Grinch
The old reindeer stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant. I blink. I stare in horror. "Scat!" I hiss. "Go back to your cave, go back to your cowshed-- whatever." He cocks his head like an elderly, slow-witted king, considers the angles, decides to ignore me. I stamp. I hammer the ground with my fists. I hurl a skull-size stone at him. He will not budge. I shake my two hairy green fists at the sky and I let out a howl so unspeakable that the water at my feet turns sudden ice and even I myself am left uneasy. But the reindeer stays; the Yuletide season is upon us. And so begins the fifty-third year of my idiotic war on Christmas.
The pain of it! The stupidity!
"Ah, well," I sigh, and shrug, trudge back to the trees.
Do not think my brains are squeezed shut, like the reindeer's, by the roots of horns. Flanks atremble, eyes like stones, he stares at as much of the world as he can see and feels it surging in him, filling his chest as the melting snow fills dried-out creekbeds, tickling his gross, lopsided balls and charging his brains with the same unrest that made him suffer last year at this time, and the year before, and the year before that. (He's forgotten them all.) His hindparts shiver with the usual joyful, mindless ache to mount whatever happens near--the storm piling up black towers to the west, some rotting, docile stump, some spraddle-legged doe. I cannot bear to look. "Why can't these creatures discover a little dignity?" I ask the sky. The sky says nothing, predictably. I make a face, uplift a defiant middle finger, and give an obscene little kick. The sky ignores me, forever unimpressed. Him too I hate, the same as I hate these brainless budding Christmas trees, these brattling birds.
Not, of course, that I fool myself with thoughts that I'm more noble. Pointless, ridiculous monster crouched in the shadows, stinking of stolen wreaths, burned nativity scenes, spilt eggnog. (I am neither proud nor ashamed, understand. One more dull victim, leering at holiday seasons that never were meant to be observed.) "Ah, sad one, poor old freak!" I cry, and hug myself, and laugh, letting out salt tears, he he! till I fall down gasping and sobbing. (It's mostly fake.) The sun spins mindlessly overhead, the shadows lengthen and shorten as if by plan. Large geese, with a high pitched call, fly north The tender grasses are dead beneath my feet. (It was just here, this dead grass , that once when the moon was tombed in clouds, I tore off sly old Frosty's head. Here, where the startling tiny eyes of Christmas lights leer at the early-winter sun like the heads of baby watersnakes, here I scared the old Who-woman with an oversized nose She smelled of eggnog and nutmeg, which made me spit. Such are the tiresome memories of a shadow-shooter, earth-rim-roamer, walker of the world's weird wall.) "Waaah!" I cry, with another quick, nasty face at the sky, mournfully observing the way it is, bitterly remembering the way it was, and idiotically casting tomorrow's nets. "Aargh! Yaww!" I reel, smash trees. Disfigured son of lunatics The big-boled oaks gaze down at me yellow with morning, beneath complexity. "No offense," I say, with a terrible, sycophantish smile, and tip an imaginary hat.
It was not always like this, of course. On occasion it's been worse.
No matter, no matter.
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