59: Sleigh

Growls filled with pockets of rage. Okay festivities, something no better than banging your room against your head. Eyes dreaming Christmas, beamed from an antechamber in your matter, any burst of pleasure ended in November, when you were seven. Somewhere a pack of huskies is dragging your corpse through a shopping mall, passersby by insert luxury trinkets into your flesh. You were drunk. Slipped on the wet cardboard at the entrance to Bethlehem Bingo. You sprayed your alcohol memories over the foyer as startled onlookers cried. It was then they roped you, tarred you, decorated you and paid the local dog dealer for his best sleigh hounds. The mist thickens that Nada taste you longed for, sat hours for, wasn’t anything to do with the candle smoke So Magi, constant in our rogue’s gallery. Slipping cardboard down the mountains with the fruit kid who was soon a silhouette shooting “Maggie! Maggie!” insults at you. A magnificent beating sound rolling through the concourse; always hands in pockets, dreaming Christmas… mushing, pausing… Lowly the potters bowed, the central artery expanded, first to the size of an arm, then a small child, then a small and a large one wrestling over spilt Nesquik, then the size of two rooms tussling over the split carpet catalogue. Austin, Clarisse and I were walking near the Biff-Bouf factory towards the abandoned alley way at the centre of the sprawling brick buildings, the alley we’d filled with thousands of cardboard boxes, by the Bingo. The winter weather had amalgamated them, created one smooth skin from their old acute angles; sunk together into an urban tor, we had tunnelled through the behemoth, finding pockets where the stronger boxes had refused to collapse, making rooms for the Magi to discover and inhabit. We crouched low, stooped as we ascended that central artery towards the neon glow beaming out from the main chamber. Hands drawn together, we entered. Sprawling brick buildings, an alleyway entered together. I once knew a shoe maker. I'd bit off parts of his face in the valley we'd travelled together and he came down from the mountain paths looking for new cheeks. A selection of shoes to trade, the potters bowed at the entrance again, along the central walking channel at the shopping centre that insulted him, yet transfixed by the candle-lit corridors. Christmas was here: mushing, pausing…. a silhouette shooting, “Maggie! Maggie!” insults, waving the split carpet catalogue in Old Bethlehem retail park, an urban tor of cardboard boxes the winter weather had sunk; the Magi playing sax in his empty packaging palace. Lowly low the waining cordwainer stooped at the great alto.