Santa goes down the list, pushing the team relentlessly across the black. Little girl after little girl, little boy after little boy, absent, vanished into the emptiness of the old, dying, dead universe.

"[T]hey would expect me to write an essay, and I would sit there for nearly an hour trying to figure out a short story on white cheese, and then furiously scribble it down in my horrible handwriting during the last thirty minutes."

at last I see this conspiracy / for what it is: a temporal embezzlement