The pigeon awoke, thinking that the roof upon which it perched had begun to collapse. It heard the sound of stone grinding on stone and the unpleasant shudder of disturbed masonry. It was an old bird, knew the sound meant that it wouldn’t be getting as much sleep as it needed these days, and prepared to take off. Before it could leap into the air, the noise settled down and it heard a voice that sounded like water gurgling in a fountain.

“No, no, not quite right, I look stupid here.”

The pigeon, normally not the bravest of creatures, crept around the chimney to get a better look.

A squat, ugly shape sat silhouetted in the moonlight. The shape kept a pair of wings folded against its body.

Coo? asked the pigeon.

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Quincy threw the last bag of groceries into his car. A strong wind blew across the parking lot so he returned the cart to a corral. As Quincy approached his car, he saw a young man leaning against it. He wore a black and yellow hat. A cigarette hung from his mouth and he was fumbling with a woman’s compact mirror. The young man stood upright when Quincy was close, and Quincy noticed that the young man was missing his right foot and leaned on a wooden cane carved into a snake.

“Can I trouble you for a second?”

“Okay,” Quincy said, eyeing the young man.

“My name’s pretty long and hard to pronounce, my friends call me Cat. My car broke down a little ways up the road and my cell phone is broke and I left my wallet at home and I just cleaned the change out of my car so could I have some money to make a phone call please?” Cat smiled a predatory smile.

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“Stop this obscenity!” shouted Brenda Moss. She stomped back and forth on the Loganberg’s lawn. Her marching had already worn away the snow to reveal weary strands of grass below. “End this disgusting display! For the children!”

The Loganberg family stood on the porch with hot chocolate in hand, bundled against the cold, watching Brenda and a half-dozen of her supporters tromp on their lawn in front of the snowwoman that their teenaged son Jimmy had put up. It was anatomically, if not statistically, correct.

“Cover it up!” Brenda yelled.

A brown car drove up and a man with the mannerisms of a squirrel emerged and darted towards Brenda. She lowered her sign, which read “YOUR SHAME IS YOUR SIN AND BOTH SHOULD BE HIDDEN” and listened to the man. She took a piece of paper from him, holding it like a sacred text.

“I’m suing you!” Brenda announced, whirling from her conversatoin and now waving the sacred text as a battle flag. “Consider yourself sued!”

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To make up for the pun that I made at the end of the Maple Syrup entry in the Guide to Moral Living in Examples, I thought I should attempt to redeem myself by linking to a fascinating visual guide on tapping a maple tree to harvest sap: http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Buds_and_Bark/tapping_sugar_maple_index.html

The whole process is alternately ghoulish and delicious, like hot dogs.  Let’s drink the juice that leaks out of this wound and put it on some flapjacks!  But hey, those damn maple trees that I climbed as a kid scraped the hell out of my hands and knees, and who can prove that they don’t thirst for our blood as well?

Scientists, I hear you say?  Pssh, I heard science isn’t even real.

Hyacinth drilled into the maple tree and tapped a spile into the fresh hole. She hung a bucket from the spile, covered up the bucket so that rain wouldn’t dilute the sap. While Hyacinth gathered her things, the maple reached down with a limb, creaking like old floorboards as it went, pulled spile out, and jammed it into Hyacinth’s back.

“Oww,” Hyacinth said, standing bolt upright. The spile didn’t break the skin, since trees have very little upper body strength, but it still hurt. The bucket banging into her back didn’t feel very pleasant, either.

“That hurts, you stupid tree,” Hyacinth said, feeling where it had hit.

The maple stuck a branch into the sap hole.

“You think that’ll work?”

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Oorthoox burst into the room and his eyestalks fell on the table. His colleague, Mrothor, was sweeping holocards off of the table. Mrothor leaned over the remainder that he gave up on, rested one of his faces on a pseudopod, and gurgled a greeting.

“How was the mission?” Mrothor asked.

“You gel-minded shibberk, were you watching the surveilance camera footage or playing One Head, Two Hundred Stomaches?” Oorthoox asked. “Honestly, sometimes I feel like I’m the only one of us who wants to devour all humans!”

“I want to devour all humans!” Mrothor said, crossing seven tentacles and three arms. A lip on his knee trembled and three of the eyes on a kidney began to tear up.

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