magical < realism

While the kids went out ice skating with their cousins, I went on a night mission to Costco to hunt the wild Christmas beef. I braced myself for a scene of chaos, with charging carts and aisle-wrapping checkout lines, but the parking lot was mostly empty. Happy shoppers tapped their chins thoughtfully over the bins of meat, trying to remember which cuts were the good ones. "We want the... back of the cow?" I can never remember, either, but that's okay because my selection method is fail-proof: look for the bin that's mostly empty, and grab the biggest thing that's left. On this occasion, there were only two hunks of meat left, and one of them was torn open. A woman was standing over the last precious roast, hemming at her phone and looking at the standing ribs in the next bin, so I slid up and nabbed the meat from under her, then sped off toward the booze before she could tackle me.

When I finally rumbled back to the truck with the entire feast in my cart, it had started raining, and mist was billowing down through the street lights like snow. It was the first moment that really felt like Christmas, and I went home to sip noggy cognac by the tree and watch a sappy holiday movie like a proper adult.

The warm feelings carried over into the morning, but only because I woke up to discover the 3 year old had wet the bed. She doesn't usually have accidents, but husbandface had filled her with hot cocoa while I had been out and then put her to bed without using the toilet. We dragged the boys out of their bunks by the ankles, ran a load of sheets, bathed the child, fed the chickens, and got everyone out the front door on time. As we were leaving, I spotted some of the parasitic carapaces trying to creep back up the vines over the gateway trellis, and I made a leap to scrape them off with my fingers. Just at that moment, Leif ducked under me, opened the gate, and left it standing ajar. Humans can crack bricks and boards with their bare hands, if they focus their muscles and energy, but a limp arm has all the velocity and force of a wet towel, and it really doesn't work as well at all in terms of resistance. So as I jumped up, reaching into the vines, my hand came swinging back down and smacked like a bag of wet bones onto the metal railing. The rest of me followed it down and crumpled on the driveway in pain. I lost some skin, and judging by the bruising seeping up between my knuckles, something miiiiight be broken, but I will just pretend I don't see that until after the holiday. I spent my ER fee on a most triumphant roast beef.

So I'm feeling less Christmassy today, having karate-chopped a steel fence, but I felt it, folks. Christmas, I mean, not the fence. For a few hours there, I felt it, and that means I can do it again. It might take a lot more cognac, though.