, redistribute them through block captains, meet at libraries and community centers to hand off packages quietly. It was messy. It violated every neat plan she had prepared. It also felt like the only honest option.
“You want us to be decentralized?” the barista asked, his voice muffled by snow. “What if people see us? What if they think it’s creepy?”
“Then do it the way Nick taught me,” Mara said. “Knock. Ask. The goal is the moment, not the stunt.”
She had, in the hours before the permit revocation, sent out a child-safety protocol written haltingly by volunteers and herself. It was a mixture of legalese and practical tenderness: how to approach a residence, what to say when a parent opened the door, where to leave a package for a family who asked for no-contact delivery. She now realized that the document was more manifesto than policy: a list of how to remain human while doing an impossible thing.
Nick called in favors. That’s the way he called it—like phone calls were small transactions of trust. He went to churches and told priests who remembered him to open their basements as tiny hubs. A night security guard at a community center who knew Nick from decades of holiday nights agreed to staff a reception desk. A teacher in a school offered classroom space. The analog network hummed as Nick walked it, a web that had been woven in the margins for years.
A call came from the neonatal unit at St. Agnes. “We have three mothers,” the nurse said, voice tape-measured by exhaustion. “They were told this year there would be nothing. They’re awake, and they asked if anyone could—if you could bring something. It's not about toys. It's about…about noticing.”
Mara did not put on a beard. She could have. She had thought about it in the mirror, thought about the charity photographs and the way a costume could make an action feel like myth instead of labor. She slipped on a coat that did not have patches. Her breath smoked in the hallway as she took the bell from the shelf and tucked it into her palm. The brass was warm from being held; its ribbon had one frayed thread where Lena had tied it in a hurry. She walked through the snow and the city felt like a machine that refused to be reduced to a diagram: streetlights blowing, car engines coughing, a delivery truck sliding slowly past a bakery whose neon sign blinked too quickly for the storm.
At St. Agnes the corridor smelled of antiseptic and the faintly sweet odor of baby shampoo. The bell sounded timid in that space—two quick rings that did not draw attention but punctuated the air. A nurse opened the door and looked at her as if she carried contraband. The three mothers were small in the fluorescent rectangle of the ward, faces raw, hair pressed flat. Their hands were folded around mugs. One of them had a shushing habit—a thumb pressed to her lip as if to quiet the world.
“I brought a box,” Mara said. Her voice sounded too loud there, somewhere between a child and someone reading a form. The nurse allowed her inside. Mara handed over a parcel—two soft blankets, a small board book with rounded corners, a knitted hat. She left a note that read: “For the nights you must be brave. For the mornings you cannot yet see.” She did not wear a costume. She did not ring a bell and expect fireworks. She waited in the doorway while the mothers read the note. Tears came quietly, one at a time, not theatrical but precise.
“Thank you,” one whispered, not to her but to the room, as if the thanks were a small object to pass around.
Mara felt the ache widen and change shape. It was not soothed so much as made accountable. It wanted action. It wanted to be distributed.
When she returned to the warehouse, the storm had brought the city to a hush like a held breath. Nick was leaning against a shipping crate, his parka buttoned to the throat. He looked as if he had been measured in coffee cups and minutes; his beard was peppered at the chin. He handed Mara the folded manifest.
“I’m done with heroics,” he said. “It’s time for technique.”
He did not offer a place of myth; he offered a method. The manifest was heavier than it had been earlier, smudged in places where hands had rubbed at pencil marks. There were annotations she had not seen—little arrows indicating alternate pickup points, a scribble that read ‘temp. hold if online threat’ and a circled phone number that was not municipal. It looked like a living thing. It looked like a part of a city that refused to be reduced.
“You’ll have to become a different kind of person for this,” he said. “Not a legend. A steward. There’s a difference. Legends get applause. Stewards keep lists and make sure beds are warm.”
Mara’s muscles hummed with fatigue and a kind of fierce satisfaction. She felt like a pilot who had been thrown into a storm and had managed to rewire the instruments on the fly. But the storm had not ended her problems. She had learned to pivot, to pull networks together across neighborhoods and basements. She had not solved the leak. She had not reconciled with the municipal office. A new email sat open on her laptop with the subject line: “RE: Data breach – immediate review.” It was from the liaison.
