She wasn’t really blind, of course. A slight singeing and some minimal scarring occurred in her beady black pupils, but that faded quickly. Shirley came every day and bathed her eyes with the juice of assorted berries, which turned them blue for a while. She thought it looked striking but her cousin sniffed and said it reminded her of one of those pale-eyed husky wolves.
More surprising was the outpouring of concern among the forest creatures. A steady stream of delicious leaves and bugs were left outside her burrow so she wouldn’t exhaust herself hunting for food. Get Well Soon! messages scratched into bark were dropped into her hole and she amused herself by sorting them into a scrapbook with the sincerest words at the front. The woodchuck beamed as concerned rodents came from all over the forest to check on her. She had never felt so beloved.
One day while she was out healing in the sun, she accidentally reached out with a lighting fast reflex and caught a grasshopper. It became obvious that she wasn’t sight-impaired and no longer need help. The attention stopped. The other animals had their own checklists to accomplish before winter set in, such as bulking up for hibernation and not getting eaten by hawks.
The woodchuck was not ready to let go of the scam. There is an old saying in the forest: once a narcissus, always a narcissus (animals have far more old sayings than most humans realize). Someone had whittled a long white stick that was the perfect height to use as a cane, so she perched the wire-rimmed sunglasses the guilty marmoset had left for her on the tip of her nose and felt her way around the forest. She knew she looked regal as she worked her way around, waving and tapping, until she realized it also alerted hawks to her presence.
The whole thing became considerably less entertaining when someone dropped a flyer down her burrow. It was a picture of the current weasel in charge in 2017, the one who liked to wear a severed fox tail on his head; he was staring up at the sun and pointing. Someone had scrawled moron across the picture. They were laughing at her.
She became reclusive and angry. The woodchuck had never been a particularly social animal but now she shunned the other creatures. She showed up late to work, bit the Mayor of Punxsutawney and lost her job as the weather groundhog. She said hateful things about the beavers, about grabbing them whenever she wanted and laughing at how she could do whatever she wanted because she was famous. She meant it ironically because her fame had become an albatross around her neck, but the beavers were still hurt by the comment. The woodchuck also wished she could get that damn bird to leave her alone.
Even Shirley, her most faithful and loyal cousin, had had enough. “So you made a mistake,” she said, “it was an extraordinary natural phenomena and none of us were ready. The eclipse glasses hadn’t come in yet and how were we to know how stupid it was to stare?” Shirley did not add that she knew enough not to but had enough sense not to mention it.
Cancel culture was real. Humiliated, she stayed in her burrow as much as possible and spent her days watching reality television on her phone. Love is Blind was her favorite. She began grinding her teeth at night, although that proved to be a good thing because it kept her incisors from growing through the roof of her mouth.
Hibernation came as a relief, because for six blissful months she could tune out the rest of the cruel forest and simply dream about being pursued by marmots and not think about the state of the world. As time passed, the weasel with the orange fox tail on his head was inexplicably still around, and she couldn’t help but feel this was all his fault. Perhaps if she had had better guidance, she wouldn’t have stared at the stupid sun. (She also had nightmare about the Love is Blind reunion and woke up in the middle of February wondering why they hadn’t spent more time talking to Chelsea, but was eventually able to fall back asleep.)
Seven years had gone by, a very long time in the short span of a groundhog’s life. And now here she was again, unprepared, with the sky flipping the script and the weird half-moon shadows flickering over the grass. She recalled what Shirley used to say to her: “Those who cannot not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” which was a pretty compelling statement for a groundhog. Actually, it might have been a lyric from a Carlos Santana song, but that wasn’t the point.
What mattered is that she alone had the power to take back her life—only she could change the course of her own history.
She grabbed her tiny sunglasses and turned to face the dark.
Coming soon: A Total Eclipse of the Heart
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