Tag: blind woodchuck

Present: Tense

The anxiety was unbearable, like when hundreds of bees had burrowed into her fur and were all screaming at her at once because she ate their queen. (She didn’t mean to eat their ruler; it was just that all bees looked alike.) Every moment felt like hours, and the cacophony of who said what felt like it was at full volume. The rabbits in the meadow kept chanting, “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” like it was a hilarious joke, not realizing that they could be next in the food chain. It felt like everyone had lost their damn minds.

Her cousin Shirley dropped by unexpectedly to recruit her to be a poll watcher. The woodchuck assumed that meant the polecats were going to be putting on another show, but watching those skinny little freaks dance made her feel bad about her thighs and she had enough things to worry about.

When was this madness going to be over? The animals in the forest were constantly going on about who they thought should run the woods, and every species seem to have a different idea of who was the scariest. Anxious chatter filled the skies from the bluebirds and the redbirds seemed to be completely divorced from reality, and now the muskrat was offering to pay people to vote for the weasel. The woodchuck felt that was extremely unfair, because no one on her side of the meadow was doing anything like that and she could use some extra cash. She didn’t really know what she would do with money, but she did love to win things. Also, how was that not illegal? She hoped the meerkat named Garland was looking into this.

She needed to distract herself, because if she saw one more clip of that weasel dancing to YMCA, she was going to gnaw off the paw holding her phone. 

She tried watching Netflix, but the thing kept buffering and freezing. Reception in her burrow was never great, and it could always be counted on to go out just when you finally managed to lose yourself in the latest episode of Love is Blind, where the people were all terrible and no one talked about Arnold Palmer’s dick. She lay on her back in the dark, watching that little circle go endlessly around and around but never quite completing itself, not unlike this election cycle. She tried not to think about the reports that the polls were tightening, because she knew that had nothing to do with the stripping ferrets, or the fact that Pennsylvania —home of Punxsutawney, where she had faithfully predicted the weather for all those Groundhog Days!—might let her down. 

Her head was going to explode if she kept thinking about this. How was she going to get through the next fourteen days? What she needed was a sure-fire distraction, a completely reliable streaming service that worked in a dark burrow and would provide enough mind numbing content to refocus her brain and force her amygdala to process only big-lipped housewives, badly-behaved yacht crews, and whatever Alan Cummings was wearing.

The woodchuck sat up, suddenly clearheaded. This was a great idea! Finally, a project that would focus her mind and keep her from endless checking her phone for updates on whether the former leader Bushy the Squirrel had endorsed someone. The woodchuck started sketching a logo for this new app and realized she should immediately apply for a patent before someone else could grab her concept. She would call it — TunnelVision!

Unfortunately, when the woodchuck applied for the trademark, she discovered that someone else had already patented the idea. It was called Bravo TV. 

It was going to be a long two weeks.

Fourteen days to go. If anxiety and nerves could power vehicles, we would never again need to drill, baby, drill.

Part Three: Every Now and Then I Fall Apart (alternate title: Eat, Prey. Love)

Panic had broken out around her. All the forest animals were aware of the near miss the woodchuck had during the last eclipse and were terrified of not being able to watch for predators. Most had never even realized there were things happening in the skies above them—the only time they looked up was for hawks. Now everyone was suddenly Chicken Little when it came to the sky.

“The birds knew and they didn’t warn us!” screamed the field mice. “It’s a conspiracy!”

“The crickets are in on it, too!” wailed a hedgehog. “How did they know to start chirping? Did they have access to an app that’s only on Android?”

A groundhog, manically running in a circle with his eyes closed, tripped over a root and tore his ACL. He lay on the ground moaning, clutching his wounded limb and making such a racket that it caught the attention of a turkey vulture flying by. This was exactly the kind of eclipse content the bird was hoping for.