“We will be conducting a full review,” the message read. “All operations involving children’s data will be suspended pending audit. If it is found that our guidelines were not met, legal action may follow. Please provide all manifests and volunteer agreements by 0800 tomorrow.”
Mara read the sentence twice. The words registered like a physical shove. Suspension. Audit. Legal action. It was one thing to have volunteers stranded by a storm. It was another to have an entire municipal procedure weaponized against a community effort because someone mistook a manifest for surveillance. Outside, the snow kept falling for a while longer. The bell on the shelf hummed in the empty warehouse like a small, waiting heartbeat.
She could feel the ache change again, this time into something that had sharper edges. It had turned from a private conviction into a public responsibility. The map that had once been a comfort had become contested ground. She had made the first, necessary mistakes—errors of scale, of haste, of misread trust. But the city had noticed; the city had regulatory teeth. She had the manifest in her hand and a municipal audit in her inbox. She had Nick’s offer of stewardship and the threat of being shut down.
Mara sat at a folding table with the manifest spread open like a prayer book and the laptop that had been half her salvation and half her undoing beside it. The red thread looped through her planner like a stubborn seam. She thought of the mothers at the hospital, of Janice’s bleach-smelling hands, of the barista who had learned to tie a bow, and of Nick who knew how to call favors like small, reliable engines.
She could continue along the route she had sketched—scale up with donors and legal teams until systems groaned and the spectacle took over, until wonder became product. Or she could dismantle the model into smaller, less glossy parts: neighborhood hubs, consent forms written in plain language, trained stewards who would be accountable to communities rather than to a press release. She could accept that her role as a centralizing force might be dangerous. She could also accept that without some form of coordination, many children would go without.
Her phone buzzed. It was a text from Lena: “You asleep? Are we doing this tomorrow?”
Mara looked at the manifest. On the margin someone—Nick, she guessed—had written a small line in a looping hand: ‘Start with what we can defend.’ Her stomach tightened. The municipal office wanted defensible paperwork. The neighborhood watch had weaponized a screenshot. The philanthropist had offered money with strings. The storm had hacked the app.
She folded the manifest and slid it into her bag. The bell lay on the table, ribbon fluffed from the overnight. She sighed, a sound like someone unhooking a network of lights. She knew the work would require more than plans and code. It would require making choices that bridged ethics and pragmatism, choices that would leave some people visible and some invisible, decisions that would unwrap someone’s tiny miracle at the cost of exposure.
She paused with her hand on the bell. It felt ordinary and heavy. She could ring it and call people to a central place and risk the spectacle. She could keep it in her bag and teach others to use it when it needed to be used. She could fold herself into Nick’s technique and insist on a different vocabulary for delivering wonder.
She stepped out into the snow and the city smelled of wet concrete and exhaust and a hundred small defiant hearths. Overhead, a banner on a construction site fluttered, proclaiming an upcoming civic celebration with a photography day that would feature "Holiday Cheer." She imagined the banner as an enormous hand trying to clap for itself. The manifest was in her bag. The municipal audit was in her inbox. The leak had not faded; if anything, it promised to become a story with legs.
She walked toward Janice's shelter because the little office had been honest in a way bureaucracy was not. She wanted to see the faces of the people she had promised to protect. She wanted to know if the small, intimate mechanisms she was building could hold in a night of storms and threats and regulations.
The streetlights threw pools of sodium light onto the snow. Her boots made a soft, rhythmic sound. She could feel the ache now as something like a thread pulled taut in the dark. It demanded action and it demanded carefulness.
I must get them there.
The line moved through her in a single, present-tense pulse, sharp as the brass bell in her hand. It was not a plan yet. It was a binding. The city hummed around her—maps and permits, trolls and kindnesses, a rumor named Nick who smelled of peppermint and smoke—and she carried a manifest like a vow.
She did not know how to keep every promise. But she would start. And starting would mean answering the audit and meeting with the liaison and convincing a philanthropist that generosity could be quiet. It would mean training street-level stewards and rewriting consent forms and maybe losing time and friends and the illusion that she could be everything. It would mean choosing who saw the light and who did not. It would mean, perhaps, that the ache might not leave, but could be held in something communal rather than in her alone.
The snow made little echoes. The manifest was heavy and warm in her bag. The bell lay against her palm like a small, steady heart. She took one step and then another toward the shelter, toward the long work of translation: of routes into rituals, of databases into decency, of myth into practice. The city closed around her like a map that would not be flattened.
