by Samuel Snoek-Brown



Step 1: Gather the bones of Santa Claus.

Check.

I knew I would find most of the skeleton in Bari, Italy, but there were so many other pieces, rumored and real, scattered all over the world. It took me all of this year and most of my savings to track down his fingers, his ribs, and a foot.  In Germany, I was almost arrested making off with a stray tooth, but when the cops confronted me I swallowed the tooth and they couldn’t prove a thing. I had to hold it in until I’d crossed the border into the Czech Republic and then I spent two days shitting in a bucket in Prague. Thank Christ for rubber gloves.

I knew all along I needed to end in Turkey.  That was the key.  It was the country of Santa Claus’s birth, and it was the country where he died. All his relics, like all his stories, had been stolen away, broken apart and reassembled in new ways, new art, all over everywhere. But he has always belonged in Turkey, the historical crossroads from Jerusalem and Mecca to Rome. If I succeed in bringing back Santa Claus, it has to be here.

In the Archaeological Museum in Antalya, not that far from the town where Saint Nicholas served as bishop, I found the last pieces of Santa Claus’s head: his jaw, some more teeth, and parts of his skull. They rested on red velvet in a gold-trimmed wooden chest, an ikon of Saint Nicholas embedded in the raised lid, the whole thing under glass in a side wing of the museum. It wasn’t hard.  No one remembered these sad, forgotten relics, these ghosts of another era. Everyone’s childhood tucked into a back hallway and ignored.

So I saved the museum in Antalya till last, and from there it was just a three-hour drive along the coast to the town where Santa Claus died. There’s a little resort on the beach, but December is very much off season, so I have the place mostly to myself, which is both good and bad, because while I need the privacy, it was hell finding the dead fat man.



Step 2: Find a dead fat man with a beard. (Kill him if necessary.)

Check.

He didn’t have to be fat, I guess. Saint Nicholas doesn’t seem very hefty in any of his ikons. But if I’m going to do this, I want to do it right, I want to bring back Santa Claus in a way that the world will embrace him again. And right or wrong, our American fat guy sucking on a Coke has pretty much swept the world. So, portly, at least.

The beard was more important, because I’m pretty sure I can bring the man back but I’m not so sure his hair will grow any once he’s in his new body.

The bones are known for miracles. I’d already heard about them secreting rosewater or myrrh on Saint Nick’s saint’s day. I don’t know what myrrh is supposed to smell like but these things are sure as hell sweating something. It’s thin but slick, like baby oil in bathwater. It smells sweet, too, but not like rosewater—it’s a sharp, earthy sweet, like the cedar sap I used to get in my clothes when I helped my dad clear brush in our back yard. Like the resin from live Christmas trees.

The priests in charge of these things would collect the water in vials and sell them to tourists or pass them around at Christmas parties, but I went to college, and I know that Egyptians used to embalm people with this shit, so I’m collecting it, too. I keep the bones stacked in one of those huge drain pans you use when you change the oil on your car. It’s almost two-thirds full already.

My point is, maybe the myrrh will kick-start a growing process and the body I use will sprout hair the way the bones sweat perfume. Or maybe it’ll act as the embalming agent it has always been and stop anything from ever growing again. So I needed a guy with a beard, because I’m not taking any chances.

I found him at my own hotel, which I take as a sign that I’m on the right track here. I don’t think he’s Turkish. He might be Italian, he might be Romanian. It’s hard to say. I found him in the sauna in the back of this seaside dive we’re both staying at. He was on the back side of fifty and has a thick, iron beard. Not white, but close enough. His hair is longish, too – in the sauna, he had it pulled back in a tight, stubby ponytail. And while he isn’t exactly fat – not Coca-Cola fat, for sure – he’s definitely a fan of lamb and beer. And sweating in the sauna, overheated and under that dark sauna lamp, he positively glowed red, his skin the classic suit, his black speedo like a belt.

