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.

Kurt Vonnegut on the Short Story

A Story Short

For the past week and heading into the next month or so, my updates have not been and will continue not to be as regular as you've come to expect.  There are several illnesses in my family and something's got to give.  But as often happens amid turmoil, creativity has burbled to the surface as I take refuge in my typewriter.

I believe that I've mentioned before how my dad loved Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories and how he wanted me to love them too.  But I just couldn’t. There was too much of a gap there, too far of a leap required of a kid born in the 70's.  A kid who had already sold his allegiance to the Ray Bradbury and Tolkien crowd.  I was conquering Martian frontiers with John Carter and exploring Middle Earth with Frodo.  I didn't have time for stories set in rural Michigan circa 1910, I was living in THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!

Though in fairness, dad gave me my first battered copy of John Carter of Mars and it was at his behest that I

spent some time exploring Victorian Africa with Allan Quartermaine.

I often wondered what it would have been like if I had liked Nick Adams and what it would have taken to make that happen for a kid of the Star Wars era.  What if those stories had been written by someone who spoke in a voice I recognized, a voice less burdened by Hemingway’s affection for the primal male rituals and closer to the swords and sorcery of Tolkien or the jetpacks and laser guns more familiar in my late twentieth century childhood?

Short stories are not my usual forte.  I tend to take large bites of the stories I concoct and I want a large canvas to make them as detailed and beautiful as their architecture can bear without the constraints of the short story getting in my way.  I love short stories, but I don't write them very often.

But the coming-of-age in the space age idea kept prodding and poking me.  Mine was a childhood spent wondering why the promised WORLD OF TOMORROW kept being put off until tomorrow and then the next day and the next.  And a character began to coelesce.

The other day I sat down at the computer and was surprised to find a story of a young man of my generation looking for the future he had been promised by those same Science Fiction visionaries and moth-eaten books from the 1950's and 60's that haunted the basement of the local library.  A kid who thrilled to the same ideas as I had and wanted to know what happened to that jetpack he was supposed to get when the world's odometer clicked over to the year 2000.  A kid who was far more clever and self confident than I insomuch as he was willing and able to do something about it.

It never ceases to surprise me when I find stories hiding in my head that aren't 100,000 words long.  And the self-discovery that like Hemingway I could tell fantastically exagerrated tales spun from my own childhood imaginings.  No more or less surprised than I was to find those half-imagined adventures were still lurking in there, buried under the more literate and adult adventures that overlay them.

What I ended up with was not even close to an attempt to rewrite the Nick Adams stories, far from it. For one thing, I'm definitely not Earnest Hemingway and have no desire to be.  Nonetheless, the stories I've been telling myself for the past couple of weeks are informed by Nick Adams even if it was just that I was reacting against that archetype.  Nick was in the back of my mind as I filtered my thirty year old self back into the ten year old body of a boy that was (in the words of Douglas Adams) similar to but not entirely unlike me.   Certainly I made him smarter, more self-assured and at once more naive than I have ever been.  Because in the end, even if a character contains a sizeable portion of Scott, it's never Scott.  His sister is never my sister and his parents never my parents, though in this case I would say his soul is my soul.

These new stories owe as full a debt to the things I was reading the summer of my tenth year on the planet.  John Carter of Mars, The Mad Scientist’s Club, The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown and God knows the pages of those musty picture books from the 1950’s that teased and tempted my young mind with the impossible future of gleaming domed cities, jetpacks and monorails.

Eventually, of course, that ten-year-old became a thirty-year-old and we made the leap together and I treasure those stories less for what they are than for what they meant to him.  But before the end, my dislike of Hemingway became a bonding thing for us. Which is why I return to it time and again.

Regardless of Hemingway’s influence on these stories, his influence on my dad meant that Dad and I talked about books from the very beginning and the Nick Adams stories in particular. I learned to love them because he did, just as I learned to love books because he made it look like the right way to live.

---
John  Carter cover public domain - care of Wikimedia Commons

Writing With the King: His, Mine & Ours

NOTE: This is the long-awaited wrapup for my unintentionally-lengthy look at Stephen King's writing book-cum-memoir "On Writing: A memoir of the Craft".   At the end of which you will find a free short story written at the prompting and in the style of Stephen King.

His, Mine and Ours 

I've spent this entire series alternating between arguing with King and praising his writing.  And honestly, I'm not sure I entirely agree with him on what writing is, where it comes from or whether or not it's something anyone can do.  I'm also split on my feelings as to whether or not there's a ceiling to our potential as writers beyond which it's impossible to improve.  King obviously feels that there is, but I'm not so sure.  I think it is possible to learn to do this and what "natural" writers are born with is an innate love for it.  Whether or not that love is the catalyst needed to go from adequate to great is a philosophical question beyond the purview of this blog or this book.

