We don’t know how he came to life. Greg said he thought it might be the combination of the charcoal pieces and the sunglasses we stuck on him. There was the pipe too. It was just a stinky old corncob pipe I’d stolen from my brother Mike’s room. He didn’t need it anymore since he got a new glass bong. Anyway that didn’t make sense. Randy said it had to be the hat because when we put that on him that’s when he started talking. It was a round black hat with a flat top. I think I’d seen one like it in old pictures of magicians or something, except this one had some silver stuff around it, like a small belt. That still didn’t make any sense. How could a hat bring a snowman to life? Karen thought it might have been some kind of chemical reaction from the pesticides they use on the vacant lot where we built him, and I agreed with her that had to be what did it. There was just no other explanation. It’s not like he just suddenly jumped to life as soon as we put the stuff on him. No, the first thing he did was sort of lean forward and we thought maybe we’d stacked his body up too high and I thought the hat would fall off but it didn’t. Then he leaned back and then forward again. Then he started talking.
“Oh, hey little kids, what’s up?”
He was kind of quiet, I guess because he was a snowman and not really used to talking. And we were all, like, freaked out that this was happening. Like, we couldn’t believe it was really real. I asked Karen if she heard that and she said, yeah, she did, so it wasn’t just me.
“Oh, hey little kids,” he said, and I really didn’t like him calling us little kids when he wasn’t that much bigger than us and I was ten, but he said, “I don’t have any arms here. You think you could help me out with that?”
We went and got some sticks but he didn’t like those because they broke when he tried to bend them. Then we found some, like, flexible tube stuff that was over by the abandoned refrigerators that we put the needles that get left there overnight in so no one gets stuck, and Joey ran to his house and got a couple of rubber gloves. It was really weird. We stuck all that in his sides and he could move them all around and even the fingers, like he had real hands.
Then he started to move around the lot a little and we asked if he’d play with us.
“Oh, yeah, sure,” he said, “has anybody got a guitar? I could really jam out.”
None of us had a guitar with us and we didn’t know why he asked for one but I remembered Mike had an old one in his closet that our stepdad had left. I ran and got that and brought it back. It wasn’t electric or anything, just a wood one. The snowman took it.
“Oh, acoustic, so I guess I’m gonna do like a retro unplugged kind of thing,” he said. Then he started playing the guitar, this, like, really high sounding sort of string of notes.
“Hey,” said Karen, “I know that song. My grandpa plays it all the time on his old CD player!”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, “it’s called Sweet Child O’Mine. This is a riff I came up with while we were just having a warmup session.”
He played us a bunch more songs, some he said were from his “snakepit crew” and we danced around the vacant lot for what seemed like hours. Then he started playing this one song he said was all about dancing by someone he knew named Jeff. It was, like, old jazz or something, and it was really long so I think we were all glad the sun came out. That’s when he started melting really fast, his head collapsing into his body and his arms fell out. But before he totally went away he said, “Hey, thanks little kids for giving me this chance to jam.”
It’s getting warm again and I don’t know if we’ll get more snow but if we do maybe we’ll have another visit from Slashy The Snowman.
I would watch that special right now.
I think I should pitch this idea to some of my creative friends and see if they can translate it into an actual short.
This would be the only Christmas special I would watch!❤️
I really think I should pitch the idea of Slashy The Snowman to some of my creative friends, some of whom are pretty adept with drawing, and make it into a real special. Maybe next year.
Brilliant! Mona
Slashy The Snowman–a very special Christmas special coming to you soon.
So cool, Chris.
Welcome to the jungle, Ann.