Chestnuts were roasting, as the flames had burst higher with their orange glowing hands, and he had glumly sat as the snow shed crystals around his home, spinning the nuts around. He sighed, and felt like covering his hands in his head, sobbing mournfully as the day was only new, just placented, and the fires seemed to be blue in his vision, sapphire fire, while the rest of the home was like the Starry Night, with swirls of blue and stars, as the trees had screamed with their open toothed mouths.
The sun divulged in the clouds, and he always felt alone with it on Christmas eve. The stick could get warmer as the flames devoured it, and he could get burnt, but he haven't cared about injuries since 2009. His hands were worn and rustic, brown with spots like a decayed car. He could imagine metallic worms eating him apart already, until he soon dried away in the junkyard. The chestnuts were his favorite part about Christmas, but they barely tasted like anything. Even sugared and with a bit of caramellized sauce he couldn't taste anything. They were only bittersweet.
I was given strength to deal with this day…I was given the Lord's strength…
The blue hedgehog often felt nothing could hear his cries. Nothing could be upheld in his own religious beliefs. If people believed the last dying flame of his God, anyways. But he didn't believe in him either. If his own god was real, he wouldn't be lonely, battered, and worn, like a forgotten toy, a forgotten plaything from a little girl.
A little girl he loved.
He remembered the tickle fights they had, the bond that grew like the sun rising at midnight upon reading fairytale after fairytale, the ribbons and dresses she had made him wear because she thought he was quite cute in them. But those things were worn out in her as she grew up. His second daughter had grown too. And his third.
He had lived in this snowy landscape for so long, he had forgotten what it was like to spend a real Christmas with anyone. No one here wanted to come to his home. They were focused on their own problems. His god had taken pity on him, said that there was a chance he could be revived again like a golden phoenix, but he refused and said he would rather spend the rest of his time here, for what he done, in another life that the gods only knew about.
His god had laid out a plate of chili dogs for him, with a note that said he still had the option to come back up, but he felt his punishment was eternal, and this was as everlasting as Hell's fires were.
With the picture of Annabelle in one hand, and the chili dog in the other, he ate three of them with neither disgust or gusto. They didn't taste like anything. They were just as flavorless as the chestnuts.
He held the picture in his rocking arms, and sung softly, imagining the little girl was with him again. The little girl that was now free from the pinioning asylum, and in college. If only little girls could stay eternally as nymphs, but he knew it wasn't them that became the beast inside their own minds. It was him.