Chapter 5 - The Old Manifest: Lessons in Ritual and Consent

Mara woke with the ache like a small animal under her ribs: persistent, alert, impossible to ignore. The city outside her window was a bruised patchwork of reflected lights and exhaust; the radiator clicked and then went quiet. She pushed a hair back from her face and reached for the planner on the nightstand—the one she had looped with red thread—and the thread caught under her fingers as if it had something to say.
I must get them there.
She said it in her head as a command and a prayer, the two tonic notes of her life. It was not a romantic conviction. It was an engineering problem wrapped in tenderness. How to carry thousands of tiny combustions of joy—single moments that flared and then left their glow—across a city slick with regulations, surveillance, and people who were exhausted enough to distrust strangers? Maps, Mara thought. Maps were where she began. Maps and flow charts and the kind of stubborn arithmetic that could make chaos admit to a plan.
Her kitchen smelled of old coffee and citrus oil. She made another pot, set her laptop where the sunlight hit the table like a strip of stage. The spreadsheet opened with a soft pop; cells awaited names, addresses, notes on consent. She labeled tabs—Routes, Volunteers, Permits, Privacy—and the act of naming steadied her. Her fingers moved with a familiar choreography: column widths adjusted, conditional formatting applied so that red would light up on high-priority zones, formulas that would auto-calculate battery drain for drones and time windows for deliveries. The routes looked like arteries; she liked that image. Arteries carried life. She imagined lines across the city, pulse points at after-school centers, shelters, high-rises where the heat was perpetually thin.
She drafted the initial outreach: short, explicit, a consent-first philosophy that read more like a catechism for respect than a marketing mailer. If you want a surprise delivered to a child, tell us how you prefer it—no knock, hand at doorway, leave in vestibule—check boxes for language support, allergies, and a checkbox labeled NO MEDIA. Volunteers clicked through the opt-in, names compiling into a list that made her feel momentarily ridiculous and powerful at once: baristas who had once wrapped paper cups with love, a retired postal worker with teaching hands, Anton the high-school theater kid who could wrap a box like a stage prop.
They came to the first meeting because Mara had sent bagels and because people who were tired of cynicism still wanted to practice kindness. They sat at a long table beneath a humming strip light in a community center warmed by old radiators. Someone had left a brass bell on the table—Mara had bought it in a fit of literalism the week before—and it made a small, honest clanging when she knocked it to call the room to order. That sound—less myth, more metal—seemed to disarm everyone.
"Names and neighborhoods," Mara said. She spoke in the short, precise sentences she used with vendors and with plans. "We route by proximity, and we prioritize consent. If a family asks not to be surprised, we respect that. If a child is in a shelter, we coordinate with staff."
They nodded, their faces lit by the glow of their phones. A woman in a paint-splattered coat raised a hand. "What about—" she started, then closed her mouth. She was thinking of cameras, of neighbor apps that pinged strangers. Someone else muttered, "Liability."
Mara had prepped for that. She had the list of municipal requirements printed, the lines underlined in black ink: permits for after-hours entry into public housing; certificates to operate drones within city airspace; a clause about parcel sizes in certain residential complexes; demands for liability insurance if you were to be within five feet of a child's doorway after midnight. The paper rustled like an old map. She read the most urgent bits aloud, and the volunteers’ faces folded into practicality.
She left the meeting early and walked the neighborhood until the city felt less like a grid and more like a set of lived-in rooms. A thrift store window displayed mittens with missing thumbs. A neighbor set out a single poinsettia on a stoop, watered and alive in the cold. Her phone chimed—an email from the municipal liaison, Javier, with a subject line marked URGENT. The city required a formal petition for access to any housing authority property over the holidays; the petition would take two weeks to process. Two weeks, which in planner-time was a corridor with several locked doors.
She pushed through the little frustration—systems always had their own speed—and kept working. But then a knock came that smelled of tobacco and peppermint and other people's old biennial enthusiasms. He filled the doorway of the community center almost like an idea appears: taller than she expected, hair bent back into a cap, a coat that had seen too many winters. His name was Nick Holroyd, he said. People called him Santa, or they had years ago; he corrected no one, the way a person keeps a habit without performing it.
Nick's hands were paper-stained and sure. He unfolded a sheet of paper Marashad never seen before—old