LOGLINE
When a solitary atheist becomes dangerously ill days before Christmas, he must decide whether life’s impermanence makes connection meaningless — or urgent.
This is not a conversion story. Marty does not discover God, receive proof of an afterlife, or learn that Christmas was secretly religious all along. The dramatic argument is almost the opposite: if this life is all there is, wasting the people you love becomes even harder to justify.
Marty makes a living pricing the things dead people leave behind: furniture, jewelry, records, photographs.
He is an atheist, estranged from his sister, defensive about Christmas and very good at mistaking not needing anyone for independence. Then he gets feverish, hypoxic and exhausted.
The “ghosts” can still be read as fever, guilt, or a dying brain doing weird Christmas shit.
If Marty finds Jesus at the end, I screwed it up.
I am more interested in whether a man who does not believe in an afterlife can stop using that as an excuse to sit this life out. He can remain an atheist. He just has to stop being an asshole about being alive.
Drafting. The current draft is 86 pages, October 2026.