December 11, 2022

Snow Words

Drabingle Blueboat watches his tears fall into the snow as he clutches his beloved book, Santa’s Shitty Christmas. Thankfully, the book has lots of pictures because Drabingle is illiterate.

Well, he’s not entirely illiterate. He can read, he just finds reading offensive. And strange. Why read when you can sing? has always been his philosophy.

In any case, it’s not worth crying about, Drabingle realizes, as he trudges through the thick snow that insists on descending in its deliberate chaos.

He flips the pages of Santa’s Shitty Christmas, admiring the rich, vivid, yet also somehow grotesquely perverse animation, depicting Santa shoveling manure, throwing up in a jail cell, having sex with his parole officer, and so many other adventures.

The book has a happy ending, though as (spoiler alert!) Santa eventually teams up with the ghost of Audrey Hepburn to beat the Russians in the Super Bowl.

Drabingle smiles as he closes the book, but feels a tug of remorse for having shot up the library. Maybe he should go back?

Maybe.

Then, as he is walking and pondering the possibilities he finds himself standing in front of a large home on Circle Avenue with a wraparound porch. The house has a Christmas carousel on the porch, and life-size electric reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh on the front lawn, along with several other Christmas attractions including Santa’s soldiers and waist-high electric candles with Noel written on them.

It’s a bit of the City of God, isn’t it?

And there’s a wooden reindeer whose sign urges all passersby to tune their radio to 89.1 FM. And so Drabingle removes his transistor radio from his pocket and twists the dial and there’s a burst of lovely Christmas music matching the majestic holiday scene, and all the emotion of the moment and magic of the season collides in a heart full of bliss.

It lasts about 14 seconds. Then the radio crackles and the music is snuffed out by the unmistakable shrill of his mother’s voice.

“Get your stupid ass home, Drabingle! These potatoes ain’t gonna peel themselves!”

Drabingle sighs and turns the radio off and tucks the book under his arm and continues through the snow and whistles thoughtfully.

Good Lord, what a meshuggeneh. --TK