Island Santa, a Novella
By Owen Thomas
()
About this ebook
Palm trees, flip-flops, and shameless regression. It's going to be an interesting Christmas.
The Nelson family is spending Christmas in Hawaii, a dubious proposition for Peter and his twelve-year old sister, Katie.
Katie stil
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Island Santa, a Novella - Owen Thomas
Island Santa
A Story by Owen Thomas
A picture containing light, looking, colorful, dark Description automatically generatedThe characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2014, 2021 OTF Literary, Anchorage, Alaska
Author Website: http://OwenThomasLiterary.com
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
The story Island Santa
is included in the compilation of short fiction by Owen Thomas entitled This is the Dream (ISBN 978-1734630343).
OTF Literary, Anchorage, Alaska.
A picture containing light, looking, colorful, dark Description automatically generatedKatie.
My father speaks my sister’s name with the same desperate patience with which he is known to re-enter a computer password he knows is wrong but hopes that, somehow, it will do the job anyway.
Can I, Dad?
Katie.
Because you said I could. Remember, Dad?
Katie.
What.
You have your own cookie.
I ate it already.
Well, then, I guess that’s that.
But, Dad, you’re not eating yours.
I’m going to eat it later. I’m saving it.
Dad? Dad.
What, Katie.
You owe me.
My father twists his neck another three-quarters of a degree so that he can see my sister. Katie is on the aisle, directly behind my mother. Dad and I have the windows. He tries to see through the crack between the seats, but he has to hunch forward and peer at his only daughter from beneath his own armpit.
He’s just not that limber. So he gives up.
My sister reaches out and pokes him again with an electric pink fingernail. I can see the top of my father’s head jerk reactively toward the shaded window.
Dad, you owe it to me,
she says. Because of the bird. You were wrong about the bird, Dad. You just were. So, so … wrong.
He inches himself up over the top of his seat, growing taller in halting, inelegant spurts, a time-lapse video of a chrysanthemum stretching up over our neighbor’s fence.
But this chrysanthemum is wearing headphones. It has male-pattern baldness and is dressed in a sky-blue aloha shirt emblazoned with mango-colored hibiscus.
What?
My father tries to whisper over the roar of the plane so as not to wake my mother. His expression shows irritation, twisted with the strain of trying to look his daughter in the eyes.
Those eyes dilate in sync with her little nostrils.
Fact: You said the bird was dead,
shouts Katie over the dull thundering that is everywhere around us. People across the aisle turn and look. Fact: You were wrong. Fact: You owe me that cookie.
They look at each other for a second or two over the top of the seat. I can see enough of my father’s face to know how this is going to end.
He is going to lose.
It does not matter that Katie is twelve and that he is fifty-two. He’s still going to lose. It doesn’t even matter that Katie is wrong about the dead bird. She’s getting that cookie. It’s only a matter of time.
My sister’s relentlessness is not for a lack of other things to hold her interest.
Like, for starters, the fact that we are forty-thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean, traveling nearly five hundred miles an hour.
Or that we are probably only three hours from Oahu.
Or that Christmas is only three days away.
Or that the tow-headed tyrant across the aisle keeps kicking the seat of the elderly man in front of him. Over the past two hours, the man has been turning a muddy shade of purple, having asked the kid’s mother no fewer than six times to control her child. He’s like a little soccer player over there. He’s not stopping.
Any minute now, the old man is going to push the little button next to the overhead light and get the flight attendant involved. Then she will get the captain involved. Then he will get the air marshals involved. And then the little plastic handcuffs will make an appearance. And then someone, either very old or very young, is going to go berserk. And then the in-flight entertainment will really begin.
But none of that matters. Katie is focused. She wants the cookie.
The irony is that Katie doesn’t even like this kind of cookie. Macadamia nut shortbread with a hint of lilikoi. Whatever shortbread is. A kind of tropical sawdust from as much as I can tell. Katie sent back half of her own cookie, uneaten, along with the little square of lasagna that she picked at and pulled apart and reconstructed into a kind of shanty to shelter her two broccoli florets and an ice cube.
Don’t play with your food, Katie.
Mind your own beeswax, Peter.
What she likes about the cookie is not the cookie at all, but its crisp metallic blue wrapper. She likes how it scatters the beam of reading light around our seats. While we were waiting for our meal to be cleared, she opened her wrapper up into