To Remove Christmas

by jeff horner

Wait until it’s sad and weeping pine needles all over your hardwood floor, hunched quietly in the corner like that, past resembling what it first represented: the sadness of sadness past. Strip it with anger because anger is related – that cousin you want to ignore who drinks your good rum, forgetting it’s for the nog – and you fight about money and markets and gun control, and you jam ornaments into boxes to be stored for the yawning year to come: the sadness of sadness future. Drag it out like a bounced drunk who’s been making you sad or mad all night the way a man killing himself with booze will do, so you grab him by the scruff and the belt, and never mind how he knocks over tchotchkes that represent nothing as you force him, his limbs beseeching, out the front door and around to the back of the house: where one takes sadness. Argue with your neighbors in your head when you hear them putzing around their backyard pruning bushes or shellacking furniture while you hide a dead tree still covered in tinsel down the yawning valley slope, because you missed the curbside pickup date, so you prepare a response, something charming, them leaning on their fence like a goddamn rake, like the face of a rake is their goddamn face, so you’d say “Ashes to ashes, right?”: because death can be funny. Trip over that rotted log much farther down the slope than you needed to walk out of paranoia, rakes lined up like a jury, and the tree, and the drunk, and your cousin, breaks your fall as you spill forward, hands forward, head forward, heels skyward, and that heartbeat you fear you’ll keep rolling, and you picture how comical your feet must look like that, from the top of the hill like that, sticking straight up in the air with the rest of you hidden, like flappy loafer-ed ducks emerging: because shadenfreude is perspective. And consider as you sit in the mud, rest your arm on our tree. And your ass getting wet. And the scrapes up your side. And the valley yawns west. And your loafers stop flapping. And you wear the quiet, and you represent nothing, and you promise to visit. Because it is a good spot: because it should be sad.