Midvinterblot
Midvinterblot
A deer slipped
quietly into the middle of town
on the eve
of the Christmas Parade
while
citizens were busy attaching his plastic
doppelgängers
to Santa Claus floats,
these festive
fetishes bobbing in the breeze.
One wrong turn
taken and he
disoriented
and terrified
mistook shop
windows for breaks
in the hard
forest of buildings that walled him in.
Cut and
bleeding he
anointed
doorposts one by one as he
ran the
gauntlet of storefronts.
He eluded
the police who
streamed in
like acolytes
to finish
off this sacrament
that would
not succumb.
All this
seemed to mean something.
Something
older and pagan and wild,
a message
from the Old Gods to the New.
“We are
still here.”
The New Gods
answered, “Not for long.”
The town, a
living breathing entity,
demanded a blood
sacrifice from its folk.
The innocent
creature, wide-eyed with fear
wandered
into the crosshairs,
the Sunset
and the Church.
They finally
dispatched him
in the town
cemetery as was fitting.
Put down to
bleed out amongst the
bones of the
founders and their kin
like other
blood sacrifices that
have been
made here.
War dead.
Murdered children.
Things we
don’t talk about
in polite
company.
This deer
came to a place he could never belong,
ran afoul of
the town, small though it may be and
could not
escape alive, same as the rest of us.