The woodchuck was stunned to see the entire meadow and forest had erupted into chaos. Scientists had predicted some animal behaviors might be odd during the eclipse, but not this level of weird. She was horrified to see one of her cousins lying prostrate on the grass, his naked belly exposed to the sky as he screamed incoherently about the end being near. The buzzard certainly seemed to agree with him.

It occurred to the woodchuck that some of the animals might be blaming her for this, which was, of course, ridiculous. All she had done was pretend to be blind for several years to get people to pamper her and bring treats; she never said anything about writhing around on the ground in plain sight of a very large bird with talons and a beak.

Oh. Well, perhaps they had a point.

The woodchuck ducked back into her burrow, uncertain of what to do about the carnage that was about to erupt. Shirley was fully awake now and could hear the screaming above ground. “Do something!” she shouted. “You’re the only one they will listen to!”

The woodchuck did not believe this was necessarily true, but her only other option was going deeper into the burrow and hiding in a tunnel. She glanced wildly around the cozy dark room, trying to think of what to do, when her eyes fell upon a metallic cold food shopping bag she had saved from her last trip to Costco. 

“Shirley!” she screamed. “Help me tear this into strips!” The two woodchucks ripped the silver fabric into long pieces as fast as possible, and she scrambled up the tunnel gripping as many as her tiny arms could hold. 

She paused at top of the hole. Outside there was terror and screaming and possible disembowelment; fellow groundhogs who hated her and felt she was responsible for the carnage that was about to happen. It would be so much easier to duck back inside and hide.

She flashed back on the last eclipse and the power she had felt course through her body just before her retinas started smoking. Maybe there was just a little bit of Captain Marvel still in her.

She dashed out of the hole and threw herself on top of her writhing cousin, flipping him several times until he fell into a nearby burrow. The turkey vulture was in a dive straight for the entrails but had to pull up before it hit the ground, zooming back into the air before readying another approach. This time it was going for her.

“Tie these around your eyes!” she screamed at the other animals, tossing the foil strips in the air. “You won’t go blind!” She threw the last ones at the other woodchucks just as the vulture snatched her by the nape of her neck and lifted her in the air. Shirley seized her foot and went airborne herself. One by one, all the now blindfolded rodents grabbed onto to each other and formed a furry chain that tethered them to ground; it stretched into the sky at least fifteen woodchucks high. 

The turkey vulture gave up, as the groundhogs were all pretty chunky and probably kind of grisly. The chain plummeted to the ground, with the woodchuck hitting last with a wince-inducing smash.

She awoke to a cold compress of soothing leaves on her forehead and a crowd of doting animals trying to anticipate her every need, bringing her insects and delicious berries. It was just like the last eclipse, only this time she could see their grateful faces beaming at her. She was their hero, but now she deserved it. She would be as humble as long she possibly could, or at least until they stopped waiting on her.

She picked up a fresh cicada someone offered her and bit into it, the crunchy filling delighting her senses. There were two or three on the bark platter, and she popped them into her mouth as well. Were they early this year? It seemed too soon for cicadas.

The woodchuck sighed and relaxed. Spring was here, and it was calm, and quiet. She hoped there wouldn’t be any more extraordinary natural phenomena to worry about this year.

Piece on Earth, Part (Pizzeria) Due*

The woodchuck roamed restlessly about her burrow, picking up and putting down a tiny Statue of Liberty, her souvenir of that remarkable whirlwind trip to New York. She had assumed she would go back into hibernation when she returned, but her mind kept replaying that weekend and dreams of her evening with the infamous Pizza Rat kept jolting her awake, sweaty and panting. Then she had to get up to pee and could not get back to sleep.

It didn’t help that her most hated holiday was approaching. She had once been the most famous groundhog in the world, her weather predictions anxiously awaited by millions as a guide as to how much longer they would need to wear mittens. Local news shows had loved her; she’d been interviewed by Anderson Cooper. 

