Short Story - A Coca-Cola Christmas

Short Story Tuesdays

Ricky’s eyes took a full ten minutes taking mental pictures of the Coca-Cola Christmas train, staring from the sidewalk through the plate glass window of the storefront that had it on display. Each car of the train set shiny red and white, with Coca-Cola Santa, falling snow, and other images that captured the magic of Christmas. There was even a Coca-Cola polar bear seated in one of the cars, wearing a little conductor’s hat and handkerchief, his paw holding a small bottle of Coke.

Ricky had never wanted something more in his whole ten years of life, thinking about the amazing train set just about every minute of every day. But it wasn’t for sale, this one-of-a-kind collectible only available through the currency of special edition plastic Coca-Cola bottles. Nine hundred and ninety-nine to be precise. A number that might as well have been a million to the young boy, for he came from a family that could only afford one of the fifty cent bottles a week. By that calculation he would be as old as Santa before he could get it, the special offer so far long gone that it probably wouldn’t even be a memory.

But such impossible odds didn’t stop Ricky from dreaming, from hoping, from believing that it could somehow come true, even under the dire circumstances he and his parents lived.

The three had come over to The Land of Opportunity half of Ricky’s life ago, the boy only having two faded memories of the long dangerous trip. The first was the awful one, the feeling of clinching tightly, chest-to-chest, rapid heartbeat to rapid heartbeat as his father held him close with one hand and his mother with the other while running through darkness, occasional spotlights trying to hunt them down.

And then came the rhythmic sound of powerful wheels speeding over iron tracks, the family of three risking their lives to hop that train to freedom.

Once on board they had laid out on their backs, catching their breaths as the repetitive rhythmic steel matched their rapid heartbeats while at the same time reverberating through their bodies.

The only other memory comes on the tail of the first, only this one much happier. Finding the train car to be loaded with Coca-Cola, Ricky’s father opening a bottle and handing it off to him.

“This is the taste of America!

Of our dreams coming true!”

Such an indelible impression that Ricky knew it would never ever leave him, the “taste of America” so refreshing, so exciting!

But opportunity really hadn’t presented itself the way his parents had hoped for, their first few weeks in the land of dreams spent with more running, more hiding, until they found the only so-called help they could, from those who spoke their language but didn’t share in their belief of what help really was.

They were sent to a hidden factory covered by a jungle of cement, where they were put to work alongside other immigrants and meant to sew for twelve hours a day, sometimes more, in exchange for a small room below the constant machine spinning, three so-called meals a day which mainly consisted of soup and sandwich, and fifty cents each for their dozen hours of labor, which basically translated to four pennies per hour, one every fifteen minutes.

Ricky, who was meant to stay in that little room of theirs all by himself as his parents overworked their fingers, didn’t even want to try and imagine how long it would take to reach nine hundred and ninety-nine Christmas bottles of Coca-Cola, feeling bad at just accepting one per week from his hardworking Mama and Papa.

He’d fill his days drawing, reading, imagining, but lately his greatest pastime was building a landscape in their small room, a scale model of a whole other world, made from whatever he could find, all centered around imaginary tracks for his dream Coca-Cola Christmas train.