This is something that essentially wrote itself. It began with a single sentence, which transformed into a specific setting, then ultimately led to the entrance of a character that I had never before known or conceived. I had no idea of a direction in which I wanted to story to travel, and even less of an idea of he who would travel it. I guess that's what I meant by: the story wrote itself. I just thought that I would share the short journey with you...I hope you find something within the story that means something to you....
Christmas candle window glow through fractal frozen crystal forests,
invading white pine incense coals and the sweaty shivers to match
the mystery of buzzing angelic voices through gargled nutmeg eggnog rum.
"Oh Silent Night" mumbles down the empty snow banked streets
caked in solid slippery black icing, holiday jingles muffled behind bolted doors
with cracks illuminated by private crackling fires, garnished with red string
and misshapen oversized socks.
The vagabond drags his crooked feet across the shadowy barricaded glass highway in silence,
never taking the shoveled exit ramps leading to gated drives and the inevitable backtrack.
The 6 to 10 member caroler packs pick up his scent from a hundred yards off
and dart like fish into the sanctuaries of neighbor's snowmen graveyards.
The old man doesn't even notice this instinctual flight, never taking his eyes off the delicate
oscillating broken steps of the dangerous snail crawl leading into an endless oblivion,
or at least until he's out of the suburbs.
His only prayer to that baby king adorned in his
birthday crown is that the frozen black and white parkway of singing family electric streetlights
will end at a cliff so that the memories of his lost song will die along with his body.
But instead he is met with another crossroads that will lead him back to where he already stands.
Now the mounds of salty gravel and loose white flakes seem as good a place as he'll ever find
to close his eyes that final time, crawling up their crumbling wall till debris touches every inch
of shredded cloth, his own fleeting heat letting the cold poison makes it's way through to the skin.
That muffled tune makes it's last cycle just far off enough to reach his ears while the drums still throb.
And with that awaited breath when the soul escapes, skipping across the white hot air
into the nothingness from which it came, it will truly be a silent night.