But the town of Punxsutawney had grown tired of her ever-increasing green room demands and she had been unceremoniously dumped as the rodent meteorologist. The green M&M things had been a joke! Now her cousin Kevin was cosplaying as her and no one seemed to notice or care. Someone told her he had been doing shots with Anderson and Andy Cohen on NYE. She had blown the best gig of her life and now she was alone and sad and probably had six more weeks of winter ahead (she would check on February 2nd, but there was always six more weeks of winter ahead).

Scrolling through her phone, she stopped cold at a headline on the New York Times site. She’d been vaguely aware of a lot of buzz about a rodent silhouette captured in concrete, but she gasped when she saw the newspaper of record writing breathless prose about it. Could this be her Pizza Rat? She exhaled as she realized this had happened in Chicago, not New York, but then a whole fantasy bloomed in her mind: what if he had come to visit her and a steamroller had flattened him? She’d seen enough cartoons to know that happened all the time. Her meadow was not that far from Chicago, and he might have thought it was close to her burrow. New Yorkers seemed to think any place outside their city was all kind of mushed together with no interesting architecture.

The woodchuck felt an overwhelming need to see the rathole for herself; she was convinced that it was him, and now she must either be proved wrong or mourn the greatest love of her life. 

The trip across the frozen prairie was fast; she serpentined from burrow to burrow, keeping a practiced eye out for hawks. Once she reached the city, she was surprised at the number of available ratholes there were to duck into for cover. The woodchuck wouldn’t normally have thought to share this underground subway system with them, but she felt they were kindred spirits now, sharing the pain of the Unknown Squashed Rat and possibly the mingling of inter species DNA.

There was a crowd gathered on the sidewalk where she knew the imprint to be, and she hid under a parked car. Flowers were placed in the snow around it and people holding candles made keening noises and rocked back and forth. What the hell was going on? Why would humans be mourning this rat? She had passed hundreds of yellow signs in alleys on the way there that shouted Target: Rats! with a large red canceled sign over a picture of a rodent. She would never understand human beings.

She strained to get a look at the impression lodged in the concrete. The angle was weird because of where she was hiding, and it was hard to tell how big it was. If all those people hadn’t been standing around it weeping, she could have laid down on top of it and that would have told her for sure. Even though Pizza Rat was a giant among rodents, she still outweighed him by several pounds.

Looking at the imprint gave her a terrible feeling. She couldn’t be completely certain, but the rush of grief she felt made her believe that this was her once in a lifetime love. She turned away, fighting back tears, too upset to gaze upon the shallow grave of her doomed future.

Suddenly the air was filled with shouts of horror, and she looked up to see a giant rat running across the street dragging a slice of pizza. It was him! He had come to find her! She had just enough time to register that the piece was from a Chicago deep dish pie instead of a foldable New York slice, when a huge SUV came barreling down the street, the driver talking excitedly on her phone and waving in the direction of the imprint. The car hit the famous rodent and he flew across the street, landing face down in the cement of a new sidewalk being poured. The woodchuck screamed and covered her eyes.

A moment later, she peeked around a tire, certain that she would see a new rat imprint; a paw reaching out to her, anguished expression on his snout as if he were Han Solo being encased in carbonite. But no! He was alive! He had surfed across the wet cement surface on the pizza and landed on the grass. The only thing in the new sidewalk was an imprint of ‘za.

The crowd parted in respect or fear and watched as the giant rodent dragged the concrete coated pizza over to the original fallen rat. He placed it gently near the candles and other odd objects left in memoriam. Then he limped over to the parked car where his lover of another species hid, grabbing a piece of cheese someone had left on the sidewalk. He paused for a moment and then angrily shook his tiny paw at the crowd who had mocked the grave of this brother rat by taking selfies and getting married in front of it. They ran screaming in all directions.

The woodchuck waited for him, her blushing cheeks as red as the berries that would bloom on the soon to leaf out mulberry trees, welcoming spring with its warm breezes and long sunny days filled with bees and butterflies and love.

