All Thor Wants for Christmas is a Box of Benadryl

AAACHOOcoughcoughcoughAAACHOO!

"Ouch!" Thor exclaimed in pained frustration after giving her nightstand--formerly buried beneath a sizeable heap of soiled tissues until the latest round of sneezing, in which the precarious assembly caught a draft--an angry kick. As the Christmas season drew ever nearer, festivity was in the air, and Thor was allergic.

Deck the halls with jolly old Saint Nicholas away in a manger up on the housetop laughing all the way, let Earth receive her king and a happy new year. Blah, blah, blah. Go to hell in a handbag, Thor thought.

She stumbled to the bathroom and turned on the shower, full-blast hot, hoping the steam might provide the relief Vicky's offensive-smelling vapor rub had not, thus far. Steadying herself on the sink, Thor braved a glance in the looking glass and found a demented Christmasesquity looking back. The violent Rudolph-red nose between livid cheeks...nature's candy stripe. Then the green mucus practically flowing from the nostrils...

Disgusted, disheartened, and just generally depressed, Thor abandoned the shower idea and returned to bed, where she started right in on a new tissue mountain.

"Christmas blows," Thor muttered miserably, and for the million and oneth time, she blew her nose.

But Thor didn't die

Thor once told the story of how he almost died, and it was the scariest story we'd ever heard, so scary that after Mom had tucked us in bed, kissed our foreheads and flipped the switch, one of us would hiss "Don't take the eggs from the chicken!" to the other, and we'd both lie there, quivering, unable to fall asleep with the images that hovered over our beds: The trail of yellow slime dripping from Thor's mouth. A woman in a tattered blue bathrobe, a frying pan held high over her head. A squawking hen beating her wings, feathers flying everywhere. Thor had almost died!

Thor Needs a Helmet

Thor reclined on the crunchy, prickly yellow grass that hadn't seen moisture since 1842 b.c. A trickle of sweat slid along her jaw from the hairline on down. She wiped it off and licked her hand. Such a perfect day for relaxing by the water. Thor smiled at the muddy bed of the empty stream and whistled merrily. Overhead the blazing sun sent its scorching rays in Thor's direction, burning her scalp to a flaming crisp. Feeling a wee bit nostalgic, Thor decided to try to pick out shapes in the clouds, like she'd done as a child. On Thor's left was a cloud that resembled a cloud, and on her right was an even fluffier cloud that looked remarkably like a cloud. Thor was amused. She giggled and chucked a stone at a passing fly. Missed it by a mile. She gesticulated wildly and shouted after the fly, "You better keep walkin'!" Blame the heat or poor genetics...either way, Thor was...special.

Thor eats

Today was not a day of reflection, a moment to gaze at his graying and wrinkled family across the table and thank them for standing by him when he robbed the dollar store of five bottles of off-brand shampoo and a candle that smelled like a decaying coconut and the entire contents of the cash register, $11.17. Today was not a time to express gratitude that his mother kept quiet the morning Thor stumbled home naked, flowers in his hair, bacon grease slathered over his bruised body. Today was not about the clown whose ass he kicked at the neighborhood carnival, the one with the fat tear drawn on his cheek and those stupid rainbow pants that hung dangerously close to his butt crack. PULL UP YOUR PANTS, YOU PERVERT CLOWN! Today he wouldn't even mention the hostage situation with the weather man on the 6 o'clock news, the time he hogtied Dirk Storm and demanded that the abuse of the guinea pigs down at Bob's Exotic Animal Factory had to stop. FREE THE GUINEAS, DIRK! ONLY YOU CAN SAVE THE GUINEAS!

No, today was not about giving thanks, or Thanksgiving, or bail money. Today was good for just one thing.

Thor dipped his head into the bowl of gravy while his family looked away.

Thor Frost, Brother of Jack?

Chill coursed through Thor's veins, propelled by a pulsating heart-shaped block of ice wedged uncomfortably in his chest cavity. Thor would've welcomed the pain of an ordinary run-of-the-mill heart attack. Anything would be preferable to the excruciating cold. Worse than the bitter frigidity, though, was the sheer terror at this sudden affliction.

Thor winced as he rubbed his frostbitten hands together, trying to return them to a recognizable color and texture...but to no avail. He discovered soon after that his legs had become little more than fleshy popsicles, of no more use to him than a banjo, given the state of his hands.

Thor had always been a loving, caring individual, warm-hearted as they come. So many times his honesty and loyalty led to his getting a pretty raw deal, but Thor learned early on to just roll with the punches, and he somehow maintained his sunny demeanor through the years, in spite of receiving arguably more than his fair share of the hardships traditionally suffered by the more humane segment of humanity.

