Herd 

Peter Grimes 

We are reindeer. Reindeer men, actually. In the daytime and on most nights, we are bereaved husbands living and working in Philadelphia, but four times each year, when the moon takes to the sky, so do we, joining the species Rangifer volentus. Flying reindeer. None of us has any control over these transformations. Gradually and instinctively amassing as a herd in the cumulus over Philadelphia, we follow the beltway’s dotted trail of electric lights and then the less frequent dots of Pennsylvania State Road 940 north to the Poconos, where we congregate on Camelback Mountain and then gambol through the wilderness for an evening. After the merrymaking, each of us flies home alone, according to his internal clock, where he regains the form of man.