“Take care, the both of ye.”
He pulls out a jar of orange marmalade and digs his hand in to pull out a glob. A whistling-whoosh sound fills the air and causes Santa to drop his dollop of jam on the floor.
His tiny earholes on the sides of his face widen to the sound and his eyes roll in circles.
“No . . .” he says. “It couldn’t be . . .”
Santa gloop-jiggles over to the window and peeks through the blinds.
Several whistling-whoosh sounds are come from outside. “Holy Christ on a cross,” Santa says. “They’ve found
me!”
Whistling-whooshes grow louder.
“Ye’ve got to take the children and get to safety,” he says to my wife. “Go through the back door and run. Run and don’t ye look back.”
Decapitron runs upstairs.
I look out of the window, wondering what the heck the fuss is about. Small black blurs are flying through the air towards
the house.
“What are they?” I ask him.
“Coffee birds I call ‘em,” Santa says. “Bastards come after me every year but they ain’t found me in over a dozen decades. Me deer are just too fast for ‘em.”
They do look like birds made out of coffee. They are flying blobs of hot liquid that pierce through the frosty air, leaving trails of stream. One of them slices into a snowman out front, melting a hole through its icy head. The coffee bird settles inside of the snowman’s brain, causing a mist to pour out of its eyes and skull. Then the snowman comes alive.
It is the one with pineapples on its head like spiky bunny ears and phone cords dangling out of its body like tentacles. The face on the snowman starts to move. Its mouth hisses. The phone cord tentacles flap into the air as it begins to slide across the snow towards the house.
More coffee birds penetrate the snowmen outside, bringing them to life.
“What the fuck!” I say.
“Arr, ye must get out now!” Santa says.
All of the two dozen snowmen we made today are now alive and heading towards the house. The snowmen in our neighbor’s yards are also coming to life and crossing the street. The coffee birds circle above, searching for more snowmen in the area.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll catch you later.”
Upstairs, Nora and Angelica are putting on slippers. Decapitron has holstered the twins to her back but didn’t bother changing out of her green reindeer fetish outfit.
“The snowmen, they’ve . . . ” I begin.
She snaps her fingers to hurry me up.
“They’ve come for Sausagey Santa . . . ”
We go downstairs. Snowballs are being pelted at the side of the house.
“It’s too late, me buckaroos,” Santa says, crying at us and wiping the tears away with his beard. “They’ve got the place surrounded.”
“Don’t worry, Santa,” Nora says, placing her hand on his elbow. “My mom won’t let anything happen to you.”
“That’s nice of ye to say me la—” Santa leaps away from Nora with a yelp as he notices the bloody growth on the side of her face.
Even a sausage hideous monstrosity like Santa finds Nora disturbing.
The snowman with axes for limbs begins chopping at the front door. Santa and I look at each other with squealing faces.
“Quick,” he says. “Up the chimney. We’ll all take me sleigh to safety.”
Santa grabs the jar of marmalade and gives it to Angelica.
“Quick,” he says to her. “Lube yourself up!”
Angelica pretends she knows all about lubing herself up. But, since she doesn’t, she just stands there looking at it until her sister takes it out of her hand and applies it to her own body.
After Nora is finished lubing herself up she rubs the jam onto her sister and gives the jar back to Santa.
“Why are we all orangey?” Angelica asks the sausage
man.
“Arrr, didn’t Decapitron ever tell ye?” Santa says. “There is magic in marmalade. Just a glob of this magic jelly and you will
be able to slide into any sized hole when going down. It is also sticky enough to help you climb up sheer walls when going up.” Angelica pretends she knows all about climbing sheer
walls.
Santa has Nora lead the way. The deformed girl climbs up the chimney like Spiderman with her jammy palms.
“Good,” Santa says.
Then he helps Angelica with her chainsaw angel wings enter the fireplace. Once she gets inside, she scurries up the chimney like a mouse.
The front door breaks away and three snowmen enter the room. One of them with axes for limbs, one of them with a twirling fan for a face, and one with a sledgehammer for a head.
Santa jumps into the fireplace and leaps into the air, squeezing himself through the chimney. After a few feet, he doesn’t move anymore.
“Arrgh, I’m stuck!” Santa cries, his little sausage legs dangling above the fire logs. “I didn’t use enough marmalade! ”
“Help him,” Decapitron says.
I go to the fireplace and push on the meat man’s butt as my wife begins decapitating the snowmen with her bare feet. As the snowmen lose their heads the coffee birds flee from the broken balls of ice and retreat through the front door. Once all of the snowmen inside the house are dead empty shells, Decapitron charges into the front yard with icy fists. The twins on her back scream with excitement.
The outside battle cries dim into silence. All I can hear is Santa’s muffled voice yelling at me to get him out of there.
Instead of pushing, I try pulling. I put all of my weight into it and he pops out of the chimney into my lap. Sitting in my lap, he looks up at me and smiles. Then I realize how short and plump he is. His flesh feels more marshmallowy than it does sausagey.
“What happened?” he says to me, looking around the room at the dead snowmen.
“My wife went after them,” I say.
