Toilet Squirrels, inspired by true events

There once was a guy in a little blue car. It was a sunny morning and he had a winding road, the wind in his hair, and a full cup of coffee. Life was good and he was happy...

Wait, I can't start there; that's the beginning of the story. No one starts at the beginning of the story anymore. Not since the ancient Greeks did away with that sort of thing.[1] This is a modern story of terror, of the harsh realism of modern life and the fragile underpinnings that anchor our society. It’s a tale of grief and woe and it should begin at the darkest moment, preferably during the high point of the action.

We'll start again.

There once was a goblin named Thistlepin who loved his job just a bit too much.

Yes, a goblin, shut up.

On this particular day, this particular goblin was bored. It was a slow day and not much was happening at Fate.com and like all bored creatures since the invention of the internet, Thistlepin was taking selfies and posting them on Instagram. 

That’s when the red light on its console began to flash.

FLASH FATE TRANSMISSION MESSAGE BEGINS>>>>  > Instagram user ‘swalkerperkins’ has ceased posting pictures of > cats and food and dared to post a selfie in his little car.
> Has declared unapproved moment of contentment.
> > Did not knock on wood or suitable substitute.
> > Take appropriate action.
> >  
<<<<END MESSAGE

Thistlepin chortled a gobliny chortle[2] and opened a window on its browser.

There was swalkerperkins, mugging for the camera. He had a shaggy beard and hipster glasses. He looked the sort who would tempt Fate. The sunroof of his little car was open and a blown-out sky beyond the open roof betokened a sunny day and little skill at cell phone photography.

          In the twenty-first century, physical manifestations of psychic phenomena don’t get a lot of respect. Every day in the modern world, Death was cheated, Time wasted, War averted, Nature tamed, and Fate tempted. Only Fate, though, had the goblins to get hers back.

Thistlepin was one of her best.

He was the cleverest, the most devious, and the most devoted to punishing those who tempted Fate’s wrath. Death, Time, War, and the rest were constantly trying to hire him away with promises of salary and all the garbage he could eat, but Thistlepin was a company goblin and Fate made sure her star player wanted for nothing.

Thistlepin called up the poor sap’s dossier. A week previously, the guy had posted another in a series of too-long blog posts about how deplorable it was that the world had forgotten how to dream optimistic dreams. He liked the movie Tomorrowland. His favorite song from The Who was Boris the Spider. His house was painted yellow. The car with the open sunroof was a blue Mini Cooper named Sweetie.

Seriously.

The guy was practically begging for it.

The goblin pondered the smug mug and carefully cracked each of the thirty-six knobbily green knuckles as it planned a diabolical plan. Finally, the cracked black lips drew back to reveal a rictus grin. This would require a comeuppance of unparalleled uppance.

Thistlepin fished the chain around its neck out of the front of his dirty white tee shirt and inserted it in a keyhole on the console that hadn’t been used in so long that it squealed as the knotty green hand forced the key to turn.

Lights lit, klaxons wailed, wood knocked, and on Earth a squirrel crawled into the exhaust pipe on the roof of a small yellow house on an island somewhere off the coast of Washington state.

---

Scott was depressingly good at what computer programmers and science fiction authors call pattern recognition. When a picture of numbers crawled across his social media newsfeed challenging him to spot the 6 among the 8’s, he never reposted because it felt too simple a puzzle. He grew up on a steady diet of Highlights puzzles and Sesame Street rhymes about one thing being nothing like the others. He excelled at find-a-word puzzles and the spot-the-difference pictures on the back page of the Sunday comics.

When he opened the toilet lit, he wanted his brain to refuse to accept a shape that was quite clearly a squirrel but his brain wasn’t having any of it. His brain didn’t reject patterns it found familiar no matter how much he begged it to.

Maybe someone forgot to flush the toilet.

Squirrel.

Turd. Obviously.

It's a squirrel.

Over time water and waste can sculpt strange shapes.

Including a bushy tail?

Look, it’s brown!

With a reddish chest and tiny paws?

Maybe someone needs to see a doctor?

You do if you think that’s anything other than a squirrel.

Well, at least it’s dead.

He’d lost track of which voice was which.

Scott mentally redacted every expletive he could think of.

He lowered the lid and walked out of the room.

“Honey!”

From the kitchen came a muffled answer that sounded like “What?”

“Why is there a squirrel in the toilet?”

Silence.

Footsteps.

His wife’s hands are at her side. The look on her face is not a good one.

“What?”

“There’s a squirrel,” he said. “In the toilet.”

She went and checked. Because this is apparently a story that people tell. A joke. A jape. A prank. Some sort of… squirrel.

His brain gave up making excuses. There was a dead squirrel in his toilet.

“You are taking care of that,” she said. “And can I say how glad I am that I’m not the one who found it?”

“Right.” 

Because even in enlightened 21^st century households, there are boy jobs and there are girl jobs. Either that, or as an MBA candidate, his wife had taken on the lessons about delegating jobs to fit candidates to guide their professional growth.

Besides, she wasn’t the one who tempted Fate.

He thought he heard a gobliny cackle.

His wife went into the library and he went to the bedroom to change. What do you wear to fish a squirrel out of a toilet? Not work clothes, certainly.

He put on canvas dungarees and an old teeshirt and wandered into the library to find his wife on the computer with the Google open on the screen. The internet was singularly unhelpful.

