Onwards he tilted at cheesewheels, charging at full speed through the dark. His face stretched taught with joy. Peter grasped innocent elves by their shoulders and shouted, “Kitchen! Where’s the kitchen?!” Confused and a little bit frightened the blonde haired, blue eyed elf would point off in a general direction, and Peter would foolishly speed off shouting a “Thank you!”
The kitchen itself was an enormous dark chasm of stoves and ovens from antiquity. All was made of cast iron and wood, and not a single food processor or Cuisinart device was to be found. A single elf in the very back scrubbed pots and pans at the sink and turned when she heard Peter’s calamitous entrance.
“Where’s the cheese?!” Peter shouted.
“Cheese?”
“Cheese!”
The elf reached for a towel and dried her hands as Peter zigzagged and leapt over counters towards her, and she opened an enormous wooden grotto holding several gargantuan cheese wheels.
“Would you like époisses, or gyuère, or…?”
While she was fetching a cheese plate and knife to cut Peter some small squares of cheese he grabbed an entire wheel, large enough to fix onto the axle of a Hummer, and sprinted out of the kitchen, shouting, “Thank you! Thank you so much! I’ll bring back the rest later! Thank you!”
And Peter dashed through the workshop again, again asking several elves for directions, again running up stairs and down stairs into the dormitory in which his room was held, until he was huffing and puffing with fatigue and his legs burned like overcooked spaghetti. But he knew he had to get back to his room before the cute little black mouse disappeared back to its nest, so he soldiered on despite the pain in his muscles and the burning in his throat, clutching his precious and incredibly heavy cheese wheel to his chest.
When he got back to his bedroom he searched the floor carefully for a little black mouse, found none and tiptoed to the bed. He pinched off some cheese from the wheel and tossed it to the floor and waited anxiously, his heart pounding, and his face perspiring with anxious sweat. And he waited, and waited, and waited, until he thought for sure that the mouse was now in another wing of the workshop, but then, to his amazement and delight, the mouse scurried out from a hole in the wall and dashed straight for the cheese. It grasped onto it with its little mouse paws and sank its little mouth teeth into into its yellow fermented flesh and nibbled away, and Peter whispered to himself, “So cute. So so so cute.”
And the mouse stood up on its hind legs and turned to him. And as Peter was tossing another piece of cheese to the ground he looked carefully and noticed that the mouse’s anatomy was somewhat puzzling. For you see, dear reader, its legs were not the crooked and hairy legs of a mouse, but the pale and slender legs of a woman, and its black body was not the plump and furry body of a mouse, but a slender and velvety black dress, and her arms were also slender and quite hairless, and her face was not the face of a rodent, but the face of beautiful girl with beautiful black hair and a pair of adorable black mouse ears.
And Peter stopped breathing and started gawking as the incredibly waifish, incredibly diminutive girl before him. She was no taller than three inches. Famished and underweight. No cleavage to speak of, only ribs— which, ladies, is still pretty hot. A Tinkerbell all dressed in black, scowling at him and chewing away at the cheese in her tiny human hands. A series of squeaks came from her as she spoke something, and her voice was so small and high pitched that Peter couldn’t understand it.
“What?”
She repeated herself. A tiny voice, a blip of words, started and finished in a moment.
“Uh… what?”
She repeated herself louder.
“One more time, please?”
She motioned for Peter to come closer, and he got down on his hands and knees and thrust his ear towards her.
“I. Want. Meat.”
“Meat?”
She nodded and squeaked something he couldn’t hear. And Peter burst out the door and back into the antique hallway of the workshop and began retracing his steps. And he dashed up the stairs and down the stairs, and realized he was going the wrong way and turned back, and asked for directions and kicked down the door to the kitchen where the very same elf was still washing the dishes. The poor elf shrieked at Peter’s axe murderer entrance.
“Meat! I need meat!”
“Lamb or beef or pork or ham or chicken or…?”
And only after a moment of showing Peter the cabinet in which the smoked and salted and butcher paper wrapped meats were stored, he had grabbed a whole leg of honey glazed ham and sprinted back out shouting, “Thank you so much! I’ll bring back the left overs! Thank you! Goodbye!”
And then he sprinted back, dear reader, and I’ll spare you the details, except to say that he was even more exhausted this second time, and he was heaving as if his very lungs were trying to escape from out his mouth hole, and by the time he reached his door he was humpbacked and heavy-footed with exhaustion. And he unlocked the door and found a good chunk of the cheese wheel had vanished, more than a single mouse could have nibbled at in the time which he was gone. The little pale mouse in her black cocktail dress scurried out from the wall and stood up on her slender and pale legs and looked at Peter with his giant roast ham pressed tightly against his chest.