Which begs the question: "Why are you so enthusiastic about a writing book that you don't entirely agree with, written by a writer whose books you're not especially a fan of?"

Arguing with King in absentia is part of the charm of his book.  If I entirely agreed with King I probably would not have given his memoir a second reading.  I have piles of books about writing in my home library that may or may not ever get a second look, most of them written by writers I whole-heartedly love and agree with.

The three books I most often loan-out are the three with which I maintain an active dialogue.  Telling Lies for Fun & Profit and Bird By Bird spend more time being loaned out than they do on my shelf and I can wholeheartedly endorse both of them for writers seeking guidance... but that doesn't mean I rubberstamp the opinions of Mr. Block of Ms. Lamott any more than I can with Mr. King.  Though I admit to arguing much more with King, but it's a friendly sort of one-sided tussle for my part.

On Writing challenged a lot of the closely-held assumptions I'd made about writing, among them the idea that I didn't need and didn't have time for writing prompts.

When King first published this book of writing advice and memories, it included a challenge to his readers.  He posed a writing problem and asked us to send him our results.

Now, when a major author asks to see something you've written, if you have any literary aspirations at all you don't hesitate.  You send them your writing sample.  Most writers refuse - on advice of counsel - to read unpublished and unagented works as an act of self-protection against future lawsuits of the "You stole my idea..." variety.  Lawsuits still happen, as JK Rowling can tell you, but I'm sure they're much less frequent because of this policy.

Because he'd never accepted writing samples from un-agented writers before, I think this was a bit of an eye-opener for Mr. King.  According to a post on his website shortly after the book came out, the request resulted in an avalanche of stories from the writers and fans eager to garner that kind of attention.  I'm as sure that many of them had dreams of landing a book deal as I am that none of them did... at least not from Mr, King's recomendation based on these writing samples.

In subsequent printings of the book, this request was removed and a notice on his website notes that submissions are closed.

All the same, it's a good 'story problem'  and one of the few I've seen that actually inspired me to sit down and put hands on keys.  I'm notoriously averse to someone giving me something to write about beyond the most general guidelines.  "Write about math" is a good prompt for me.  "Write a story about characters in this specific situation, hitting the following specific points..." is significantly less likely to get a response from my creative faculty.

Have I mentioned yet how much I hated writing for school?

Suffice to say that I like to write my own ideas and if I didn't I probably would still be a journalist.  I have enough ideas and writing prompts of my own to last me a lifetime and any time spent writing someone else's ideas feels like fingernails on the chalkboard.  No matter who the idea came from, I feel caged by these things and the urge to wander off their map is overwhelming.

For some reason King's story didn't do that to me.  For one thing, I don't usually write horror, so I was stepping into unknown territory and knowing that Stephen King had drawn the map in my quavering mitts was oddly comforting.  For another, it wasn't a ghost story it was a story of love gone awry and the chain of events leading to confrontation.

Of course I wandered off the path anyway, but I did so knowing what direction the path lay when I wanted to get back to it.  Dick & Jane are in a bad marriage.  Spousal abuse compounded by all the bad add-ons a horror writer of King's caliber can dream up.  But the roles are reversed and Jane is the abuser and Dick the abused.  Events lead to separation and, eventually, Jane's arrest.  One day, Dick drops their child off at a friend's and comes home to find Jane waiting for him...  chaos ensues.

And for whatever reasons, my fingers flew across the keyboard.  On some level I was playing out my arguments with King's assumptions about storytelling and "The Craft".  But the story became a meditation on the benevolence of the Creator, on fatherhood, vengeance and the proprietary feelings we all feel toward our loved ones and what happens when that's taken to an unhealthy level.

It was a strange feeling to have my storytelling so guided by someone else.

My story was longer than the word count he later imposed (out of a sense of wise self-preservation, I'm sure) so I never sent it to him or tried to get it published (it wasn't my idea, after all) and throughout the writing of this series, I've been vacillating on whether or not to just post it here and be done with it.  I've decided to do so as a way to encourage you to do the same, if not here then in your own webspace.

Without further ado I invite you to read: "Mine" A macabre little story about Dick & Jane (Opens as a .PDF "GoogleDoc")


Read the previous posts in this series:
Writing With the King: An introduction and summary about why I care and why you should too.

Part I - Designated Dreamers: The truth of memory and the place of writers as society's shepards of the subconscious.

Part II - Bedside Tables: The importance of the mundane as a foil for the fantastic (or the horrifying).