The normally reliable “Straight Dope” forum was already there with the aspiring stylings of the North American Itinerant Internet Humorist. A user named Polycarp summoned this gem from the back row of a high school physics classroom:

“It's Schrödinger's Squirrel. At all times and places, there is an infinitesimally small but non-zero chance that a macroscopic object such as a squirrel will coalesce out of zero-point enerhy. You drew the short straw.  Just be glad it wasn't a moose.”                            “Polycarp” (Guest user) Straight Dope Message Boards

How Did a Squirrel Get In My Toilet? (discussion thread)

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=559221

Accessed 9 June 2015, 9:25 pm

When he wasn’t tempting Fate, Scott was a science fiction author of a strange bent and that explanation pleased him on some perverse level even as it lit up some hitherto unnoticed dark corners of his imagination.

“Terrific,” Scott thought. “Now I have to worry about a toilet moose.”

That’s what he thought.

To himself.

No man gets credit for speaking that kind of thing out loud, and he’d been married long enough to know that. His outside voice said “Do they say how to get it out of the toilet?”

She checked again.

“No.” She paused. “Gloves?”

“I am not touching that thing.”

“Tongs?”

“Maybe the fireplace set has tongs…”

Scott tried to banish the fact that his world had expanded to include toilet mammals as a genus/species combo as he lined an orange Home Depot bucket with trash bags. The log lifter tongs made short work of the tiny furry corpse and he flushed the toilet.

Thistlepin whispered in his wife’s ear and she came running into the room to deliver the coup de grace.

“Oh my God, you didn’t flush it did you?”

“No,” he said. “No, I’m not that crazy.”

He tied a knot in the sack and headed outside.

“Dinner’s cancelled. Eat whatever you want; I don’t think I’m going to feel up to food tonight.”

As he headed outside, dead toilet squirrel in hand, he chanted quietly to himself over and over, It could have been worse, at least it wasn’t a moose.

---

[1] Not since the Greeks invented the "cold open" for their iconic dramas featuring the recurring hero Ἰάκωβος πέδη.  This innovation allowed them to show the hero smashing the Kakos syndicate before they went to the bother of showing him meeting their leader, cheating at baccarat, or wooing his bride. They also invented the little known speculatori ex machine but the Romans stole it and claimed it as their own. Bloody Romans.

[2] The goblin was required to chortle. It was in the handbook. A good gobliny chortle was a prerequisite for Fatework.

Dreamers: Disenchanted with dystopia...

Last week, I discovered that Brad Bird and Damon Lindelhof made a movie just for me. It was an old-fashioned sort of movie, with an old-fashioned message of hope. Yes, it was a little preachy, but it's a sermon worth hearing and I loved it unabashedly from its goofy vacuum cleaner jet pack to its steampunk rocket to another dimension.

It wasn't just optimistic, it was anti-cynical. As we've come to expect from Brad Bird, it was practically utopian, but in a practical way.

I must be honest with you: as a general rule, dystopia bores the snot out of me.

It's not that dystopian stories should not be told, but by dwelling solely on the inevitability of decline, we've shot ourselves in the collective foot as a literary movement and as a society.

There are dystopian stories that need to be told and certainly valid uses of the milieu. I haven't had a chance to see Fury Road yet, but the cultural conversation it spawned is evidence that dystopian futures still have the power to make us think about the dystopian now. And science fiction does and should have a role to play in warning us of the future consequences of current trends. All the same, I feel deeply and personally that we took a wrong turn somewhere.

I really want to blame the "Same but different" approach that publishing and Hollywood takes whenever something is successful. Katniss's adventures in the Land Beyond Running Man means that we're going to spend awhile feeding fictional kids into a futuristic meat grinder whether we like it or not. Just as the success of the first Avengers has doomed us to a hundred 'shared world' movie franchises and team-ups, we're also staying far too long at the dystopian dinner party, wringing the last marketing dollar out of the genre until there's nothing left of it but a husk of post-apocalyptic cliches.

Lest you think I watched Tomorrowland and had an epiphany, I said almost those exact words in November 2011 shortly after finishing Howard Carter. Howard is aggressively anti-dystopian without ever venturing into utopian. Its story rests on the refutation that cycles are unbreakable. Its stance is pointedly and fearlessly anti-fatalist.

I tried very hard to walk the line between the two without betraying my central idea that the thing I miss most in modern science fiction is the sense of hope. Hope that children can make better choices than their parents. Hope that humanity can improve and change. Hope that the ingenuity of humanity can eventually triumph over the inhumanity of humanity.

Zombies are so over-done there's nothing left on the bone. The Dystopia became just another setting and more often than not these days, it seems to be another setting: Do I set this novel in post-apocalyptic wasteland or Belgium? Attacking the underlying set of assumptions that make these apocalypses feel inevitable is the bravest thing Bird and Lindelhof have done, and should garner them a much larger audience than the latest disaster flick, no matter how charming Dwayne Johnson might be.

I used to like dystopian stories for the same reason I used to be more enthusiastic about zombie movies: they meant something. These two semi-connected constructs were our muse for decades, an airing of inchoate fears about the state of the world and stark, if at times hyperbolic, warnings about our inevitable fate should we continue on our current path. Regional and economic inequities are given a harsh and satirical spotlight among the adventure elements of The Hunger Games. I haven't seen the movie yet, but the evocation of a feminine warrior element at the center of Mad Max: Fury Road has given rise to a valuable and ongoing societal debate around the gender assumptions that it leaves shattered in its wake.

But will its message of equality give rise to more? Or will its success give rise to a storytelling wasteland of tropes and cliches written on the back of a napkin by movie execs who cannot see past the dollar signs to the message that filled those bags with cash?

I fear the latter.

If you're with me and you too miss the idea that we should and can dream, and that positing futures should be at least as much about hoping for better tomorrows as it is foretelling doom, go see Tomorrowland.