She was gonna get laid tonight.

*For our non-Chicago rat lovers, Pizzeria Uno boasts it invented deep dish pizza in 1943; and Pizzeria Due was opened to handle the overflow from Uno.

The woodchuck does not have a preference, as she eats mostly grass and bugs.

Piece on Earth, Good Will Toward . . .

At the time, going to the wedding seemed like a good idea—the woodchuck had needed some cheering up. She should have been deep into hibernation by now, but lately the state of the forest had made her anxious and depressed and she found herself wide awake and staring into the darkness of mid-December.

When the huge gold leaf had swirled into her burrow, she’d been impressed. The calligraphy scratched across the surface announced the marriage of her cousins Chip and Dale—to each other. She wasn’t sure how she felt about this. It was common knowledge that all her cousins mated with each other because really, how were you supposed to know if they were related to you or not? But actually getting married felt a little extreme. This must have been Chip’s idea—he had always pushed the envelope a bit more than the others.

An overheard conversation where a park ranger had mentioned traveling to her destination and a spur of the moment decision had led to her now being trapped in a leather satchel in an overhead bin. An announcement about landing jarred her awake, and she began chewing her way out of the carry-on, wondering why it smelled like cows and hoping it wasn’t anyone she knew.

Escaping the bag had been easy, but now she was locked in the compartment. There was a small space in the back, and she barely squeezed her furry butt through the hole. This extra hibernation weight was going to be a bitch to get off in the spring. The woodchuck poked her head out of the last bin and came face to snout with a human wearing a red scarf tied jauntily around her neck. A shriek filled the plane; and while the woodchuck wasn’t familiar with the finer points of flying, even she knew that this much noise from the flight attendant —now trying to stand on a drink cart—was going to send the rest of the seated passengers into a frenzy. She leaped to the floor and ran full speed up the aisle, the shouts of “Rat! Rat! It’s a rat!” taunting her. A panicked stew hit the emergency exit and a long yellow slide suddenly inflated in front of her. Not being a fan of playground equipment, she added her own screams to the chaos as she slid down backwards on her belly, her sharp toenails carving ragged slits in the rubber tube. By the time she reached the bottom, the limp yellow plastic was waving in the wind as she scampered away across the tarmac, gasping and shaking. She’d always been a nervous flyer.

The woodchuck found a nearby burrow and plunged into the darkness. She paused to compose herself, and as she took deep breaths, she thought about how the plane people had reacted when they assumed she was a rat. It was a ridiculous mistake—she didn’t even have a tail!—but their terror had been palpable. It had felt powerful to command such fear. At home when humans saw her on the golf course near her meadow, they usually started singing that dumb Kenny Loggins song. God, she hated Caddyshack.

The tunnel she was in lit up with headlights coming from both directions and a cacophony of enraged honking. This was not like the burrows she was used to. She serpentined between the metal beasts trying to avoid their wheels but the lights were so terrifying that she froze. She watched helplessly as Death by SUV approached, when suddenly hundreds of tiny paws reached up through a metal grate behind her and pushed it aside. They grabbed chunks of the fur on her haunches and pulled her through the hole into a freefall, where she landed in freezing water that had more than just a whiff of a sewage to it. As she tried to shake the sludge from her ears, she became aware of thousands of yellow eyes staring up at her. Terrified, she turned to flee, when all the watching rats began bowing and stroking her fur. 

“Oh, wondrous giant being, you have dropped from the dreaded Tunnel of Abe to lead our people in your ways of survival and lunch. We salute your girth and beg you to teach us how to become as large and powerful as you are.”

The woodchuck was annoyed at the crack about her weight—it was hibernation, damn it!—but if thousands were offering to worship her, who was she to argue?

“Um, teeming crowds of rodents who smell of typhoid and filth, you have earned my undying gratitude! I am only in your fair sewer for a short time, so you must choose a leader who knows the path of these tunnels and can lead your millions to less smelly living quarters.” 

