Pretty much our whole family has caught some sort of bug that’s kept us in bed for the majority of the past 24 hours. We’re resting up and will be back soon.

(image via here)

We’re hanging out here in Northeast Ohio post blizzard with a solid mix of family and friends.  We’ve asked everyone we’re with to contribute to today’s post.  I’ve started off with the first line of a story which everyone has completed one at a time, sentence by sentence.

*

When we first arrived we had an entirely different sense of what was to come. We had expected a party, but what we found was a man, dead on the floor. Empty bottles of wine and 3D glasses littered the ground. Amidst the silence, we heard a loud screech from above. The man whom we assumed was dead slowly began to rise his stiffness giving way to fluidity as he began to dance about the room. No one really seemed to mind as he danced passed us and out the door like he was late. His Santa Claus outfit was stained, and his face looked strangely familiar. It was then, as we watched him walk down the driveway, that we realized who the man was. We had all been to Marc’s earlier in the day to capitalize on the post-christmas deals, and had noticed the one-armed man dancing in his santa costume outside while singing hanukkah songs and half speaking of the imminent doom of the of the world.

–

But now, sitting back long enough to bask in the holiday hum, we scanned the room and realized that each of us had synced up our inner, individual glow with the fire in the home’s hearth. The suddenness of that collective realization brought panic: was the fire just what we had created and were watching and nothing more than tangible — or was it our communal exuberance that made combustion possible? Whatever the truth was, whatever the real importance of knowing that truth was,  it dwelled in deep breaths.

(Image found via Pinterest)