“Oh, no,” Santa says, standing up and brushing fireplace ashes from his butt. “She has no idea what they’re capable of.” “You have no idea what Decapitron is capable of,” I tell him.
He lubes himself up better the second time. Then he lubes me up as well.
“Come, me laddo,” he says.
We climb up the chimney to the roof. The marmalade really is magic. It does most of the climbing for me. All I have to do is place a goop palm on the wall of the chimney and the slime pulls me upwards.
The first thing I see when I reach my snowy rooftop is Santa’s electric sleigh. It is made out of lightning, just like Decapitron said. Sparkling volts of light shimmer at me as I stand myself up. Past the sleigh are his reindeer, grunting and sneezing at each other.
Wait . . . Something is amiss.
My daughters are gone.
“The bastard!” Santa says. “He took it! He took me
bag!”
The plump little man hops to the edge of my roof, looking off into the distance. I see it, down the street. The snowmen are fleeing the scene with Santa’s giant bag. There is movement coming from inside of the bag, as well as the screams of my little girls.
I can make out what appears to be a leader of the snowmen. A large, 4-balled snowman with a row of carrots going down the back of his head like a Mohawk, large razor sharp sickles for arms, and on his face the snowman has a Hitler mustache made of coal.
“We need to go after them,” I tell Santa.
“Jump in,” he tells me as a he blobs towards his lightning sleigh. “Let’s pick up your wife first.”
I step inside of the sleigh. It feels like it is made of glass. Santa snaps his reins and the carriage takes us up off the rooftop and lands gently in the front yard on a pile of snowmen corpses.
Decapitron is standing by the mail box. She isn’t moving. Upon closer inspection, we discover that she has been turned to ice. Her flesh has become glassy and transparent. She’s now a masterfully carved ice sculpture of herself. The twins strapped to her back have also been cha
nged to ice.
“Frosty’s magic is strong, me boy,” Santa says. “She never should have tried to take him on alone.”
“Is . . . is she dead?”
“Nay,” he says. “Not yet, anyway. If we get them back to the North Pole in time they can surely be saved.”
“What about my daughters?” I ask.
“We cannot save them right now,” he says. “We have to regroup, bring your wife back from the ice, and then go after Frosty when we’re good and ready. I have to get me bag back from the bastard. All of Christmas depends on it.”
I touch my hand to Decapitron’s glassy cheek.
“What do ye say, lad?” asks Sausagey Santa. “Will ye help me save Christmas from the bastards?”
Still staring at my icy wife, I nod my head.
“As long as you help me get my daughter back,” I say, forgetting for a second that I have more than one daughter.
“It’s a promise,” he says.
CHAPTER FOUR
SKY GRAVES
Heading towards the North Pole:
My ice sculpture of a wife is propped against the backseat of the sleigh where Santa’s bag of presents should be. I try my hardest to keep my hairdo together as we fly through the air at light speed, hoping Decapitron doesn’t slip out of her seat and shatter on the ground below.
“Who was that snowman, anyway?” I ask Santa.
“Arrr, that be Frosty The Neo-Nazi Snowman of Satan,” he says. “Or Nazi Frosty for short. He be me arch nemesis for ages, always trying to ruin Christmas for all the kiddies. Always praising Satan instead of Baby Jesus.”
Santa tells me the story of how Frosty came into being. Frosty actually came from Santa himself. After Kris Kringle attempted suicide for the last time and became the sausagey mutant he is today, he decided he wanted to change. He wanted to figure out a way to change his opinion of Christmas so that his eternity wouldn’t be such a living hell. The elves agreed to help him and together they created a machine that could expel all of the hate out of his mind. The hate was sucked out of Kringle’s brain tissue through vacuum tubes. When sucked out of the brain, hate looks like steaming hot black coffee. They extracted enough hate coffee to fill five bathtubs. When it was all over, Kringle was free of his hatred and soon became the happy piratey character sitting next to me.
Unfortunately, Kringle is 100% immortal. And by 100% I mean that not any tiny piece of him can ever die. Not even his hate. Though it was separated from him, the hatred did not die. It just lingered, stewed, until it eventually took on a life of its own. It grew its own consciousness. It became a new immortal life form. It became Frosty.
Frosty’s true form is five bathtubs of steaming black hate coffee, but over time he learned how to separate his mass into coffee birds. He learned how to possess the bodies of snowmen. He learned how to control ice and bend nature to his will.
Besides being a big Hitler fan, Frosty thinks Satan is number one. His major goals include: promoting the anti-Christ, creating an anti-Christmas movement, and becoming the world’s first anti-Santa. He currently resides at the South Pole where he is building an enormous concentration camp for children.
We’re starting to pass through grave space. It is a popular new thing to be buried in mid-air rather than underground. Tombstones and coffins have anti-gravitation devices planted on them so they can hover in the sky. Santa navigates slowly through the floating graveyard, careful not to crash into anyone’s coffin. The night is calm and gentle as we swim through. The dead drift back and forth like hundreds of baby cradles floating in the middle of the sea.
One of the sky graves comes so close to the sleigh that it nearly bonks me in the head. I get a good look at the words on the tombstone. They read: “She loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” Just like the song by that old surrealistic rock band The Slow Poisoners.
