One of those stories from the books that become movies

    Winter is coming.

    This is one of those creepy, talking tree, wizard stick, hunchback hobbit stories.  The kind of story that has a pantless gargoyle always sneaking up on the female lead.  He’s nearsighted and has bad teeth.  He drools and wears a constant red, drooling erection, like an excited dog.  The gargoyle has a missing finger from a shop class accident.

    In this story, before the trees start talking, before the token old bearded guy gets philosophical, it all starts with a misting of snow.  It comes in like lazy fog and turns the floor into glass.  The freeze is so strong that pipes break.  Old ladies go inverted walking out to the mailbox.  Old men shrivel into stone statues.  It’s bad.  The plumbers are the only ones making a living.  Even then, their plungers shatter.  Carpal tunnel works like arsenic in their hands.

    Winter is here.  In this story, winter comes in the way the town badass enters the saloon in a western.  It kicks in the door and put it’s cold blade to the collective throat of everything.  Dogs are taxidermied right on their leash.  It’s too hard to chew and eat frozen food, so people begin to go hungry.  They huddle together.  Every once in a while, one of the gnarlier ones takes a bite out of someone.  It typically ends with the attempted cannibal being ostracized.  They move out to the woods and become ugly, emaciated, shivering versions of what they once were.

    During the day time, these nasty people in the woods are just creepy.  At about dusk, when the light is low, those same outcasted people start too look like thin saplings with twisted branches.  They stand and sway in the wind.  Growing skinner everyday.  Some of them fracture right at the waist and fall like rotted timber.  As time goes on in this story, more and more people are banished to the woods, where they starve and freeze into trees.

    The trees don’t really talk in this one.  It’s the cannibal people with the scarlet letters that do the talking.  They sing songs at night and huddle for warmth.  They make fires and feast on whoever has the lowest pulse that night.  They’re more demonic by the second.  At that stage, the eyes sink way back in to the skull.  It’s like they’ve been pushed there so that they won’t freeze solid.

    Surviving animals grow red, angry eyes and pounce on anything that looks like a meal.  It’s not uncommon to see two or ten wolves choking down the frosty remains of the mailman or the chief of police.  It’s a bad world.  The day time grows impossibly short.

    This story takes a twist because it’s an El Niño year.  That means a warm front blows in…from the west or something.  This collides with the cold and makes slush.  As the warmth continues to blow in, the ice melts and the plants start to stretch and perk up their ears again.  The color drops back into the cheeks of the populous.  Those people in the woods are able to eat berries and kill birds that have migrated back into town.  For the moment, as quickly as it had arrived, winter is gone.

    This is the part where that little goblin comes in.  It’s a woman.  Not the usual male antagonist.  This woman has bad tits and a little bit of chin hair. Her name is Naomi Larp.  It doesn’t sound like a bad name, but she’s a bad gremlin woman.  She started as just a regular woman, but the cold and the cannibalism get to her.  She enjoys the taste of human flesh and has a knack for preparing it.  Kabobs, pan fried, stir fried, sautéed — she does it all.  Give her just the two small knuckles on the non-dominant hand and she’ll impress the judges of any television cooking program.  They’ll lick their fingers.  Until they find out it’s fingers that they’re eating — human fingers.

    This grouchy gargoyle woman opens up a shop and starts feeding people to people.  There’s a rumor going around that she’s serving human flesh, but at $3.99 for a combo plate, it’s hard to pass up.  People continue eating from her little food truck.  The food truck doubles as her home.  She puts her dirty feet up on the stove at night and smokes cigarettes.  No one cares.  They come night and day for the combo plate.

    As the story goes on, Naomi Larp gets rich.  She hordes all the money and doesn’t change her behavior.  Even with millions of dollars, she refuses to clip her toenails.  They grow out of her sandals and scrape on the ground.

    One day, a city bus hits her.  Hits her right in the head.  Kills her.  The old bearded man in this story is the guy that gives her eulogy.  He’s fattened off of human flesh.  Consuming human for so long has given him a twitch.  The speech isn’t good.  Plenty of people showed up for the service.  They serve chicken.

    That’s how the story ends.  The gargoyle dies.  Peace at last.