Last Christmas, I bought Jim a pop-up Christmas card which featured pipe-cleaner Santa and Rudolph happily flying in a cardboard aeroplane. Conversation upon its receipt turned to the question of what would happen if, in the course of their wintry duties, they were caught in a storm and the aeroplane crashed. Twenty minutes later, I sent Jim the following over MSN, reproduced here for your entertainment while waiting for Gamewank 12:Metacrisis.
It had only been a matter of time, and eventually Nicholas’ alcoholism had flown the sleigh into a mountainside. It was probably just sheer bad luck that it should be such a remote and hostile one.
He hadn’t always been like this. When the world was young and the nascent human race had first cried out for him, he’d been a spritely, mischievous soul. But for millennia he had witnessed every cruel act by a child, his position requiring that he catalogue every transgression, every petty, evil crime perpetrated by every spoilt, sniveling brat.
He had become depressed, his naive world view shattered by eons of mistreatment. He had longed to end it all, to wrest back some small vestige of control, but for an immortal even suicide is no release. And so he ate. He blamed the collective consciousness – he was becoming obese because that’s how They imagined him, but the truth was that he sat in the dark eating fistfuls of brandy butter to dull the pain.
And so it was with more self loathing than desperation that he plunged his chubby claws into Rudolph’s chest, and dragged his still-warm heart from that cavernous ribcage, once so full of life. Dark, arterial blood stained his bright beard black as he worked his jaw, tearing the flesh of the vital organ and chewing, chewing, swallowing.
- Illustration by Jamie Trinca
