BURLINGTON, ON – With spring coming on, Burlington’s Coates family has no choice but to put Mr. Snowglobe, the magical talking snowman they accidentally brought to life earlier this season, to a comparatively quick and merciful death.
“There must have been some magic in that old silk hat we found,” said Jim Coates, 45. “But now it’s getting warmer, we’ve got to put him in the ground.”
Snowglobe, initially a source of wonder and inspiration for the family, has been rapidly losing weight. His carrot nose has begun to rot, his rhymes have started to slip, and his charcoal mouth, initially smiling, has sagged into a grimace.
“It was around the time the smile started to droop that he started to get into that existentialism shit,” said Catherine Coates, 47. “We tried to get him a sunlamp for his seasonal affective disorder, but it only made the situation worse.”
When Arliss Coates, 7, told him that Santa would come to save him, the snowman swallowed another mouthful of antifreeze and told him that “there is no fucking Santa Claus, you idiot.”
“We asked if he would let us put him in the freezer,” said Travis Coates, 12. “He said he didn’t want to live that way. Then he used a racial slur to talk about the frozen peas.”
Although the family doctor told Mr. Snowglobe it was prohibited by law for her to perform an assisted suicide, she was later heard to whisper into his ear that the easiest way would be to get in a car, roll up the windows, and turn on the seat warmers.
Sources say it was around late March that Snowglobe, already smoking the equivalent of four packs of cigarettes a day out of his corn-cob pipe, began asking seven-year-old Arliss Coates to help him “do the thing that I’m too much of a coward to do myself.”
This is not the first time tragedy has struck the Coates family. Just this past September, Leafy, the magical grass man, bullied Catherine into taking a blowtorch to his head, rather than face the long winter death of photosynthetic starvation.
At press time, Travis had volunteered to take the blow-dryer out back, telling his mother that, “He was my jolly happy soul, I’ll do it.”
