Please enjoy the next post in Murdertrout, Chapter 8 of Attack of the Lesbian Activist Squirrels. Comments are welcome. Tips via the PayPal link to the right are also welcome but always optional.
Merry Christmas and happy reading.
The Curmudgeon was consulting his notebook and mumbling to himself. “All hook and no brain… there’s a pattern here somewhere.”
The song ran out without another suggestion from The Curmudgeon, who was deep in thought. Hoping for more M&Ms, Cindy let the MP3 player skip to the next song; Dancing Queen.
“You can dance
You can jive
Having the time of your life”
“Abba?” The Curmudgeon mused.
“Ooh see that girl
Watch that scene
Digging the dancing queen…”
It took a few seconds for the song to sink in. Then. All. Hell. Broke. Loose.
The fish turned the water from a froth to a roiling foaming mess. Impressed, The Curmudgeon leaned back and grinned. Meanwhile, Brett ran past him in a panic.
Brett was shouting something over the disco singers. Cindy saw Brett’s frantic hand-waving and brought her camera up with a quick draw that would fit in at the OK Corral.
The trans-species raptor was back! It was zipping around the stream like a hummingbird on crack. Fish had started jumping out of the water; trying to bite what should be their feathery nemesis. Brett was waving his arms like he’d found the Holy Grail. Cindy was running the camera like her life depended on it. The Curmudgeon just grinned. “Abba,” he said to himself, “no shit.”
It was at this moment that the Curmudgeon got an idea. An awful idea. The Curmudgeon got a wonderful, awful idea!
By now the Hawk had lined up for an attack run that would surely land him a huge tasty exceptionally stupid trout. Meanwhile, the fish were going nuts, as if they’d love to eat a Hawk. Brett was shouting at everything and being ignored by all.
Amid the chaos, The Curmudgeon had formed a theory. Clearly there are different varieties of stupid. These fish were most certainly infected with University based stupid. Students couldn’t afford to even sniff the air in the vicinity of a Tesla; thus the Tesla line hadn’t gained much traction. What about a prompt specifically tuned to the University variety of stupid?
Without hesitating, The Curmudgeon bellowed the ultimate mating call of the University Marxist. “STUDENT LOAN FORGIVENESS!”
That did it!
The fish went from random jumps to a single unified explosion. They erupted from the stream in a giant wall of shimmering insanity. This took the Hawk completely by surprise. It plowed into the mass of fin and scale with the grace of a bowling ball.
The Hawk had met it’s match in sheer fish density. It crashed into the water where it was immediately beset on all sides by trout doing their best impression of Rocky Mountain Piranha. Feathers began to fly and the hawk let out a terrified squawk.
Brett freaked out. He’d isolated the rarest, most special, most politically correct and therefore marketable wild creature on earth. To have such a thing snuffed out just when he might cash in on it was unthinkable. He dove into the water hoping to save the bird.
Cindy gasped but held the camera rock steady.
The Curmudgeon cocked an eyebrow. “Bad move.” He muttered.
A few seconds passed. The fish hadn’t let up. Abba was still playing. The Hawk was still submerged and Brett still hadn’t surfaced either.
“Do trout have teeth?” Cindy worried. She was still recording the patch of stream where man and bird had gone down. She was genuinely concerned for Brett but also (if she were honest with herself) pondering the market value of a video where a rare unique wild animal and a college student were simultaneously torn to shreds. It had to be significant!
“Small teeth.” The Curmudgeon winced. “Not likely to hurt a human… but”
“But?” Cindy prompted.
“Maybe a bunch together. It would be a bad way to go. Like getting pecked to death by ducks.”
Cindy was a college student trying to study the hard sciences within a woke campus. Intellectually she’d been pecked at my weak little ducks all her life. She began to feel genuine sorrow for Brett’s fate.
“Bad way to go…” She mumbled. A tear came to her eye. Poor Brett, killed in the dumbest way by the dumbest creatures.