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.
theblindwoodchuck.com 