The rats seemed moved by her modest suggestion that there were others more qualified to lead than she, so she added, “I seek a great tree, hundreds of feet in the sky and surrounded by a ring of ice, to attend the wedding of my cousin.”

Moving in unison as if they were a swirling swarm of garbage, the mischief of rats began to lead her through the subway system. They paused for a moment to consult Google maps, and then scampered up the steps at 47th Street. The woodchuck was once again amazed by the humans who ran screaming in all directions as the horde burst out of the subway opening. They came upon an open plaza and then abruptly stopped, their millions of amber eyes wide with awe. A magnificent tree soared into the clouds and was lit up and sparkling against the darkening sky. How her cousin had been able to pull this off was beyond her ken, but Chip sure knew how to throw a party.

“Here is your destination, O Great Woodchuck! And to prove our admiration for your style and substance, we got you a date!”

The swarm parted to make a path, and each rodent watched in admiration as a muscular rat dragging an enormous slice of pizza approached the woodchuck. He winked at her and nodded at the piece of pie; she blushed and then grabbed the other side. The two of them headed toward the ceremony, each of them wondering what the night might bring, as it began to softly snow. It was, after all, Christmas in New York.

Christine Broquet loves it when all the rats of New York and Chicago can come together to wish each other a happy holiday and a wonderful start to a new year!
God bless them, every one—or rather, six million.

Bot-ulism

The sun warmed her whiskers as the blind woodchuck relaxed in the meadow. Closing her eyes, Philomena sighed deeply and was grateful for spring, the season of renewal. She was wondering what her next big adventure would be now that she was retired, when she heard snickering above her face and sat up just in time to catch a couple of rabbits getting ready to poke her with a stick. They shrieked and leaped into the bushes, one of them giggling back at her, “Sorry! We thought you were dead!” They then proceeded to mate right in front of her. Honestly, sometimes it was like the porn channel out here.

No one recognized her anymore. She had been replaced as the furry weather savant on Groundhog’s Day and was dismayed when no one realized it was her cousin Kevin who was making up shit now about his shadow. Apparently, some people think all woodchucks look alike, which seemed a little bit racist to her. 

The woodchuck had been an exemplary representative of her species and felt slighted that no one remembered her. She crawled down into her burrow and thought about going back into hibernation when she heard the ping notification of a text. She was stunned to see that she had been selected to be in the National Directory of Famous Rodents! All she needed to do was send them $100 and a short biography, and she would be immortalized next to other famous rat-like creatures such as Micky Mouse and the Rodents of Unusual Size from The Princess Bride.

She had never heard of this book before, but it must be legitimate. Only a few words were spelled wrong on their website, so that was a good sign. This would be her legacy! She would keep this book on her coffee table and casually leave it open to the page that featured her.

There were two problems here: number one, she had no money. But she did have her cousin’s credit card, and she was certain that Shirley would be happy to pay for this tribute to the woodchuck’s weather predicting skills. 

The second problem was a little more complicated. She needed to write a bio for the book, and she couldn’t hold a pencil. This lack of opposable thumbs was so annoying sometimes. If only there were a way to get someone to do it for her . . .

Shirley had told her about this new technology that could do exactly that! Quickly, she opened up the link her cousin had sent her and punched in a few pertinent details that she wanted mentioned. To her astonishment, the screen immediately filled with glowing praise! 

“Meet Whiskers, the remarkable blind woodchuck who has become a legendary figure in the world of weather prediction. Despite losing his sight at a young age due to a tragic accident, Whiskers developed an extraordinary ability to forecast the weather, particularly on the momentous occasion of February 2nd each year. This incredible talent earned him the esteemed title of the “Weather Prognosticator Extraordinaire.”

