FERRET FICTION FRENZY ends with the last story! You can read about how it started here.
Please welcome our 7th and final FERRET AUTHOR, Harrison Pierce. When not posthumously stalking Kurt Vonnegut or watching the Oklahoma City Thunder play basketball, Harrison can be found in the wine section of the grocery store or harassing the bar wench for a pint of an obscure Oregonian micro-brew. Also, don't be surprised if he spits out the mass market, corporate coffee you just poured him, he's a bit of a coffee-snob jerk.
Ferret Story NUMBER 7 by Harrison Pierce
An Ideal Idol
Shfft. Pfflnk. Shfft. Pfflnk. Shfft. Pfflnk.
Two and a half foot down, still hemorrhaging into the cloth Michael wrapped me in, my last few moments are played out by the slow jazz drum rhythm of the shovel casting dirt on a sole-less shoebox. It wasn’t my fault. Or maybe Darlene, the daughter, said it wasn’t her fault. Whatever the case I am lying here, bound by a cloud soft, albeit, dirty bath towel while still being just alive to taste the warm copper in my own blood, being lowered into a night grave with an earthen dirge calling me home.
And for what, you ask? A locket, you ask? A goddamn necklace? No. I tell you it was more than that. It was the miracle that made up everything of life. The way the dim bedside light entered Darlene’s eyes and radiated from the top of her pubescent filled sleeper shirt, you would have thought that she was the guardian of all that was good and decent in the world. She never removed it, unless to do what I can only say was to caress more glow out of it before she opened the fleur-de-lis laden oval. She cried every time. Every time I knew that it was because the images inside could only be the world presented in the poetry of a spring sparrow’s return home after the long winter’s droll presentation of life’s recession.
Everything else I have ever found to have the light of life gleaming from it now lay barren among the piles of useless pocket and sofa treasure beneath the dining room plate chest. No luster, no beauty to share with me anymore. Just four different sizes dinge, dirt and grimy metal. Every night I got to play witness to this display of selfish mockery to the world. Tonight, I decided it was my turn.
Making it to her wouldn’t be so hard tonight, as it wasn’t any other night. Chad, her brother and my keeper, wasn’t the brightest of fellows. He wasn’t very tall, and as far as I can tell, intelligence in their realm is directly proportionate to height. Being that his black bat and red bird bed burdened duvet was only waste high to him, it makes since that he would think a pin latch would suffice on my door. One would have thought that Michael, being the tallest of the three, would have better sense to teach Chad better care and preventative measurements.
Fifteen minutes after the lights go out, I hear the Chad’s higher register voice stop asking the ceiling for favors and spring myself out like those fellows from the cages on the rock that Michael loves watching. Down the hallway, past the grey glow of older men talking about socialism that holds Michael frozen, partially in the floor, partially in the chair and, from the smell, fully in the bottle sitting next him, I make it to the room that holds the golden and silver lily that will bring me the happiness I had thought came only from round pictures of dead men. I digress; maybe that’s why those who are tall enough to know how to get them throw them away so quickly.
I slip into the moonbeam of a cracked door. There she is. There it is. My whole life has been meaningless up until now. Up until I get to hold the warmth and loveliness that brings the tears to Darlene’s face, even now as she has finished caressing it and lies on her back, holding the eternal flame in one hand, allowing the chain to flow down the other. It’s now or never. I make my scamper to the end of the bed and jump up. It is all happening so fast that I can’t register much outside the sound of my heart pounding so fast that it may explode.
IT’S MINE!! I have one paw clasped white-knuckle tight around the small piece of sun born joy while the other four are flailing through the air, almost as if I were swimming my way down to the ground weightlessly, aimlessly.
“Hey!!” I hear her yell. “Cherokee, NO!!!”
“Cherokee?” Fuck all if I hadn’t forgotten about her unholy terror of a big ass dog, my sworn and mortal enemy. And was he ever the most worthy opponent. I had managed to elude him all these nights, for months, because of the lacking of grace that the canine species possesses. What he lacked in grace, he made up for in agility and a steel trap jaw that managed to lock down before the locket, my only love in the world, hit the floor to shine it’s lovely, saintly face on me in favor, one last time as the world around it disappeared with Darlene’s rousing calls for help.
Was it worth it? You bet your ass.
Shfft. Pfflnk. Shfft. Pfflnk. Shfft. Pfflnk.
Shfft.
P.S.: This is the last Ferret Story. If you want to indulge in more ferretness, here is Ksenia's Ferret Story that started it all (NUMBER 0?). And here you can find more amazing ferret stories written by different authors: Ferret Story NUMBER 1, Ferret Story NUMBER 2, Ferret Story NUMBER 3, and Ferret Story NUMBER 4, and Ferret Story NUMBER 5, and Ferret Story NUMBER 6.