Noah Zimmerman 

Christmas Comes Early For Santa

Santa stares at himself in his bathroom mirror, jowls hanging low and heavy, his hangover written all over his sad clown face. Sad Clown Nimrod, the drunken king of being drunk, the joke of the North Pole. Mrs. Claus has finally after many long and frustrating years petitioned the court to have their sham of a marriage dissolved. A sham, a shame.

Santa watches violent reindeer porn and jerks off. When he completes there is sweat between his rolls of fat. He doesn’t feel like crying but he is crying. His doctor has warned him. You need to lose weight, you’re not a healthy man. You need to avoid stress.

The elves are not virgins. There are brothels at the North Pole, it’s a dirty business. The elves who can’t cut it in the workshop still need to make a living, someway, somehow. Santa is too high profile to go to a brothel. How could he look a low-productivity elf in the eye and threaten him with a year at the bottom of the well if he saw him the night before at the whorehouse?

Santa is not really their boss. Nominally he is but they enforce their own frontier-justice if things go too far, and they always do. “Go too far.” Santa grunts to himself in front of the mirror, watching his swollen lips moving, a pair of pallid slugs. “On Blixen. On Trollop. On Slattern and Floozy.” The elves, continuously involved in an endless series of blood-feuds. It’s the old story, no one can remember what started it all off, and just when it seems like it’s finally over it flares up again, the screams of children in the night as homes burn in the permafrost.

There’s an old joke: “The North Pole, where the elves are ugly and the reindeer wear rape whistles.” The brutality of the world is conveyed through short declarative sentences. The truth is Santa doesn’t use reindeer to pull his sled anymore. His health problems prevent him from personally delivering presents. The job has been contracted and sub-contracted so many times that Santa has no idea how the presents get under the tree anymore. He’s not the only one to notice this, there’s grumbling around the elf union hall.

Santa Claus goes ice-fishing. He enjoys the companionable solitude of the other ice-fishers visible across the terminal flatness of the lake, huddled besides their dark circles where the line of continuity from water to ice to air blurs. The fishing line collects tiny shards of ice, plucking them right out of the air along its length. Soon it is encrusted in icy fuzz. He warms himself out of an old flask. Who gave him this flask anyhow? It has his initial on it: SJC. The booze in the North Pole is made from fermented snowberries mixed with carefully rotted seal blubber. It’s an acquired taste.

The night sky shines colors, but everyone at the North Pole is used to it. Hawaiians don’t freak out over every sunset the way tourists do, Pisans can’t get excited that their tower is leaning, and elves don’t care that much about the northern lights. Aurora bores they sneer, those little shits. They are hardened, opaque, they are not crystals capable of transmitting light. At best a clouded quartz. 

The eternal night of the wintry North Pole lures in no tourists. Santa would like to do some traveling himself someday. But he’s confused about his finances. These details are taken care of by a comptroller, a squat little gnome who Santa is afraid of. He and his executive team do almost all of the day to day management, not just of the gift operation, but of Santa himself. When he last brought up the idea of a vacation the comptroller gave him a stare. He’ll ask again next year.

Santa waits and waits for a bite. Taking little swigs of blubber-rum every few minutes. Across the ice field is some other redundant version of himself, mild and uncomplaining, filtered out of the thing he created by the simple economics of the new efficiencies: Automation. Decentralization. Logistics. Supply lines in squiggles and loops unfathomable. When he wiggles his line it sets quick darting concentric circles reverberating out to the edge of the imperfect circle he has carved out of the ice. For some reason they don’t ripple back. For bait he uses chunks of smoked reindeer. He chokes down a slug from the flask. It feels like it warms him a little less each time. He chokes down another. Wiggles the line again. Forgets what he’s even doing here, what manner of fish he hopes to catch, what he would do if he did catch one. Chokes down another slug, snorts and shakes his head. There’s a heavy vagueness to it all, and he lets his eyes close.

Time passes in this way and each time he starts awake it’s with a gasp of cold. The shiver of the stars in the sky tremulous and distant, but lending their sympathy to him anyhow. That’s ice in my beard he tells himself, but it feels remote, as if he’s telling someone else. He knows if he lets this go on too long he may get frostbite. Mrs. Claus isn’t around anymore to send someone to find him if he doesn’t make it home for dinner, to stare at him with that admixture of longing and contempt. He thinks about that expression, wonders if he misses it as he slowly freezes to death atop a fishless, unnamed lake. No one misses him for a week.