Asterisk Weasels Out of a Real Post

Damn straight I am posting a story from my creative writing class tonight. I have a thesis to write, people! After all, I've already pulled one all-nighter this week, why on earth would I want to make it two? Fortunately this story is an old one but a good one! Here's hoping you have a fun read!

The yellow light of the old, dusty, mock-chandelier nicely counteracts the harsh blue glow of the monitor screen, allowing our computer room to have a warm, cozy feeling, despite the bitter cold temperatures that grace our basement. Wrapped in an old fleece blanket, I am hunched over the computer using one of those odd two-step computer chairs that yuppies buy because the catalogues tell them that these are the new “thing” in chair innovation. My parents bought it at an estate sale in the retirement community down across the street, and I’ve learned that in all actuality this chair will do absolutely nothing for your posture, but it will bruise your knees if you’re the sort who leans forward when you type.

I am seventeen, and I am writing an essay for English 112.

I came home from school late in the afternoon to discover that the refrigerator was, as they say, “on the fritz.” I’ve never actually been sure exactly what “on the fritz” means [was Fritz a person? who created that phrase? what happened to Fritz anyway?], but in this case it simply meant that to the annoyance of my father, the fridge was not currently functioning. We didn’t have time to deal with it right away, however, as Mom had left us a list of errands to run, and apparently they were rather pressing. Dad told my brother, Michael, and me to grab our coats, get in the car, and we’d worry about the fridge later. Neither of us complained, because running errands in the early evening with Dad usually meant he’d buy us dinner so he wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of feeding us when we got home. Meanwhile, Mom was working late for the second night in a row, which was actually a little weird, as she was so valuable at her company that usually she told them when she’d work, not the other way around.

When we returned home, there was a small, yet disconcerting pool of water on the kitchen floor. While I would surely have loved to help deal with the guaranteed-to-be-messy situation, I was a high school senior and I had a 700 word analysis due the next day. For the first time in my life, I was glad I had homework. My younger brother, assigned the task of removing (and identifying) everything from the fridge, was undeniably envious.

So, as I am sitting in the yellow light of the tiny half-room where we keep our family computer, listening the patient hum of the pitiful electric heater as it attempts to heat the place, my father, in his Redwing boots, keeps stomping down the stairs carrying refugee food to the spare fridge in the other side of the basement. It’s distracting, but I don’t say anything.

Eventually Dad runs out of room in the spare fridge. Mom has still not come home from work, and it has been dark out for a good three hours (although this means nothing, seeing how winter in the godless, frozen North means the sun sets at four o’clock). Desperate, Dad heads through our tiny computer area for the aptly named “utility room” of our basement, and proceeds to clear out the old fashioned, domestic-chest style freezer we keep next to the dryer for overflow Costco products. Out come stacks of toaster waffles (the fall back breakfast plan of every dually employed family), hotdog packages, and frozen ravioli, thereby emptying the first layer of the freezer. At this point, Dad seems to have forgotten the malfunctioning fridge upstairs and has embarked on an archeological dig through the ices of time. The storage freezer holds many secrets. Dad will uncover them all.

After removing several unidentified lumps of freezer burn in plastic bags, Dad reaches the true storage levels—the soup broth timeline. My mom has a habit of taking left over bones from every holiday main course and turning them into a broth for a soup she usually forgets to make (it’s not her fault—neither my brother nor I like soup very much). In spite of this, every year she makes a new broth, just in case she gets a chance to make soups. Instead, broth ends up in neatly labeled, little Tupperware containers, moved from the main freezer, to the spare, only to later be forgotten in the storage freezer. As I work on my essay, Dad reads the labels out loud to me.

“2001, 1998, 1997, oh wow, 1995.”

“Dad, why did we keep soup from 1995?”

My father doesn’t have an answer for this, so he just laughs, puts the Tupperware in the “it-should-be-okay-to-throw-this-out” pile, and continues digging.

The heater burns out for a while, and I shiver as the utility room lets in cold, drafty air from the rest of the basement. Suddenly…

“URG, gross!”

I look over, and see Dad standing there, behind the storage freezer on the unfinished cement floor of the utility room, holding up a plastic bag from a department store called Lamonts.

As far as I can remember, the Lamonts in Port Angeles closed in 1994.

“Dad?”

My father is laughing and holding the bag as far away from himself as he can.

“Megan, look! A bag of liquefied, frozen weasels!”

I am at a loss for words. Why?

On one hand, I desperately want to get up and walk across the computer area at the base of the stairwell and through the utility room to look in that bag, but on the other hand, I really, really don’t. I’m curious, but I’m not that curious.

“Dad, why do we have a bag of liquefied weasels in our freezer? And how does a weasel liquefy?”

I can explain this occurrence to some extent, see, as my parent’s are both wildlife biologists. I’ve grown up being used to one (or both) of them finding something dead and still in good condition and then bringing it home to take apart or look at under a microscope. We used to take birds that hit our window to the local nature museum, since they had a guy there who would stuff them for free. I always thought it was cool when one of my birds would end up in one of those neat glass display cases. But somehow this was different.

“I guess they were in the freezer so long they just lost the ability to hold a shape.” Dad says. “Gruesome, don’t you think? I wonder where they came from.”

I’m halfway between falling off my chair laughing and falling off my chair vomiting. Instead I shrug like this is nothing out of the ordinary and go back to writing my paper.

When Mom comes home, I very slowly explain to her the events of the evening, dragging out the details to end with “…and guess what we found, Mom?”

Mom, who had lamented about the old soup we had tossed, shrugs. I relish at saying “bag of liquefied weasels,” as it is such a satisfying phrase—wholly revolting and absolutely hysterical at the same time. I expect a cry of disgust and the blame game between my parents as to who brought those home, so I am not at all prepared for the response.

“My weasels!” squeals Mom. “I forgot about those!”

My brother and I swap the same look—a wide-eyed, incredulous stare, followed by a disbelieving shake of the head and a dramatic eye-roll. Other people’s mothers do not collect dead weasels. Ever.

“What did you do with them?” Mom asks.

Michael gives Mom another weird look and states simply that Dad threw them off the deck, Lamonts bag and all.