It went on and on for six paragraphs, finally concluding with:

“Beyond his weather-predicting prowess, Whiskers has become an inspiration to many. His resilience in the face of adversity reminds us that even when faced with challenges, we can overcome them and thrive. He serves as a powerful symbol of the indomitable human spirit and the boundless wonders of nature.”

The woodchuck was stunned. She had no idea she had been such an inspiration to the world. Sure, the bot had misgendered her but that wasn’t a big deal—she could just change her pronouns. It also seemed to think that she was really blind, as opposed to just short-sighted, but she always wore her shades so who was she to correct people? The biggest problem was that her name now was apparently Whiskers, but she could put up with that since society seemed to have benefited from her in such a grand way. Then there was this:

“His intuitive understanding of weather patterns has even led to breakthroughs in scientific research, furthering our understanding of climate and the interconnectedness of the natural world.”

Apparently, she had solved climate change. Who knew?

The woodchuck felt revitalized, full of energy and ready to continue to spread her good deededness around the world. 

Her first act would be to get some new business cards printed up; they would read:

Whiskers,
Weather Prognosticator Extraordinaire!

The parts of this column in bold blue were generated by ChatGPT.

The woodchuck is grateful for the help in writing this post, but kind of terrified for the world as the robot overlords are clearly already here.

PunxsutawnEmeritus

The alarm blared in the middle of the night, and the blind woodchuck groaned and batted at the screen until it stopped shrieking. It was very dark and cozy in the burrow and she dreaded the thought of rousing herself enough to even roll over. Waking up early from hibernation was a bitch. 

She shivered a bit at the cloud of cold air that was hovering just above her DIY down quilt— a bunch of ducks had molted right outside the entrance to her burrow, and she had gathered all the loose feathers into a plastic bag that had been blowing around the meadow. The tote of downy discarded plumage had kept her toasty for the past few months and made getting up all that more difficult. The bag had a weird smiley face on the side that kind of creeped her out, but she tried to ignore it. Sometimes it felt like the eyes followed her.

She pushed the blanket aside to finally get up when a sudden realization struck her: this was February 2, her busiest workday of the year, but now she remembered that something had changed. She flopped back in the dirt and a huge smile, bigger than the one on the plastic bag quilt, crossed her face. She had set the alarm out of habit but now she could ignore it. She had retired!

No more waking up at dark o’clock to get to Punxsutawney in time for the big reveal, especially during an ice storm; no more being groped by clueless mayors with freezing cold hands as they tried to hoist her into the air or feeling guilty about the bag of Snickers she had consumed that made the hoisting more difficult. And best of all, since it was almost impossible to tell woodchucks apart, she would still get the snaps for doing a great job! 

When she had made the decision to leave the Official Groundhog Predictor position, she had been uncertain if it was the right choice. (It had actually not been her choice at all, since she had overslept, missed last year’s ceremony and been replaced by her cousin Kevin; but she was very good at bending the story to flatter herself and had come to believe her version was the truth. She could even visualize the fantasy retirement party the town had thrown her, although they had been too cheap to get her a gold watch; she got a stick instead.)

She snuggled deeper into her maniacally grinning sleeping bag and thought about all the things she would do now that the unencumbered time stretched endlessly before her. Maybe she would write a screenplay; a blockbuster film that would replace that other movie about groundhogs that had become synonymous with doing the same thing over and over again. She hated that people assumed her days were an endless loop of sleeping and eating and then sleeping, although she had to admit it had been an apt metaphor for watching the House repeatedly not voting for Kevin McCarthy for five days in a row.

Maybe she would write a biopic about what it was like to carry the responsibility of predicting spring on her shoulders all these years, how the world had counted on her to use her shadowy skills to let them know when it would be warm enough to wear a tube top. She was exactly the right rodent to write this film. Maybe they could even get Bill Murray to be in it again, although this time he would be the one with the mayor’s hand up his ass! She chortled to herself and thought she would get right on that, just as soon as she slept for another three months.

The Blind Woodchuck is correct; February is the best month to sleep through.

