(no subject)
It was a ten minute drive home, and within the first three she saw the initial face. She was listening to Queen at the time and she thought it might have been a hallucination brought on by the pain, but by the time the second face popped up Tom Petty had made his grand entrance on her radio, and she knew it must have been something else. But they were small faces and she decided to ignore them. She was busy concentrating on the road, and on the lyrics of the song.
Its good to be king
Of your own little world
It helps to make friends
Its good to meet girls
Realist she thought, and squinted against the light of a passing car. She wondered briefly where they were headed, and another face popped up on her left. She blinked two or three times. These faces were so small, and yet so undeniably faces. The brightness of her headlights whited out their features but she could make out beady little eyes, reflecting spots of shine with a peculiar redness. Such tiny little faces. She slowed down as her car navigated a patch of ice slick and dark on the road, and as she rounded the curve at twenty miles an hour, five hundred squirrels jumped at her windowshield.
She screamed, quite naturally. She would have defied anyone to do anything else. Yelping, perhaps, might also have been in the program, but she didn't get the chance, because they had swarmed over the doors and there was the sound of tiny paws scrabbling madly with the handle. In a trice they had gotten it open and she was staring into those tons of beady little eyes, which burned with a light that she wouldn't have hesitated to call lunacy.
They unbuckled her seatbelt, rolled her out of the car and, ignoring her shrieks and yelps and calls and wails, figured out the gas and steering and drove away.
There were thoughts in her mind that spoke of conspiracy. Well, certainly a conspiracy, that was a given. But some secret confederacy of mutant Volvo-driving squirrels? Living in the woods waiting for their middle-aged prey to drive by slowly enough? Or the genetically-enhanced misbegottens of some mad race car scientist, which begged the question of how they would have reacted had she been driving a stick shift? Sagging under the weight of her confused thoughts, she trudged the last mile home.
The next day she swallowed her pride and marched, already indignant in self-preservation, into the police station to report her car hijacked and stolen by woodland animals.
The cop gave her a look she hadn't seen since protesting repeatedly to her third grade teacher that her homework had been part of a plot against J. Edgar Hoover and had therefore gone into the Witness Protection Program when it betrayed its compatriots to the government.
"Don't look at me like that!"
There was a long pause. The cop sighed and said, "Ma'am..."
"Ma'am! Don't ma'am me! That's what it is, isn't it? Its because I'm a woman. If a man had marched in here and reported his car stolen by small furry animals you wouldn't have thought twice about it! That's sexist, buster, that's what that is!"
"Ma'am..."
"Look, I don't have time to sit here and argue. Are you going to file the report or not?"
She drew herself up and settled in for a prolonged staredown, but the cop was young and inexperienced, or at least, inexperienced as far as carjackings by squirrels go. He sighed again and pulled out the appropriate paperwork.
"Thank God I have insurance," she muttered.
"I'm just curious," said the cop thoughtfully, "but... is that covered in your policy?"
"Jeez, I hadn't thought of that!" she said, aghast, and called to find out. Five minutes and three holds later, she hung up and wrinkled her nose. "They laughed at me."
"Ma'am..."
"They laughed at me!"
"Ma'am, I can see you're getting all worked up over this. How's about you go home and lie down for a while, okay? Rest up. I'll see what I can do about your car."
She nodded, sniffling, and walked home once more. True to his word, the cop did what he could, and the next day a phone call informed her that the car had been found in the woods about three miles off the road, rammed into an oak tree which, incidentally, was completely bereft of acorns.
The next day she went to get Botox injections so she could say ridiculous things with a straight face and also lie effectively.