I slipped outside and back to my room, returned to the sauna with a plastic shopping bag, and pulled it over his head.

He steamed in the December air as I dragged him back to my room.

When I laid him out on the bed and watched him cool and stiffen, I had to wipe childish tears from my hot cheeks, thinking about my five-year-old self and that long, long wait for Santa Claus. Finally, he had come.



Step 3: Find an electrical source with which to revive Santa Claus.

Check.

There’s an outlet in my room.

The defibrillator is already plugged in.



Step 4: Insert Santa Claus’ bones into a fresh body.

I’m still missing some relics, not because I couldn’t steal them but because no one knows where they are. Trade in these things was rampant in the Middle Ages, and when things finally settled down after the Reformation, modern politics went and cocked everything up again, all this diplomacy, all these cries for the return of national property. As if any one country owns Santa Claus.

So I’m short a few teeth, a couple of ribs, some ankle bones. I don’t know how that will affect the process, but I’m hoping I can pull a Jurassic Park. You remember in that movie (I never read the book) when the little cartoon DNA is jumping around explaining about the dinosaurs? And how they were missing a few key ingredients? They used frog DNA to fill in the gaps.

I don’t need frogs. I have a whole, fresh, human body.

So the new Santa Claus will have to make do with a couple of Italian/Romanian ribs, and of course all the organs too: the heart, the brain, the spleen, the prick. But I don’t think any of that will really be an issue. It’ll make him more cosmopolitan, maybe.

I do wonder what language he’ll wake up speaking. Italian/Romanian? Turkish? No, Saint Nicholas was Greek by birth. Or nothing at all? Will he wake up new and pristine, and I’ll have to teach him English and what little I’ve retained of my high school French? Maybe we can learn Latin together. Santa Claus always seemed like he might know Latin.

The hardest part, though, is going to be the transferal. Getting the existing bones out without completely dissecting the body is going to be tricky as hell, even with my few years deboning chickens at a bbq joint during college. But getting Santa Claus into his new body? Piecing together the jigsaw of the skeleton in all that dark and slippery meat, fitting joints and arranging muscles by touch along?

Back in the States, I bought a plastic skeleton from a school supply company and practiced assembling and disassembling it in the dark, like a soldier with a rifle. I even stuffed a lawn clippings bag full of steaks and pork chops and tried assembling the skeleton inside that. But let’s face it, this is going to be something else entirely.

And I’ll have to get it done – deboning and the reinsertion and the resurrection – before the body begins to rot.

I wonder if the myrrh in the bones will buy me time. Or at least perfume the meat if it starts to go bad.



A thought about the reindeer:

Granted, these are a recent addition to the Santa Claus story, and the bones won’t recognize them as authentic at all. But I’m hoping for a miracle here. Because in the movies, it’s always something like magic dust or elf-grown hay that makes the reindeer fly.

And I’m thinking the myrrh in the bones is pretty much the same thing. So surely I can get those bastards in the air.

Except there are eight reindeer – nine, if you count Rudolph, which I don’t, but it wouldn’t hurt to be prepared – and I’ve only collected that one oil-pan bucket of myrrh, and it’s all going into the resurrection process.

Shit.

I have not thought this through.

by Samuel Snoek-Brown



The first one who turned up was some thick-chested guy in an open-collared shirt and khakis. He had a mustache black like the grip of a gun and an unmistakable aroma of cigarettes about him. I found him in the kitchen of the house I shared with my brother, my friend Jake, and my girlfriend. I went downstairs and there he was, sitting at our kitchen table, goddamn typewriter and everything, banging at the keys. Jake joked that he looked like Hemingway, but it wasn’t a fucking joke. This guy never said a word, just sat down there all goddamn morning typing away in the kitchen as if we weren’t even there. At least he made us all coffee.

Then Whitman showed up. He liked to sit in a wood deck chair and stare at the trees in the back, bleak in the late fall, the limbs creaking in the wind as gray and wiry as his beard. The Hemingway barely acknowledged him, but the Whitman sometimes sneaked a longing glance into the kitchen.

