Under a Gilded Moon

by Joy Jordan-Lake

She’d admired framed Currier & Ives prints at a Barnard friend’s home. Part of her, though, had suspected the people in those lithographed sleighs and those glowing homes were also weighed down with secrets and worry and illness. Which, perhaps, made the insistently giddy jingle of those sleigh bells hard to bear some days. Other days, maybe, the sleigh bells got to drown everything out.