Short Story: Franken the Snowman

I consider myself to be a fairly creative person. And I pride myself on being able to work with whatever's on hand, be it home repair or cooking dinner or whatever. But that mentality has backfired pretty spectacularly on a few occasions, and one winter years ago was not an exception.

Snow is a rarity in the Pacific Northwest, west of the Cascades. We usually get snowfall a couple of times a year, but it tends to be the big, wet flakes that are pretty to watch fall but don't stick around. Accumulation that lasts for more than three days can be pretty rare, and sometimes only happens once in a whole winter. So we seize snow days. We revel in them.

This one winter we'd finally gotten something like three or four inches of snow and I was determined to make the most of it. "Making the most" of course, involved making a snowman. It was cold and quiet and I hadn't done this in a while, so I was excited.

Building it in my own backyard would have been ideal, but we had a dog and I wasn't so good at picking up every pile of his poo regularly. Rolling around the snow there could be perilous, so I built it in my grandparents' yard, who also happened to be our neighbors.

The first thing I did was roll out a base, torso, and head in the classical fashion. But since we only had about three inches I couldn't make him very big. Still, he was well proportioned and decent sized. As a bonus, I even sculpted a little dog to keep him company and modeled it after our basset hound, Oliver.

Now it was time to accessorize him, and this was where things started to get a little hairy. We didn't really have any of that "classic" snowman stuff, and he was a little small for boots and a scarf even if we'd had an extra available. And with things starting to already feel a little sloppy outside, I wasn't sure his head would hold a hat up for very long.

I rooted around in the fridge for a while but we were out of carrots. The closest thing I could find were some fingerling potatoes, so I grabbed one that was long and skinny and had a hook on the end. It would be an ugly nose, but it'd work.

The real discovery came when I stumbled upon a package of stale peppermint candies in the back of the baking cupboard. They were perfectly circular and a pretty red and white color. I grabbed those, dug up some gravel from the driveway, and found two branches in the backyard.

I was ready to roll.

In the end, I had a very nice snowman, with two peppermint eyes, a hook nose and gravel smile, and three proud peppermint buttons down his front. He even had a little peppermint-eyed dog! Well satisfied, I went about completing "making the most" of my snow day, which included such activities as having hot chocolate, throwing snow at my sister, and walking to the lake near our house.

Day wore into evening, and with everybody now home I decided to show off my creation to my family. But when I led them to the backyard I gasped because my snowman had been murdered.

It turns out peppermint reacts weirdly with snow, and something in the candies lowers the melting point of the snow as they dissolve and melt. The result is a bored tunnel in the snow. You can stick your fingers into them, it's a very localized effect. However, the red dye in the melted candies is another story. It bleeds everywhere.

So instead of a classic little Frosty I was able to introduce my family to Mr. Murder Victim and his Hound of the Baskervilles. Because instead of cute peppermint eyes they both had hollow, bloodshot sockets, and as an added bonus the snowman had three neat bullet holes blooming in his chest.

And of course, his hook nose had fallen out, leaving him noseless and with a gravel smile that now looked a little toothy.

I was mortified.

Actually, we did get a good laugh out of it, and thankfully my family believed that I wasn't some disturbed psychopath but rather the victim of chemistry and circumstance.

I've made other snowmen. I've sculpted dogs. But that snowman has to be my favorite.

My grandma's dog stayed up all night barking at him, until in the morning he simply melted away.