Island Santa, a Novella

By Owen Thomas

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 still believes in Santa Clause. Embarrassing, but true. Having finally come to grips with the tragic “extinction” of unicorns and the senseless exile of the Tooth Fairy, little Katie now clings to Santa with a tenacity so grim and so combative that her older brother and her parents can only exchange worried looks across the dinner table. Someone should talk to her about the real world.

But no one quite seems to have the courage.

The idea of running off to Hawaii just as Santa is loading up his sleigh is met with more than just a little resistance. After all, how is it reasonable to expect that the red-suited fat man will know to look for them in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? What will he think when he parks his reindeer atop their dark and empty home?

Peter, fifteen, has his own concerns, less about Santa than the sacrifice of holiday tradition. What about the snow and stringing the house with Christmas lights? What about the first-person-shooter zombie video games at the neighbors’ Christmas Eve party? More importantly, how can a Christmas away from home not have a devastating impact on the volume of Christmas-morning loot?

Not that the Nelson kids have any real say in the matter. The tickets have been purchased. The bags have been packed. Peter will have to console himself with the belief that his friend Cody is right: that the Islands are teeming with topless women. Katie, meanwhile, will just have to trust that Santa can adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.
Neither of them is prepared to understand why their father seems to have forgotten his true age, or why their mother is calling him a sex pony, or even why he pushed for the trip to Hawaii in the first place.

In the end, everyone is going to believe what he or she wants to believe about the world.

It’s going to be an interesting Christmas.

"Island Santa" is a novella. While it is here available for purchase separately, "Island Santa" is also included in a larger work of short fiction by Owen Thomas entitled "This is the Dream."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Owen Thomas
• Release date: Oct 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9798987167700

Book preview

Island Santa

A novella

A picture containing light, looking, colorful, dark Description automatically generated

Owen Thomas

The 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, 2022 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 novella Island Santa is included as the title story in the larger work of short fiction This is the Dream, by Owen Thomas, Copyright 2021, OTF Literary.

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Katie.

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.