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Garrison Keillor, moments before birth.

Garrisson Keillor let his idle hands slip down to his waist and traced his belly with his swollen fingertips. The last two weeks had seen his pregnant belly swell as fast as a country lamb getting ready for the Minnesota winter, and he found himself in a cold sweat over his impending delivery date. He really was going to have a beautiful baby, but…how?

The old Swede heard a distressed cough from the audience and snapped back to his surroundings. Ah, Prairie Home Companion. His show. His…life. And it this was the Christmas show!

Snap out of it, Gar-Gar, he snapped silently to himself. The carolers from the local school were at the Fitzgerald,singing “O Holy Night.” Fred Newman caught Garrison in a worried glance. With Garrison’s newly huge gut and erratic behavior of late, he probably thought he had been drinking heavily….if only! If only he had cirrhosis! It would be easier to explain, and deal with…how could he tell anyone what had happened? How he somehow gave himself this baby after a night of blackout passion between him and an unconscious Tappert Brothers duo?

No. It was distinct Norwegian madness. He heard the sloshing sounds of an espresso machine..wait, that was Fred! Oh shoot, time for the next sketch!

“And now, the lives of the Cowboys! In today’s dusty times, no dust is better than Stetson Brand dust. Yes, Stettson Dust, that-” an unhuman shriek roared up and filled the auditorium.

Fred gamely kept up his mouth-made “clip-clop” noises, but soon to, they petered out as the auditorium because filled with the non-sound of impending freakish reality. Now, complete silence, save for the tiny *splish* of the streams of sweat dripping off of Garrison’s forehead, wrinkled in agony. A muttering. A whisper. All eyes on the collapsed host.

His white, wrinkled hands gripped his belly with the intensity akin to that of a Norwegian Bachelor Farmer’s grip on his hoe during spring planting season.

His baby, his beautiful baby…oh god, wouldn’t anyone help him?

His fellow performers reared back in horror. One by one they backed away, slowly, eyes wide in terror and confusion. A scream shot out from an audience member,followed by several shouts. Why were they scared? Just then he felt the rip…stunned, he lay silent, his pain intense, but holed up in that strange place it goes when the worst happens. You see it the soldier holding his severed left arm in his right hand, wandering the battlefield quietly asking for help. His pain was in that bubble, and his eyes silently beheld a long, thin tentacle slowly emerging from his putrescent belly.

Then another tentacle, squirming and dripping with blood, writhed forth, swiftly this time, and long. This one started out towards the audience, probing, seeking…he felt his body surge forward in an unnatural, painful jerk. It wasn’t a movement he wanted…the audience was screaming this time, all of them, and the smarter ones starting to flee. His fellow performers bolted, eyes brimming with tears and terror. The tentacles started coming out in twos and threes now, faster, more urgent. Did one of them just grab Fred? Sue Scott? Oh no, the lead singer of Wilco, the guest for tonight’s program, he slipped on the sheet of blood… his blood…

Garrison knew his time was short…this wasn’t the baby he had been expecting. With his last thoughts starting to blacken out, he swiftly assembled a prayer before abandoning it as futile, and gurgling into his still-attached and fully functioning mic, he sputtered, “God has abandoned the good people of Minnesota…”

Garrison Keillor died on January 24, 2009, but not in vain. For, on that dark and cold Midwestern eve, our Dark Lord was born. Click and Clack wept. The world shuddered.

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