Per more cues in KY, she’d merrily adorned herself with ribbons and bows up and down, from the top of her new festive haired head to the bottom of her new festive shoed toe — toes. Bought for the season would be their reason, on the surface. Then she came back to the Rodentia Assembly Hall intending to give assumed ever-listening Rodentius the giant white rat with a bit of brown to keep him honest another show of information, holiday style. She even brought her Rudolph bulb along for good luck; it now lit the single room hall as much as the floor light that also tagged along with her.
“What Christmas means to me,” she started after taking the podium, trying not to glance into his corner too much. Nervous for some reason! It was only a big rodent, though. Nothing more. “AHEM… Christmas, to me, to myself, to… I…” Stumped, she looks down here, saw the color highlighted in so many ways on her arms, torso, legs, feet. “… means *red*; yes, red. And Santa,” she followed, thinking of another red dominated being. “But not *Satan*, not 666.”
“Good one, ha!” Rodentius enthusiastically encourages from his thought-to-be ever-corner in the hall, named for what he would call his better, female half which represents the whole virtual town surrounding them on all sides and then some. “Keep it coming!”
—–
But suddenly, just like that, there was no one in the assembly hall except Wheeler, who just stood there alone, awkwardly dressed for the occasion. Should have been a more somber attire, black instead of red, the other half of the equation as it turned out. Black for the empty chair revealed by the vanished big, non-anthropomorphized rodent, just an oversized but otherwise very ordinary animal with no human form to him atall. Black for absence itself. Loss of a friend.
Rodentius is *always* here, she panics. Why now, why just before Christmas of all times of the year? Why did he have to go… so SOON?!
She turns back to the chairs of the assembly hall after staring quite a while at the corner bereft of soul, of consciousness, trying to reorient herself after this shocking discovery. Then she imagines the red chairs being repopulated with not humans but aliens to balance things out, a show of planets to repopulate a darkened universe. Like here:
Yes, this helps, she thinks. Mars, the first red planet as it were, was just a beginning. Black and red together makes more sense on this special special day. Absence. And presents. TBC
Sunklands 