Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

associated with fun. It was the way her own children would eventually think of her: dull, strict, chained to the past. She had boys, all of them healthy, and only one prone to trouble. He had a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but his heart was good, and the chipmunk knew he would eventually straighten himself out. Her husband thought so too, and died knowing that he had been correct.

A month or two after he’d passed on, she asked this son what jazz was, and when he told her it was a kind of music, she knew instinctively that he was telling the truth. “Is it bad music?” she asked.

“Well, if it’s played badly,” he said. “Otherwise it’s really quite pleasant.”

“Did squirrels invent it?”

“God, no,” he said. “Whoever gave you that idea?”

The chipmunk stroked her brown-and-white muzzle. “Nobody,” she said. “I was just guessing.”

When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of “jazz” as well and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity.

The Toad, the Turtle, and the Duck

The complaint line started at the edge of the swamp and stretched westward, ending, where the turtle finally arrived, at the base of a charred pine stump. He fell into place behind a glassy-eyed toad and had just commenced a jaw-aching yawn when a duck showed up and took the position behind him, muttering, “What a bunch of idiots.”

The turtle, his mouth still open, nodded in agreement.

“This is my second time in this line, can you believe it?” groused the duck. “First they told me I wouldn’t need any ID, then, after I waited almost three hours, this ball-busting river rat goes, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but if you don’t have some form of identification, there’s nothing I can do.’

“I was, like, ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me that earlier?’ And she was all, ‘If you can’t be civil, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’ ”

The turtle groaned in sympathy, as something similar had once happened to him. “It’s the oldest trick in the book,” he said. “They screw up, but somehow you’re the problem.”

“I said to her, ‘You want civil, try working for a company that doesn’t give everyone the goddamn runaround!’ ” the duck continued. “ ‘You can’t very well complain about our complaining when you’re the one who’s given us something to complain about.’ ”

“Well put,” said the turtle, who was, he’d later admit, genuinely impressed. “You don’t expect such clarity from a duck, or any bird, really, but this one totally nailed it,” he’d tell his wife when he got home that evening.

It was here that the toad entered the conversation. “You want pissed off? I got to the front of the line, I showed my ID, and I was then told that I needed two forms of it. Can you beat that? I said, ‘I didn’t see that ugly-assed bobcat give you two forms,’ and the one behind the counter, a black snake, she was, said that this was a special rule just for reptiles.

“I said, ‘No problem, I’m an amphibian.’ And to this she goes-I kid you not-‘Same difference.’

“I said, ‘It’s not the same fucking difference. First off, I only mate in the water. Number two, the skin I was born with-I still got it. So don’t feed me any of that “same difference” bullshit. You should know that better than anyone.’

“Then she gives me the same line of crap the river rat gave this duck, all, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but if you’re going to use that kind of language…’ ”

The turtle rolled his eyes. “Typical.”

“I should have punched her,” the toad said. “Right in the face-pow.”

“I’m with you, brother!” said the duck.

“Or no,” continued the toad, “I should have gouged out her eyes, blinded her so she had to spend the rest of her life in darkness.”

The turtle had a blind cousin, a cousin he hated, and this made him laugh all the harder.

“Then I should have yanked out her tongue,” the toad said. “See how she liked that!”

“Not so easy giving us shit when she can’t talk,” said the duck.

“After all that, I should have set her on fire,” added the toad. “No, I should have poured acid on her and then set her on fire, the stupid bitch.”

The turtle started saying something, but the toad, excited by a new possibility, interrupted him: “Or wait, no, after cutting off her tongue, I should have smeared an apple with shit, opened up her big fat mouth, and forced it down her throat. Then I should have poured acid on her. Then I should have set her on fire.”

The three of them laughed.

“Better yet, you should have used a cantaloupe,” said the turtle. “Cover that with shit and stuff it down her throat. Ha!”

“Or no,” said the duck. “Instead of a cantaloupe, you should have used a watermelon. Then you-”

And here the merry atmosphere soured. “A watermelon for the black snake,” said the toad. “Now you’re just being a racist.”

“No,” the duck said, “I only meant-”

“I know what you ‘meant,’ ” the toad said, “and I think it stinks.”

“Hear! Hear!” agreed the turtle.

“Yeah, well, to hell with the both of you,” said the duck, and he waddled off, muttering under his breath.

“God, I hate guys like him,” the toad said. “A watermelon. He wouldn’t have said that if she’d been a king snake, and he damn sure wouldn’t have said it if she were a python.”

The pair looked at the retreating duck and shook their heads in disgust. A moment of silence, and then the toad continued, “I should have smeared a honeydew with shit-or no, a honeydew and a cantaloupe. I should have smeared both melons with shit and forced them down her throat. Then I should have poured acid on her, and then I should have set her on fire.”

“Well,” said the turtle, “there’s always the next time.”

The Motherless Bear

In the three hours before her death, the bear’s mother unearthed some acorns buried months earlier by a squirrel. They were damp and worm-eaten, as unappetizing as turds, and, sighing at her rotten luck, she kicked them back into their hole. At around ten she stopped to pull a burr from her left haunch, and then, her daughter would report, “Then she just… died.”

The first few times she said these words, the bear could not believe them. Her mother gone-how could it be! After a day, though, the shock wore off, and she tried to recapture it with an artfully placed pause and an array of amateur theatrical gestures. The faraway look was effective, and eventually she came to master it. “And then,” she would say, her eyes fixed on the distant horizon, “then she just… died.”

Seven times she cried, but as the weeks passed this became more difficult, and so she took to covering her face with her paws and doing a jerky thing with her shoulders. “There, there,” friends would say, and she would imagine them returning to their families. “I saw that poor motherless bear today, and if she doesn’t just break your heart, well, I don’t know what will.”

Her neighbors brought food, more than enough to get her through the winter, so she stayed awake that year