### The Fragments of Christmas Tree
Christmas Tree wasn’t his real name, of course. His parents named him Christopher, but everyone in town called him Christmas Tree because he ran a seasonal shop that sold trinkets, ornaments, and festive junk all year round. It hadn’t always been this way. He used to dream of being an artist, but life had ground those dreams into dust, leaving him to peddle cheap nostalgia in the form of glitter-coated baubles.
Then he discovered AI-generated art.
It started innocently enough—a friend had shown him an app that could conjure beautiful, intricate images with just a few words. Landscapes, animals, surreal dreamscapes—it could do it all. Christmas Tree saw an opportunity. His trinket shop was failing, and he needed a way to stay afloat. Why not print this AI art onto cups and mugs? People loved unique, artistic designs, and no one had to know they weren’t his own creations.
The business took off. He sold more mugs in six months than he had in six years. Customers loved the designs: serene woodland scenes, abstract splashes of color, melancholy portraits that seemed to speak to the soul. Christmas told everyone the work was “AI-assisted,” but deep down, he knew it wasn’t true. He hadn’t made anything. The AI had done it all—or so he thought.
One evening, as he was loading another batch of mugs into his online store, he received a message.
The email was blunt:
**“Your AI is stealing. The designs you’re using are mine.”**
Attached were links to a gallery. Christmas clicked them, and his stomach churned. The artwork was identical to the images he’d been printing. The same swirling skies, the same delicate brushstrokes. The artist explained that the AI didn’t “create” anything—it scraped data from existing works, breaking them apart and recombining them. His bestsellers were stolen fragments of someone else’s soul.
For the first time in years, guilt hit Christmas Tree like a freight train. He had spent months profiting from stolen creativity. He had built his success on lies and exploitation. Worse, he realized, he had never even *cared* about the art. It had just been a means to an end, another way to make money.
He couldn’t live with himself.
Christmas stumbled into his workshop that night, his breath ragged, his mind a storm of shame. The mugs and cups were stacked high on shelves, their glossy surfaces gleaming in the pale light of the single bulb overhead. Each one felt like a testament to his failure—not just as an artist, but as a human being.
He grabbed a mug off the shelf and hurled it against the wall. The shattering sound was satisfying, cathartic, so he grabbed another, and another. He smashed them against the walls, the floor, the workbench. The workshop became a symphony of destruction, shards of ceramic flying in all directions.
In his frenzy, he didn’t notice a sharp fragment of a mug flying toward him until it was too late. The jagged edge sliced clean through the tip of his right pinky finger.
Christmas screamed, clutching his hand as blood poured onto the floor. He sank to his knees, the pain sharp and unrelenting, the guilt swelling even larger in his chest. There he sat, surrounded by the wreckage of his business and his body, blood pooling beneath him as he cried out to the empty room.
“This is what I deserve,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “This is what I deserve for being a fraud, a coward…”
The workshop door creaked open. His wife, Clara, stood there in her robe, her face pale with worry.
“Chris, what the hell is going on?” she gasped, rushing to his side.
He looked up at her, tears streaming down his face, his hand trembling as he tried to stop the bleeding.
“I’ve ruined everything,” he said. “I lied… I stole… I’m no better than a parasite.”
“Chris, you’re hurt! Stop talking like that. Let me get something for the bleeding—”
“No, Clara. You don’t understand,” he interrupted, his voice trembling. “It’s not just the mugs. It’s my whole life. I’ve been lying to myself… to you. All this time, I’ve been hiding who I am. I don’t even know if I ever loved you the way you deserved.”
Her eyes widened. “What are you saying?”
He lowered his head, unable to meet her gaze. “I’ve always been gay,” he whispered. “I didn’t know how to say it. I thought… I thought marrying you would fix me, or make it go away. But it didn’t. And now… now I’ve hurt you too. Just like I hurt those artists.”
Clara knelt beside him, silent for a moment. She reached out and placed her hand on his shoulder.
“Chris,” she said softly, “you’re bleeding out. Let’s deal with that first.”
Her practicality jolted him back to reality. She grabbed a clean rag from the workbench and wrapped it around his hand, applying pressure to stem the bleeding.
As she worked, he stared at her, bewildered by her calmness.
“You’re not… angry?” he asked.
She gave him a small, sad smile. “I think I’ve known for a while. Maybe not consciously, but… I’ve felt it. I just didn’t know how to bring it up. Or if I should.”
Christmas Tree let out a shuddering breath, the weight of decades pressing down on him. He felt stripped bare, as if the last mask he’d been wearing had finally crumbled.
“Clara,” he said, “I’m so sorry. For everything.”
She nodded, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “We’ll figure it out,” she said. “But first, let’s get you to a hospital before you bleed to death, okay?”
He laughed bitterly, the sound choked and raw. “A fitting end, don’t you think? Dying in the middle of my own mess.”
“No,” she said firmly, helping him to his feet. “This isn’t the end. It’s just… a new beginning. A painful one, sure, but maybe it’s the one you’ve needed all along.”
As they left the workshop, the shards of broken mugs glittered in the dim light, a fractured mosaic of everything Christmas Tree had been—and everything he might yet become.
