Schmoddy and Gruzzy, they were a couple of squirrels. Friends for years, those two. Inseparable ever since Gruzzy had taken a bullet for Schmoddy, by which I mean having sex with a lady squirrel Schmoddy had spotted in a pub and was quite sweet on at the time but turned out to be suffering from a most unpleasant venereal disease. Which one exactly I can’t at the moment recall. There was oozing of pus, I do know that much.
One bright sunny day in July there they were crossing the street, Schmoddy accompanying Gruzzy on his monthly trip to the chemist for his penicillin, when Schmoddy, who had been walking a few steps in front, turned at a peculiar noise he’d heard.
“Gruzzy,” Schmoddy asked his dear old friend, “was that you?”
To which Gruzzy, rather oversensitive about his flatulence, though after all the teasing and abuse he’d endured on its account, squirrels being the sophomorically cruel species that everyone knows they are, he could hardly be blamed, replied, “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Schmoddy had been about to tell Gruzzy that he knew very well what he was talking about, that Gruzzy had farted right there in the middle of the street before the ears and noses of all outdoors, when a truck rolled through and went right over Gruzzy, smashing him to death under its shiny black tires, for its driver was a man who knew the impression left by a well glossed set of tires.
After taking a moment to contemplate the crushed form of his oldest and dearest friend, though only a moment, mind you, the squirrel, in addition to being thoughtless of the feelings of others, not being a sentimental animal, Schmoddy reached out and plucked the penicillin prescription from Gruzzy’s twitching, twisted paw. Schmoddy went on to the chemist, knowing full well that all squirrels looked alike and getting Gruzzy’s medicine would be no more of a challenge than getting his own, and knowing also that the pills would be welcome on the underground drug market on which Schmoddy had come to depend for supplementary income, what with the judge recently increasing his alimony payment.
The chemist filled the prescription and Schmoddy returned home, passing along the way the putrifying carcass of his best mate, whose name he was already struggling to recall. He sold off the pencillin at a reasthe pencillto recall.on and Schmoddy returned home, passing the putrifying carcass of his best mate, whose name he honable margin of profit, and lived comfortably until some years later when he lost his grip running over a power line and fell in the path of a riding lawn mower, the blades of which reduced him to a tangle of sinewy viscera in a matter of seconds, killing Schmoddy and dooming his ex-wife and considerable posterity to lives of slow starvation on the streets of Squirrel Town, a most inhospitable place, as you might imagine given the nature of squirrels.
Trichomoniasis! That was it. “The trich” we used to call it.