“I… got you… some meat…” he wheezed.
She held out her arms to Peter as if she were strong enough to carry the entire pig leg. He tore off a spiral and put it in her hands, and it draped over her body like she wore a ghost costume made of ham. The mouse girl lay the steak down on the floor and rolled it up like a carpet sample, then held it over her shoulder and carried it into the mouse hole. She came back moments later, empty handed, and held her arms out again for some more. Peter gave it to her, and she repeated the process, rolling, rolling, rolling, hefting it up, and then slowly carrying it away. Peter rolled up the third cold cut himself, and the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth.
“Is that where you live?” Peter asked. “Behind my bedroom wall?”
She squeaked and peeped and chirped something indistinguishable.
When she came back for more ham Peter said, “I’m sorry, but you need to speak way, way… way louder, because your voice is way too little.”
The mouse girl cupped her hands over her mouth and shouted, “Youneedtospeakwaywaywaywaywayquieterpalbecauseyoutalksogoddamnloudthatithurtsmylittlemouseears!”
“Ok, that was good, now I just need you to speak slower.”
“Speak! Qui-e-ter! You! Are! Screa-ming! At! Me!”
“Sorry,” Peter whispered. “Can you speak in a lower voice?”
She coughed into a fist and said, “Can you speak in a higher voice?” In a normal, albiet somewhat childish voice.
“I understood you perfectly!” Peter said. “Oh wait, uh…” He tightened his vocal cords and tried to raise his voice an octave, “This is as high as my voice goes.”
The mouse girl gave him the okay sign, took another rolled up carpet sample of meat and toted it away. “Use that voice,” she said. “You don’t sound like a t-rex.”
Unbeknownst to Peter, the little mouse girl wasn’t just packing the wall interiors with meat, but she was in fact handing off each ham roll to another mouse girl, who would carry it a few paces and pass it off to another mouse girl, who in turn passed it off to a fourth mouse girl, and then a fifth, and a sixth, and down the line it was passed, one by one, exactly like a bucket brigade, into the deepest and darkest mouse chasms of the workshop. There were hundreds of little mouse girls, wearing little mouse cocktail dresses, winding through the dusty intestines of the workshop, squeaking to each other about their mouse business.
Peter handed her the last cut of ham, and he was left with sticky fingers and a knob of bone. He spoke in an embarrassing meatwad voice, “Are you going to eat all that? It’ll go bad in a few days.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Hey, what’s your name?”
The mouse girl clapped the ham grease off her hands and looked up at Peter with a puzzled expression. Then she gave him the finger, the middle finger to be precise, and walked off back to her mouse hole.
“What the fuck? I brought you food, you bitch.”
And she was gone, off into those secretive spaces behind the walls, too small for humans or elves or normal sized people to tread. Perhaps you aren’t familiar with the meaning of what just happened, dear reader. Allow me to explain the North Pole custom of flipping the bird. You see, in the North Pole, when some jerk is talking on the phone in a movie theater, or when a moron in a BMW is sitting at a green light, it’s customary to raise your middle finger as a non-verbal “fudge you” to whosoever is deserving of your ire. Now what exactly Peter did to offend his little mouse friend is as much a mystery to him as it is to me. In my humble opinion it was completely uncalled for.
So let this be a lesson to all you young boys out there. Never, ever, give gifts to a girl you’re not already dating. Flowers, chocolates, jewelry will never win the heart of a single girl. Nowadays, she wont even thank you with a hug. She will pocket the gift, say thank you, and then go straight to Tindr minutes later in search of other prospects. Gifts are for girls who love you, not for girls whose hearts you want to win.
That’s how Peter wound up with half a wheel of parmesean and a ham bone in his bedroom on his first night in Santa’s workshop. And as he undressed before the fireplace, the little mouse girl peeped out from the mouse hole and watched him remove his ridiculous and baggy shirt, and pry off his wooden shoes. When Peter looked out the window and into the cold snowy night, he saw his reflection, and down by the reflection of the floor, he saw the mouse girl watching him. Sexily Peter slinked across the room, undoing his belt, and slowly he lowered his pants. He stretched and posed like a model for his secret admirer, flexing his muscles in the firelight. When he turned and looked at the mouse hole he saw a whisp of black hair and a thin black tail pull away from the aperture.