The wintery sky hung low, hazy, and bleak. A darkening smudge was spreading. Banks of inky clouds swept along by fierce and frigid gusts of wind. The heavens above committing a kind of frotteurism.

“Comb your hair, put on your shades, and dig your bunkers. It was the Year of the Rat, after all… It was endless stretches of greenery, soaring walls in the Kingdom’s Garden… Yessir, all the cadres at that banquet had a reclining seat…

“Comrades, cadres at the Gala, smiling and dancing in bursts of illumination. Everything painted red and gold, with bestiaries decorated in grinning rats. Everyone at the Gala, collared in cangues, blissfully unaware of the pedo lurking by the playground.”

Santa felt a tremendous force, a searing pain ripping through his chest, and he unloosed a series of dry, hacking coughs. His eyes stretched wide when he remembered that coughing, once, was worse than saying the n-word.

“Throw your head up to the sky and imagine God Himself, hanging upside down, like a bat, dangling and doing sit-ups from the leg of a flying helicopter. God Himself, the real Patient Zero. God Himself, smoking on a mary-joo-wanna cigarette.”

The darkening smudge in the sky started spreading quicker, spilling across the horizon, like an ink stain, racing rapidly in every direction.

“There can be no murder in paradise. I’m telling you. It’s incomprehensible. Inconceivable… Brother Snake God got that smoldering intensity bright in the whites of his eyes, yeah? And he corrected the wrong ideas, right?

“Metastasis? No sir, not in paradise! In paradise there’s only virgins, green grass and positivity…”

Santa had been licking his wounds, was pulling on a Snoop-sized blunt. The fat man had his meaty hand gripped over the width of the steering wheel, and his knuckles were scraped and bleeding.

As Santa was sitting back in the bucket seat, he steered the Caddy with one hand, and a faint clanking could be heard from the trunk, sounded similar to metal hitting a human skull.

Santa coughed out a plume of smoke, clicked his tongue, then went on, “A maze of limestone caves. Sure paid off like a winning slot machine. We had Ron Varra running around with his hair on fire. But he wasn’t credible. He was a crank. A ‘conspiracy theorist.’ Then God Himself, in the gold chair by the fireplace, told us the dead were coming back to haunt the hospitals.”

“Yessir. Now everyone understands that a day is long, and a year is quick.”

Here and there Santa reached over to stroke the pangolin resting in the passenger seat. The pangolin was purring like a cat.

“I’m telling you. This is killing.” Santa continued, his Texas twang breaking. His enunciation clipped. His voice upping an octave. “I’m telling you. It’s never been like this.

“The Snake-charmers used their cunning, inveigled us. They threw ants in the sugar... Ants in our pants… Fed us nothing but bones. They exploited our Restless Anal Syndrome and used imprimaturs to cast spells. Didn’t Marx say something about the peasants being like sacks of potatoes? It’s no wonder the peasants believe in opioids and influencers, Maatje Bensassi and phantoms.”

A hologram above the dashboard flickered on, displayed grainy video of Marilyn Manson pouring milk and cereal into a groupie’s yawning vagina. Then the ghoul dove down, devoured the Lucky Charms like a starving dog.

A moue played across Santa’s face, and his lilt became aggressive, “Yessir, it’s onion heads on the prowl. Onion heads tapping on trumpets. The onion head’s call to arms is telepathy turned telekinesis...

“And we’re slaves, slaves to a type of torpid stillness. Slaves, goin’ batshit crazy in algorithms… Incunabulum, tintinnabulation… Fucking robots building robots.

“Yessir, we all got hoodwinked… It’s the greatest coverup, the greatest crime of our time…

“But few even care. We’re walking crash test dummies. Post-human. We’re Sam Harris, naked and covered in peanut butter, chasing imaginary llamas.

“Yessir, last time I went to California, a homeless lady, who looked like Michael Rapaport, squatted in the middle of traffic, defecated, then threw a handful of her shit at me, screamed something about Gavin Newsom...”

Santa snorted, felt chunks of dried blood trickle down his throat, and sneered with a satirical curl of his upper lip.

“Yessir, the ghosts sure are coming back to haunt the hospitals. The ghosts fighting for air and light. The ghosts pressing their noses against one-way mirrors like trapped rats.”

The pangolin lifted its pointy snout. Its eyes flashed purple. The pangolin had started shaking like a chicken with its throat slit. But now the pangolin was stoic as the dead. The pangolin statuesquely still, the pangolin reflection of a reflection, a picture of a picture. The pangolin daring anyone to pity or patronize it.