David Sedaris: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

He turned to leave, and the rabbit, who was nothing if not quick, reached for his heavy stick. Then he hung the frog upon his gate and added NO CURSING to his NO TRESPASSING sign.

It wasn’t long before an otter came along and went for the crushed frog. Then a badger stopped by, attracted by the smell of the dead otter. As the bodies were heaped upon the gate, it began to tilt. The rabbit propped it up with a fallen branch and then turned his attention to the sign. NO DIRTY LOOKS, he wrote. NO QUESTIONING MY INTEGRITY. NO INSULTING REMARKS ABOUT MY EARS OR MY TEETH. He was just wondering how to spell “insolence” when a shadow fell, and he looked up to see a magnificent white unicorn. His silky mane curled about his neck in waves the color of buttercups. Equally brilliant was his horn, which looked to be made of gold. At his approach, the rabbit put down his pencil. “State your name and your business.”

“I’m a unicorn,” said the unicorn, “and I come to bring joy to all the forest creatures.”

“Not with that horn you don’t,” said the rabbit.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said, lose the weapon.”

“The horn is what makes me who I am!”

“Which is unwelcome,” said the rabbit. “Now do as I say or beat it.”

“But happiness follows wherever I go!” the unicorn protested. “I can make a rainbow just by flicking my tail.”

The rabbit reached for his stick.

“If you won’t let me through the gate, I’ll just jump over it,” said the unicorn. And because he was taller than the rabbit and much more powerful, he did just that. “Sorry,” he said as he headed into the forest, “but you didn’t leave me any choice.”

“We’ll see about that,” muttered the rabbit, and he spat onto the blood-soaked ground.

The unicorn spent the late afternoon making rainbows for all the woodland creatures. Then he caused the wildflowers to bloom and conjured up some berries for a hungry box turtle. As the sun set over the treetops, he settled upon a bed of fragrant moss and fell into a deep sleep.

The following morning, the songbirds woke him. The unicorn yawned and was just about to stand when he noticed the pile of golden shavings scattered across the moss. Then he felt his forehead and galloped to the gate piled high with rotting carcasses. “Who chewed off my horn?” he wailed.

The rabbit answered calmly that rules were rules. “If I let you trot around with a weapon on your head, I’d have to let everyone do it.”

“But it had magic powers!”

“I said, scram,” said the rabbit.

The unicorn, just a common everyday horse now, slunk off toward a field of tall grasses. The rabbit watched him go and then turned back to his sign. “Magic powers indeed,” he muttered. “I didn’t taste anything special.” Again he spat, only this time, a diamond came out and landed on the ground beside him. That’s what he was staring at when the wolves arrived.

It was hot that afternoon, so after the chicken and her sister had walked the yard a few times, they wandered into the henhouse for a little shade. Had it been crowded they probably wouldn’t have said much, but there was no one around, and so the two spoke intimately, the way they had when they were young. “I don’t know if it’s normal or what,” the sister said. “But sometimes… and this is just between the two of us, okay?”

The chicken nodded.

“Sometimes, when I’m with the rooster, I wonder what it would be like if he, you know, wasn’t a rooster.”

“You mean, like, if he was a duck or a goose?” The thought was ridiculous, and the chicken had to bite the inside of her beak to keep a straight face. “Or how about a turkey?” At this she lost her composure and whooped until her eyes teared. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. Go on.”

“Never mind,” her sister said. “It wasn’t important.”

“Oh, don’t be like that,” the chicken scolded. “Come on, now. So if he’s not a rooster, what is he?”

The sister took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Well, like, maybe if he was, for instance, more like me?”

“Brown?” the chicken said, and in the silence that followed she grasped what her sister had been aiming at. “You don’t mean…”

“It’s just a thought,” her sister said.

“Just a thought?”

“Something that’s passed through my mind a couple of times.”

“A couple of times?” This was what the chicken did when presented with shocking or unpleasant news. If informed, for example, of an outbreak of lice, she’d look at the speaker, saying, “An outbreak of lice?” as if the transformation from statement to question might somehow confuse the situation into reversing itself.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” her sister said.

“Shouldn’t have said anything?”

As they were talking, the farmer’s wife walked in. She was a plump woman but quick, and before the sisters had time to run, she grabbed them by the feet and hung them upside down, one in each hand. The chicken had never seen the world from this angle and wasn’t sure she liked it: an open doorway three feet off the ground. Trees hanging senselessly from a brilliant green sky. Her vision grew hazy, and just as she thought she might pass out, the farmer’s wife released her grip and the chicken fell on her head into the straw. Her sister, meanwhile, with one clean jerk, had her neck wrung.

“At least it happened quickly,” the gray pullet said, and the chicken agreed that it could have been worse.

“You’re just lucky the woman chose your sister instead of you,” the pullet continued, and though the chicken concurred, she knew that luck had nothing to do with it. Her sister had been killed because she deserved it-there was no other explanation. Decent creatures lived until they couldn’t stand it anymore, and then they were ushered to a kind of paradise where they were adorned with jewels and tended to by servants hoisting platters full of grain.

Devious and perverse creatures, on the other hand, suffered untimely deaths and were sent to a reverse paradise where they were the servants, and instead of jewels they were adorned with flaming-hot coals. Her sister was there now, and all because she had entertained unnatural thoughts, which were as bad as unnatural actions in certain circumstances. “I’m sorry it had to happen,” the chicken told the pullet, “but at least I learned something from it.”

At dawn the following morning, the rooster made his rounds. He was a disagreeable character, someone to be endured rather than looked forward to, but to not accept him or to do so with less than a full heart was, the chicken now understood, a first-class ticket to hell. He approached her nest and had just taken his position when she turned to address him. “I want you to know,” she whispered, “that I really love you.”

“Tough titty,” he said.

“No,” she went on, “I mean it. Some of the others, they might put up with you or whatnot, but I honestly treasure our time together, and I wouldn’t trade you for anyone.”

He told her that unless she was willing to talk dirty she should just keep her trap shut, and when she continued he jerked his head forward and pecked out her left eye.

“It was an accident,” she told the others. “He gets excited and, well, you know, these things happen.” Inwardly, though, she was devastated. Had the rooster chipped her beak, all right, no hard feelings, but her eyes were her best feature, and now she had only one of them. The other was just a dank hole, the rim crusted with blood and mucus.