Last night I went out for a jog. I took University Blvd. across I-15, went up past the radio towers, and eventually found myself in the park near Wal-Mart. It was nice and quiet, and quite relaxing. The sprinklers were softly spraying a fine mist, which, due to a light breeze, was impossible to avoid. But it felt good. I was well into the park when I realized that I was not alone. I was sharing the park with a kitty-weasel. She was mostly black, with two parallel white stripes running from her nose to the tip of her tail. She was a skunk.
I doubt that seeing a skunk in a park is uncommon. But strangely enough, I could have sworn that this skunk had come here to play. She was frolicking about as if she were a regular human child. She would hop off of a bridge here and run around a pole there, over and under – it would not have been surprising to see her sliding down the slide. The scary part came when she decided to play with me. She would look at me through some shrubbery, scurry to another spot to look again, then another, and another, but she never got any farther away. Although it was a completely prejudice decision, I decided that I did not like her. I began to think. How accurately can I throw a rock? Fairly accurately. How accurately can she spray? Mist - like the sprinklers in the breeze. How many rocks are available? None. How much spray does she have to spray? I don’t want to know. I decided that hide and seek was no fun. I was playing a high stakes game of tag, and she was it.
As I fled, my mind revealed images of multitudes of black and white kitty-weasels frolicking around the park. If there was one, why could there not be more? I could see the human children coming to play, and a war breaking out; smelly children crying, skunks being kicked over the fence – who knows what could happen. It could very well be turned into one of those sixties-style horror films: Attack of the Killer Kitty-Weasels! Maybe that is the real reason that the park closes after dark.
2 Comments:
That was a cool entry. I loved it. And for some reason I really related to the telling of it, almost more than the actual story. The fact that you presented the little skunk with human traits did a really cool and strange thing for me. By personifying her, I sympathized with her, when before logic would had me scorn the thing. Great job.
This story reminds me of Bambi. It's almost as if there should have been flowers so the skunk could have danced the night away. I would have loved to watch this skunk just as long as it didn't come close. That is a very awkward situation and I think you handled it very well!
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