Fireplace for Your Home

At my mother’s during Christmas time, we sat down to watch a movie. Mom and her husband were busy getting together warm drinks and tidying up the kitchen as my husband, six-year-old daughter, and I nestled into the couch.

“Do you have a movie in mind?” I asked Jordan.

“Oh, I know what we should watch,” he responded, knowingly, flipping through the menus to get to the streaming program he was looking for.

Opening scene: close-up on a fireplace. So hyper-real we could almost feel the embers and we could certainly see and hear it crackling. The extreme close-up lingered. We sat watching for several minutes. Evelyn was enraptured.

I stifled a laugh as I began to realize what we were looking at.

“Daddy, I have to go potty. Will you please pause it?”

“Of course, baby,” Jordan responded, pausing the scene.

I couldn’t hold back my eruption of giggles any longer. Jordan joined me. As my mom and her husband walked into the room, wanting to know what was so funny, we explained that Evelyn had just asked us to pause Fireplace for Your Home on Netflix.

Evelyn returned from the bathroom as our laughter settled, and we pulled up Home Alone, which Evelyn probably believes to this day opens with an extreme close-up on a fireplace.

Looking for more to read? Check these out from the MockingOwl contributors and authors.

• Christmas Traditions
• Asking Questions, Christmas Edition
• Christmas Waltz, a Poem
• My Favorite Things: a Christmas Carol

CLS Sandoval

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CLS Sandoval, PhD (she/her) is a pushcart nominated writer and communication professor with accolades in film, academia, and creative writing who speaks, signs, acts, publishes, sings, performs, writes, paints, teaches and rarely relaxes. She’s a flash fiction and poetry editor for Dark Onus Lit. She has presented over 50 times at communication conferences, published 15 academic articles, two academic books, three full-length literary collections, three chapbooks, as well as flash and poetry pieces in several literary journals, recently including Opiate Magazine, The Journal of Magical Wonder, and A Moon of One’s Own. She is raising her daughter and dog with her husband in Alhambra, CA.

Find more on CLS’s Facebook or Instagram.

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