I thought someone was fucking with us, paying their buddies to put on thrift-store clothes and show up unannounced. My brother swore he knew nothing about it. I was a little annoyed because my girlfriend kept eying the Hemingway. He looked back at her infrequently, but enough.

Two days later, Gertrude Stein pushed through our front door. Squat, domineering, and, unlike the men, loud as hell. “The light in here is terrible the light is wan. The light is the light and needs to be lighter.” She pointed at a Vermeer print my girlfriend had hung over the couch, this big poster of a woman at a table in the sunlight. Stein pointed like she wanted to cut the thing, her finger sharp in the air. “You call this art?” she said.

I liked her immediately, but all of us were starting to freak out.

We had a meeting in the garage, where Jake discovered Kerouac sleeping in the back seat of his car, and we discussed what to do about all these writers. My brother looked over at Kerouac, sound asleep and smelling like fortified wine, and said, “I tried to kick some of them out, but Austen. She lit into me. It was so bad I got weak in the knees. I ain’t saying shit to anyone.” He ran a nervous hand through his hair. “And I am not pissing off Hemingway, man. You know what that guy is capable of?”

My girlfriend said, “I wouldn’t mind seeing you fight Hemingway.”

“Sell them,” someone said and we all yelped there in the garage. It wasn’t that we weren’t used to new voices by then, it was just rare that any of them talked to us. We crept around the back of Jake’s car and found Charles Dickens hunched on a milk crate, writing by candlelight on a stack of cardboard boxes.

“Sorry,” he said. “Everywhere else was taken.”

He didn’t say much else, but we got the gist, and the other three loved the idea. So they put out ads, cleared furniture from the living room, roped off pathways like we lived in some royal manor. Come watch the authors at work, the ads said. Five dollars, and later fifteen dollars, a person. Jake moved his car out of the garage and set up tables, and sure enough, more authors came, men, women, men we’d never realized were women writing under a penname, people whose language we couldn’t speak. They rented a pavilion tent and set it up in the front yard, and more authors came.

I wanted to move out, but no one would let me. I even tried to break up with my girlfriend. She said, “What the hell is the matter with you? This is why we came here. We’ve finally got the company of writers and you just want to fucking run away.” I’m pretty sure she was sleeping with Hemingway by then.

They’d moved a bunch of the furniture into my room to clear more space for the writers and the tourists. The refrigerator was in there, the stove, both the washing machine and the dryer. A couple of hall tables. Even the other bedroom furniture. I had three beds to wake up in each morning and I couldn’t get out of any of them.

But today, I don’t know why, I’d had enough. The partying and drinking and vocalized philosophizing keep me up all night. I opened the window and started throwing out bedding, quilts floating like parachutes into the lawn, pillows sliding down the canvas slope of the pavilion tent. I disassembled each bed, even my own, and threw out all the pieces, and I tossed out all the artwork then leaned the mattresses against the wall. Out in the yard, Stein was eying the wrecked paintings then nodding approvingly up at my window. I threw my stereo at her, then I threw my brother’s television and all my girlfriend’s clothes. I shoved the appliances out into the hall and all afternoon I could hear my brother explaining, “Sorry folks, detour!” But I didn’t care. Fuck Hemingway.

I’ve cleared out everything and moved a mattress to cover the door. I had what I’d actually moved here for: an empty space, plenty of light, and a little quiet in which to write.






“Colony” was originally written for Our Band Could Be Your Lit.

SAMUEL SNOEK-BROWN is a writing teacher and a fiction author, though not always in that order. He lives with his wife in Portland, Oregon; online, he lives at snoekbrown.wordpress.com. Sam’s work has appeared in Ampersand Review, Forge, Midwest Literary Magazine, Orchid, Red Fez, Red Wheelbarrow, Temenos, Tonopah, and others, and is forthcoming in Sententia.