Dear Ferret Folks-
 
More than anything else on God's green earth, Hurricane Lily the Weasel
loves rubber.  Rubber bands.  Rubber backed bath mats.  Pencil erasers,
the fresh, creamy pink ones.  The little rubber nubbins that are the keys
on the T.V.  remote.  Ah, the smell of it!  Bouncy rubber!  So fine to
BITE!
 
Tonight I brought home a new acquisition.  It is a pair of flip-flops
from a chain of local stores called the Ocean State Job Lot.  It's a
place where they sell things that just couldn't be sold in normal stores
because they were too big, too cheaply made, or way too tacky for regular
retail.  I love shopping there.  I always find loads of things that I
don't have any conceivable need for.  Then I buy them.
 
The flip-flops in question cost me a whopping $1.29 plus tax.  They are
bright blue, and each has a little bunch of bright yellow bananas tacked
to the strap that goes across your instep.  The bananas are marvelous,
they splay out at all angles in a little Carmen Miranda fruity poof.  The
blue rubber is so new, so fresh, that it still has a light coating of
that ashy dust that only the newest rubber has.  They smell like giant
pink erasers, the kind you have for the beginning of each new school year
when you're little.  (Kids write their names on them in pen, which to me
always seemed to defeat the purpose altogether.  But I digress...)
 
When Lily was out roaming loose tonight she smelled them.  I argue the
proposition that a third of a ferret's brain is devoted to the sense of
smell.  Not my Lily.  It's more like half, and her brain has special
receptors for rubber shoe insoles.  These weren't true insoles, her holy
of holies, but they were miiiighty gooood, indeed!
 
I saw Lily, a gray blur, heading as quickly as her four tiny feet could
carry her, making a beeline for the spot on the floor where I had left
the flip-flops.  DISASTER!  If she got one, it would be dragged
underneath the spare ugly yellow sofa in the guest room (the nearest
sofa), and I would NEVER see it again!  Not in one piece, anyway.
 
I dove for them.  It was a kind of slow motion moment, Lily scrambling,
me making a sideways full-body leap through the air, a sort of horizontal
Michael Jordan move.  I almost got there first, she did manage to get her
paws on one of them.  I snatched it away from her with no apology, and
put them both atop a high table with no hesitation whatsoever.  HAH!
Score one for the hoomin.
 
Later that night, after the ferrets had been returned to their room I
took another look at them.  And found the evidence of her terrible,
terrible desire for my flip-flops.
 
Buried in the foamy sole of my left flop was half a splintered weasel
claw, a shiny beige crescent.  It had evidently been in the process of
peeling away from the healthy part of the claw, and got left behind as
the mute evidence of her need.  Her unspeakable need for rubber.
 
I imagine her in the days to come, dreaming fitfully of the forbidden
flip-flops, running in her sleep.  Running and juuust barely touching the
rubbery treasures, only to have them cruelly torn from her grasp.  Oh,
the heartache!
 
Alexandra in Massachusetts
[Posted in FML issue 4239]