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My Christmas Dream (I know I promised these recitations would be sporadic; I lied)
I was working manual labor, with a crew of guys' guys I had to get along with. We walked down a long dirt road to the work site. The bosses fed us a kind of "meat roll" of pork and scrambled eggs with pieces of shrimp hanging out of it--not on plates; you picked it up off the ground and ate it with your hands. The job consisted of leveling a vast patch of slushy ice, which had formed ridges and mounds and had to be smoothed out. Its texture was more like ice cream--it came in supercold, viscous clumps. I had to get down on my knees to push the slush off a big central mound; from my vantage point there, I surveyed the work site. In addition to men, my co-workers included giant oxen covered with ice crystals, and "rock demons"--blond colored featureless humanoids resembling something out of a Jack Kirby comic. I looked up and was shocked to see that the work site sat at the base of an immense tube reaching up hundreds of feet, with walls of smoothly polished wood. Instead of sky overhead, there was a ceiling of loose, dripping ice. I couldn't fathom why it didn't fall on us; it was very ominous.