She also loved the stars so fondly that her family buried her in them. It probably cost them a pretty penny as well. Sky burials are not cheap.
It doesn’t take us too long to get to the North Pole, but it sure didn’t seem like we were going at the speed of light. Perhaps the sleigh has the ability to travel at the speed of light but never does because the wind force would peel Santa’s face off of his head and meat gravy would spill out onto the houses below.
In the distance, there are towers made of ice. They are jagged and spiky. Like a forest of glass crab legs. There is a whole city of people down there. No, not people. They are elves.
“Arr, arr, arrrrgh!” Santa says.
I still have to get used to him saying that instead of ho, ho,
ho.
He gives me a big walnut smile as he takes us in for a
landing.
Upon landing, the sleigh gets swarmed by hundreds of elves. Their voices are like millions of locust wings flapping through the air. Three of the elves approach us as we step down from the seats of lightning.
They are only four feet tall but very thin with long pointy ears. They aren’t at all as plump and munchkin-like as I was expecting. All three of them wear dark green business suits with white shirts and red ties, carrying clipboards with pens flipping through their tiny fingers. One of them is a bald elf with a white handlebar mustache. Another elf is a female with a white pixie haircut. And the third elf has a white . . . SLY GUY HAIRCUT!
He catches my eyes and we both slick back our hair at each other. Then we snap and point finger-guns at one another. This guy is sly. I like him.
“What is the problem?” Pixie Elf asks Santa. “You’ve barely completed the second quadrant.”
“He smells of beer,” Bald Elf says. “Are you flying drunk
again?”
Their voices are all mousey and squeaky.
“Nay, nay!” Santa says. “Well . . . aye. Aye, I had a few to drink. But that’s not why I be comin’ round. We’ve a major emergency tonight. Frosty the Nazi bastard done stolen me bag of toys.”
The elf crowd’s locust-flapping voices raise so loudly they sound like an avalanche.
“Me pal, de one and only Sly Guy Matthew Fry, is here to help.” As Santa speaks, the elves clamor with amazement at his words, whispering It’s the Sly Guy! or some say Oh, wow, Matt Fry! “Frosty has kidnapped his children and we have to fight to get them back.”
I had no idea I was famous anywhere, let alone the North Pole. I look out among the crowd of elves and see dozens of sly guy haircuts. They aren’t quite as slick as my ‘do, but are still pretty sweet.
The elves carefully take Decapitron out of the backseat and put her on a greasy black octopus-shaped cart. The tentacles of the octopus squirm towards the ground as if it’s alive.
“They’ll be fine, lad,” Santa says, as the cart squirt-drives her away to one of the glass buildings in the distance.
I notice there aren’t a lot of colors around here. I was expecting the North Pole to be filled with bright lights and colorful buildings. It seems like the place would be more like a giant toy box. But everything is white and black and gray. The elves even have white hair and light gray skin. The only color is in the clothing worn by the elves.
Bald Elf climbs a spiral staircase that leads to an icicled steel platform.
“Elves,” Bald Elf says to the crowd. “Frosty has committed an act of war. He has stolen Santa’s bag in an attempt to foil Christmas. We will not stand for this.”
Bald Elf breaks a tiny icicle off of his handlebar mustache. He holds it with his index finger and his thumb and points it up at the sky like a tiny sword.
“Elves,” he continues. “Tonight we go to war! ”
The elves cheer. They begin a chant: “Fight for Christmas! Fight for Christmas! Fight for Christmas! Fight for Christmas!”
Bald Elf stabs his icicle up and down with every syllable of the chant.
Sausagey Santa nods his balloon of a head at the crowd of elves and winks at me with his green olive eyes.
CHAPTER FIVE
HYPERSPACE PANTI
ES
We board a small rust-colored train and take it deep inside of the crystal facility. Bald Elf stays behind to organize the elven troops. Sly Guy Elf sits next to me, bobbing his head in a cool groove. Most of the elves don’t wear green suits like Pixie Elf and Sly Guy Elf. They wear red shirts under green overalls, sometimes wearing white aprons. Pixie Elf and Sly Guy Elf must be the managers.
“It’s so dreary here,” I tell Santa in the seat across from me. “I was expecting it to be a happier, more colorful place.”
“The arctic be a harsh environment,” Santa says. “It is not a very happy place.”
The color does not improve as the train enters the facility. The lighting is dim. The walls are gray and white. Every once in a while we will pass something Christmassy, like a giant plastic candy cane or a frosted wreath, but they are so few and far between that the bright colors just give a feeling of loneliness.
Many of the elves are looking back at me, to check out the original sly guy hairstyle. Some of the guy elves point finger- guns at me and I wink back at them. Many of the girl elves look at me, swoon, and giggle. I wink at them, too.
“They like ye,” Santa whispers to me. “There’s plenty of
time before we leave if ye want to take ‘em to bed.”
“Huh?” I ask.
“Elves be total sluts,” Santa says. “They never shy away from a good pump in the arse. Go on, give ‘em a try.”
Sausagey Santa Page 3