The Covid Craft Chronicles

(The woodchuck is in hibernation. Here is another random chapter of The Ripple Effect)

Last week, sneezing with what I assumed was my typical snotty grandson cold, I tested positive. This was a bit of a shock, as I had convinced myself that I was one of those people who were immune to the virus, having never gotten it before. It was a very mild case—many of the Felix colds have been far worse—but I was back in lockdown two weeks before Christmas. Why couldn’t I get sick when I had nothing to do?

Somewhere around the fifth night of isolation, I was visited by a spirit. It hovered above my bed and tossed handmade Christmas gift tags at my face until I sat up with a start. I screamed when I saw the apparition, and through a swirly cloud of vanilla bean and bergamot scents, realized that I was being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present: Martha Stewart.

“Martha, did you die so you could show me the error of my ways and guide me through past crafting errors?” I moaned. 

“I’m not dead, you idiot,” she snapped at me. “This is a dream and the Paxlovid has apparently made you hallucinate me. What do you want? I have to get over to Snoop’s to shape the buffet table napkins into the Twelve days of Christmas.”

“Why have you come to visit me? Will there be other spirits coming tonight as well?”

“The only spirit I want to see is an Aperol spritz, so let’s get this over with. Why are you using all this free time feeling sorry for yourself? You’re barely sick. You are wasting precious crafting minutes lying on the couch watching stupid Netflix Christmas movies. Get up and make a damn wreath out of pinecones.”

“But I don’t have the correct supplies!” I wailed. “And I can’t go to Michael’s because I’m in quarantine!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake—have you learned nothing from my magazine? Use what’s around the house. For example, look at all those take out containers piled up. Did you even turn on your stove this year? It looks like all you did was order Indian food.”

Prison had made Martha mean, but she had a point.

So in the spirit of being environmentally correct and getting Martha out of my bedroom, I gathered up my recyclables, a two year old bag of cranberries I found in the freezer and some fir branches I cut off my sister’s tree. And voila! I made luminaria out of garbage!

Don’t despair if you get sick this holiday season—there are plenty of ways to keep yourself entertained while you sit alone and everyone else is having a good time. And if you arrange rosemary and sage sticks into a pentagram and slide it under your bed, you may be able to keep a certain perfectionist bitch out of your dreams. 

It’s a good thing.

Electile dysfunction

The woodchuck looked at the queuing menagerie and contemplated screaming. How hard was it to dip your paw in ink and blot it next to a picture of who you thought should run the forest? Every single animal had a question or couldn’t remember what precinct their burrow was in or had a conspiracy theory they wanted to argue about; she had no idea voting was going to be so loud.

When her cousin Shirley had asked her if she wanted to be an election judge, she hadn’t been listening closely (which was always the best way to have a conversation with Shirley). Hearing the word “judge”, she had somehow taken that to mean that she was going to be on Judge Judy’s show; she relished the idea of testifying against all the animals she felt had wronged her. Unfortunately, now she was surrounded by all those same crazed creatures trying to “make their voices heard”. She was trying to stay impartial, but honestly, did anyone really want to hear what the possums had to say?

She looked around, bewildered, at the various pieces of technology as someone shouted at her that there was a mealy worm gumming up the ballot scanner and she needed to stick her paw in there to dislodge it. She couldn’t get the printer to work in her own burrow—why had anyone trusted her with this stuff?

The woodchuck hadn’t planned on voting in this election. She had decided to go into early hibernation and hoped to sleep through the whole thing. But the meadow and the forest had strange vibes about them lately, with the Foxes whispering stories about how the election was fixed before it even took place. They had brought in animals from other places to watch the polecats who were trying to keep order; there was a chameleon outside the voting area changing from camouflage to hot pink and then back again, which she guessed was supposed to be intimidating but just made her giggle. You could tell they weren’t from around here because the temperature had dropped last night and all the lizards sleeping in trees had frozen and fallen to the ground. They had thawed out by morning and gone back to the line to stick their tongues out at the waiting voters.

