It began with a body. The plastic limbs used and dumped every so often. Then it was X-rays, blurred or no longer needed when the patient died. Then the clothes of the same dead people and their small, worthless belongings; cheap necklaces and bracelets, earrings that had slipped down the sides of the beds and were missed by the cleaners when they fell to the floor.

She worked through Halloween and walked back on bonfire night while the fireworks exploded overhead. She went back to her small room and turned the calendar until December came. She marked off each day with an X, all the way to Christmas day.
On the weekends when she could not find work, she went to the cinema, read her books. She learnt the things she had promised her brother; how to cook, to study, to sketch from the week all she saw in hundreds of thumbnail drawings. She kept her promises to him and in the evenings she sat and looked to the photos that were stuck to the mirror that faced her bed.

The hospital filled in December with seasonal sickness and drunken parties; she received Christmas cards and sent out others in return; she smiled and remembered how her and her brother had competed as children to who had more from school. All the silly arguments that seemed important when you had nothing to care for. She put a rubber band around them and kept them in her inside pocket and was secretly proud to have them.

On Christmas Eve she worked until her manager caught her and sent her home. She walked home rather than taking the bus and the hours it took were beautiful and aching; car headlights in the dark, the noise of bars and houses, the silhouettes of children by their windows. If her legs had not throbbed she would have walked all night just to see the Christmas of strangers.

She arrived home and drew a chair up to the window and allowed her self to watch the streets for a few more hours. Long after midnight she finally walked to the door and turned on the light. She walked to the bedroom and took all she had out of the bedroom chest. By the time she had assembled the body and dragged it into the kitchen and sat it on the chair, the sun of Christmas day was rising.

The rest of the morning she spent on him. She taped all the x rays onto his body, until it was complete. She dressed him in a suit and slipped on shoes and socks. Then she added a wallet to his back pocket, a chain around his neck, an earring in his left ear; what her brother had always wanted but had never got round to doing. The suit, the shoes; all the presents she would never be able to give him.

The sketches she slipped inside his jacket pocket; her memories where his heart would be. Then she took the photographs of him from her mirror and gently pushed them onto the blank skull, until each small image of him became a whole; until she could see his face again. She stood back and looked at him. Then she walked away, drew the food from the oven and onto the table; poured wine for the both of them, put the Christmas cards on the table. She opened the window and the steam escaped. As the heat escaped the noises of the city climbed in and instead of silence, her brother spoke with a thousand small city noises that came from each house and she sat and listened. Listened for hours, until it was dark and the day almost finished; and finally she smiled at being close to him and hearing him speak to her on Christmas day.