One day, though, Thor decided he'd had enough. He rolled up his welcome mat and begged for apathy. He got his wish, essentially, but with a catch. There's always a catch. With Thor's new detachment from emotion came detachment from life. Thor's body was icing over, slowly hardening into a glaciated corpse. He realized too late what was going on. This sick experiment of the gods had claimed his soul, and all he could do was watch himself die, choking on the frost that was rapidly consuming him.

Thor's world, too prown

The sun was a blazing golden pancake, a hotcake left on the griddle too long, all crispy on the edges, and when Thor peered out her window, she wanted to scream.
She'd thought the condition was temporary. She'd woken late this morning, her face deep in a chocolate-brown pillow, a trail of dingy drool puddling in its corner. She'd rubbed her hazel eyes and stretched, marveling at the tan she'd managed to develop here in Minnesota, in the middle of February, when the snow out there by the driveway was piled as high as her shoulders. The gigantic mole on her arm had grown richer in color, she noticed, dark as coffee grounds, and Thor figured cancer was a-comin', popping out like an eraserhead, a button she could press to shoot toxins throughout her body until she was bald in some hospital bed, wishing for Disneyland, smiling sickly for the TV cameras and wondering when Goofy would walk through the door with a grocery store sheet cake: "GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR CANCER, THOR -- DREAMS DO COME TRUE."
But that wasn't it. No, something else was going on. This had happened to Thor before, when she'd lost her mind lying in the bathtub and accidentally stared too long at the dusty light fixture overhead. She'd splashed back to reality, looked around and saw all the colors were off, muted, bland, wrong. Blinking had cured that, though. After a few minutes, the shower curtain was once again pink, the dandruff shampoo blue, the mildew between the tiles a deep green-black.
No blinking was fixing this. Time hadn't lightened the color of the mole, hadn't turned her bedspread from mocha to scarlet.
Thor's world, it seemed, had turned brown.
She grabbed at the curtain and threw it back. There it hung in the sky, the pancake, the end of everything, the beginning of her beige life.

The thorn in Thor's side

Thor is a lover of life, an eater of food, a stealer of wireless Internet access. This is a precarious life of crime, one that relies on speed and wit and precise, practiced positioning. Thor sucks at all of these things, which is why she hasn't posted recently and now must do so during her lunch break at work. An apology from Writer2 and a plea toWriter1 to trudge ahead.

Thor likes chips.

Good Morrow, Thor

A rooster crowed somewhere within Thor's subconscious, rousing him or her from a sound sleep.

Damn it, Isabella. That was a good dream.

Isabella the Rooster was the basest bane of Thor's existence. Thor acquired the bird--actually little more than a hallucination born of ill-performed hypnosis--from a traveling salesman at a fair some six years before. Said salesman sold but two products, sun-dried raspberries and so-called "internal timekeeping devices." Isabella was one of these devices, a top of the line model, the best of the best, superior to all the rest...at least, that was the sales pitch.

In spite of the salesman's thick unidentifiable accent and his grotesquely inappropriate choice of footwear--sleek white ice skates on a hot summer 's day--Thor determined the man could be trusted. Also, Thor was very taken with the idea of forever dispatching the shrieking alarm clock necessary to alert Thor to the start of the day.

For just three easy payments of $29.95, Thor got Isabella...and in essence, Thor got screwed, because what Thor got for all of his or her troubles and hard-earned money was a defective piece of intangible merchandise. The ruddy creature squawked whenever it felt the urge. This was most often at night, just after Thor had fallen asleep, or in the morning, anywhere from one to three hours after Thor's desired waking time. Thor hadn't arrived at a single function on schedule since Isabella's birth...installation...whatever.

Thor fumed at Isabella's countless failures, interpreting each of them as personal insults rather than systematic errors in a deficient product. In truth, Thor was emotionally attached to Isabella. Needless to say, this was unhealthy. Were it not for Thor's tendency to look for love in the most absurd places (fake rooster...um...), perhaps Thor could've cut his or her losses and returned to a life with some resemblance of order, regulated by good ol' fashioned clockwork. But logic never was Thor's way. Nor was giving up.

When Thor started something, he or she made a point to see it through to the bitter end. The little situation with Isabella was certainly no exception to Thor's overall attitude of perseverance. And so, another day like every other began as Thor's days always did, with Thor rising belatedly and ranting and raving at a figment of his or her own imagination before settling down to a bowl of cornflakes with a heaping helping of sun-dried raspberries.

What Thor knows

Thor knows this is an experiment, and for now there are no rules, no guidelines, no clue, really, what this is supposed to be.

But Thor will figure it out. Thor has an amazing ability to survive when survival seems impossible, to thrive on the verge of collapse. Thor is hardy, hearty. Thor is Tupperware. Thor is mashed potatoes. Thor scrapes off the mold and scrapes ahead.

Oh, the adventures Thor will have.