The big Muskrat who owned the river had stirred up all the birds and now the chattering about how they communicated with each other had become deafening, threatening to drown out what was actually at stake. The woodchuck wasn’t completely sure what Democracy was, but if it meant that she would never again have to listen to that semiaquatic water rodent try to ratsplain electric vehicles to her, she would be happy to vote for it.

Shirley had tried to explain to the woodchuck how important the issues were, but the roaring in her ears drowned out her cousin’s voice. Everything felt like it was on the verge of collapse. It was confusing and scary and she had to keep resisting the urge to go to sleep—she had never met an ostrich, but she envied their ability to stick their heads in the sand. Around the meadow, she was still known as the blind woodchuck, after her faux paw of staring directly into the sun during an eclipse; but also for her habit of willfully denying what was happening around her. She knew now, on this November 8th, that she had to reject that nickname and take off her sunglasses.

She gulped down a few stinkbugs for the caffeine hit, and handed out another ballot.

The Blind Woodchuck may have a brain the size of a pea, but even she understands how important it is to vote!

Vacation, all I ever needed

Shirley poked her head deep in the woodchuck’s burrow and shouted “Hey, cuz! Are you home?”

Home-home-home echoed off the dirt walls, and then silence filled the deep hole as dust floated through a rogue sunbeam that was trying to infiltrate the darkness. Shirley sighed and waddled off to find another woodchuck to gossip with, but she was worried; she hadn’t seen her cousin in weeks.

Far beneath the meadow, in a side tunnel that had been dug specifically for this purpose, the woodchuck chuckled to herself and ate another Snickers bar. A few months ago, she had planted a sign at the top of the burrow that said Gone Fishin!, a little hint she hoped the other groundhogs would understand meant that she wanted to be left alone. Instead, animals kept dropping by to put in orders for scallops or tilapia. 

We live in the dirt, miles from water thought the woodchuck. Did they really think she was going to bring them back scallops?

This time, she had told Shirley that she bought a jet ski and was planning a real vacation to try it out. It had been like posting a notice on Groundhog Twitter; the news had spread faster than monkey pox, or as she called it, the chimp bumps. The woodchuck hated chipmunks intensely and used every opportunity she could find to mock them. The little beasts had been by several times before asking where their tilapia was.

But the jet ski story seemed to have done the trick, and she had been left alone in her cozy burrow for some time now. The silence had been wonderful, the lack of information regularly stuffed into her head by Shirley about her cousins and other woodland animals freeing up space for her to think deep thoughts and to watch that Harry Styles spitting video many times over. She didn’t think he would really do that to Chris Pine, but she would have to watch it a few hundred more times to be sure. 

The problem with watching cutting edge crime scene videos while scrolling for other angles was that it was hard to ignore the rest of the internet. The place with all the sunflowers kept popping up, and she found herself worrying about the grain that was going to waste that could have fed so many. The wildfires everywhere seem to be spreading, and sometimes she thought she could smell smoke even deep in her burrow. That ice shelf that was about to collapse was keeping her up at nights, and she knew once it went, she really was going to be able to get tilapia for everyone because they would be swimming in her burrow.

The worse thing was that the Weasel was still everywhere, despite having been driven out of the forest. Why was everyone still talking about him instead focusing on more important things, like how few monarch butterflies there were this summer, and democracy?

The woodchuck was slowly coming to the realization that it wasn’t her cousins and friends she needed the vacation from—it was the constant stream of fear and bad news that churned through her mind both night and day. It didn’t seem fair that she should have to worry about this stuff; her brain was the size of a walnut and it’s not like she could fix any of it. Besides, she really wanted to discuss the Harry Styles Spitting Video with Shirley. She just had to figure out how to let everyone know that she was back from vacation without letting any of them ride on her jet ski.