One of these Misses Clauses fellating a candy cane, another fellating the other end of the treat, they’re sucking away to kiss sweet at the middle without stripe, dripping drool sugary thick.
And yet another one, this their leader it would appear from the rear, the fat and old and the ugly, her face a rash of makeup, scars herpetic and of acne, too, black luck and its blue mutilation, she’s asking Mel…what you got in that sack of yours, you gimme a gift?
Just looted dog food, a can of beer, root root root another pair of shades.
One with a particularly heaving bosom leans up against Mel, grabs hands, presses them to the fuming insides of her thighs.
Busy tonight, Santy?
Any time for a lonely old Miss?
Twenty for a halfhour, thirty for the hour, I’ll ride your North Pole.
It’s a seasonal thing — a fire sale, don’t you know, feel how hot I am down there…my sleigh or yours?
Mel suddenly defects his hands from the granny’s panties, punches her in the mouth, loosening teeth whether they’re dentures or real to gnaw among his knuckles like miniature graves, without name. Blood splurts onto the premature white of his faking beard as Misses Claus goes down and out, and her sisters go chasing Mel down the street; dodging formations of troops, winding around stalled and honking jams of military jeeps, trucks and tanks, armored snowcats, huskies and convoys of bison, Mel’s cowbell clanging his escape with the slip of his stride in the deepening snow, south into an unlit quarter of the world known as Canarsie; the Misseses wielding their hoarded purses weighted with dimes swindled from shoppers in the good name of the poor, swinging them around to hurl at him as they clutch at their florid hems through the piling hoar.
Our sun rises as promised the next morning, Xmas — a covenant’s a covenant, and what’s death to annul it; though this rise occurs maybe spiteful, halting, reluctant, as if unsure of itself, the sun embarrassed by what’s happened in the hour it’s forbidden to light. At the horizon, gray; clouds assemble to breathe down flaming flakes. Medics, police, fire, National Guard goyim, US Army, Every Acronym (EA), Neighborhood Watch even and volunteers both organized and irregular, all the lineaments of uniformed disaster they’ve been mobilized, equipped then assembled with an amazing degree of expedition, and efficient professionalism given the hurry, though there’s just nothing for them to do except inhale, exhale into the freeze as if that’ll help any, but if it makes them feel better, then — as through the jammed caravan of patrol cars, miscellaneous emergency management personnel, and the triage that is local press with ambition, three survivors arrive at the Gatekeeper’s hut. One of them’s a shvartze, too, and though he’s the one driving this suggests not a few concerns, begging the profile — it’s standard policy to ask, I’m sure you understand, of all people…
Might be a delivery, maybe a poolboychick, a worker but what crew; he’s not a gardener, no exterminator, perhaps another species of hand hired but by whom and for what, none he’s ever known, the Gatekeeper going on ten years, and so a suspicion to report — that is, if there’s anyone left to report to. One of the three, not the shvartze, the one in the passenger seat in the hood and robe, with the staff that’s just the bough of a cedar fallen by lightning, he gets himself out of the metallic puke Lexus, a rental, keeps his door open and walks around the hood to the slit in the window, yells hoarse above the sirens and wails.
We’re looking for One Thousand Cedars, the Development, of course — tries to keep it light.
We’re catering the bris, though we seem to have lost our passes — it’s tragic, forgive.
What bris? the Gatekeeper wants to know, wiping at the rime of his eyelid, a tear.
A bris, a circumcision, the face under the hood gives a smile, you know: down go the pants, snip goes the tip…
I’ve been working here nearly a decade, says the Keeper, there’s no need to tell me what’s a bris, nu — what I’m asking is what circumcision, whose, who’s circumcising who around here? I’m saying, if anyone’s doing any circumcising, it’s me of you — get my drift?
Above, planes plummet, and police helicopters descend, metalplated locusts, upon the Development’s baseball diamond, the roof of the Rec Center’s pool, onto great rolling lawns: rotors flaying shingles and swingsets; the air, a mass of noise and flashes, microphones held up to megaphones, the violent frolic of doppler, you know him; corpses are stacked on the sidewalk one by one then laid one atop another when there’s no more space, later becoming laidout feet to feet along streets, their toes tagged with ID, their heads propped against the curb, mouths left hanging open; in shock, postmortem disbelief — it’s as if they’d be revived by the snow.
No, I haven’t heard of any circumcisions, Mister Bris, now disaster I’ve heard of, plague…
