Ornry Squirrels and Naughty Pups

I do have a bit of flash fiction for you today, but first, a peek at why you should not mess with squirrels:

Squirrel gives snake a beating in backyard brawl

GOLD CANYON, AZ (CBS5) - A Gold Canyon woman called 911 and told the dispatcher there was brawl on her back patio between a gopher snake and a ground squirrel.







And on with the flash fiction. If you haven't read Pat's post from Monday, you might want to do that first.

“Moooo-oo-oooo!”

“That was silly. It sounded too much like a cow!”

“What about this one? Mm-baah woo-hoo!”

Marissa cocked her head to the side as she listened to her darling steps sons in the other room. Wolf pups, she had learned, were not exactly like human children. For instance, you didn’t need to feed wolf pups sugar to make them bounce off the walls. And even the best behaved pup can and will say something horrifyingly rude without notice. She suspected that what the boys were doing right now would fall under the heading of horrifyingly rude. The question was, how to handle this.

She got up, walked into the living room and eyed her little darlings. They were, as usual, sitting cross-legged on the floor, planted directly in front of the TV, with Xbox controllers hermetically sealed to their hands. They only got two hours of TV time a day during the summer and every second of that time was spent played Minecraft, of all things. Marissa eyed the action on the TV screen to see if the unusual sound effects in any way matched what was going on in the game and was not surprised to see that they did not. Yep, definitely going to be something horrifyingly rude.

“Guys,” she said with the most level tone she could manage. Two pair of vibrant blues eyes locked on her. Two nearly identical faces, differing only in hair color, showed mild curiosity but no guilt. That didn’t mean much, Marissa knew. Wolf pups did not consider making rude embarrassing noises something to be guilty about.

“What do you think, Mom. Did that last one sound right?” Thor, the blonde haired twin, asked brightly. Loki, the dark-haired twin, looked sideways at his brother and shook his head. Thor was just like their dad, open, honest and basically clueless about pretty much everything. Loki, on the other hand, was very sharp at reading other people’s body language and while he would feel no guilt over doing something that would embarrass his step-mom, he was savvy enough to know when she was going to get pissed and avoid doing it in her presence.

“What was that sound supposed to be, exactly?” Marissa asked cautiously, clued in by Loki’s behavior that she wasn’t going to like this.

“The sound of romantic bleeping.”

Marissa closed her eyes and mentally counted to ten.

“Romantic what?” she asked carefully, trying to keep her voice level.

“Bleeping,” Thor replied.

“I don’t think Dad said bleeping,” Loki added in. “He made this sound like a sheep with a belly ache.”

“It didn’t sound very romantic, though,” Thor said. “So we were trying to figure out how to make it sound better. So did it sound like romantic bleeping?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said after a moment. “Why, exactly, did you… How did you…”

“We overheard Dad talking to Uncle Nick,” Loki said.

“In that case, maybe you should ask your dad and Uncle Nick if it sounds right,” Marissa said, shaking her head.

**********

Ring!

Marissa got up and answered the phone, looking around to make sure her two living wiretaps weren’t around. After this morning’s conversation, she was hyper aware of their tendency to verbally regurgitate everything they overheard and with the ears of wolves, they could accidentally overhear a lot.

“Hello?” she said. The sound coming over the phone sounded suspiciously like muffled giggling. “Hello? Anyone there?” she asked again.

“Oh, gawd! You are never going to believe this!”

“Ziva? What’s up,” Marissa replied.

“Those two hellions of yours!”

Oh no, Marissa thought, her heart sinking into her stomach.

“They showed up here at the paper about ten minutes ago and asked to see their dad. Said they needed to ask him something,” Ziva said and then started giggling again.

“Oh, no,” Marissa said out loud. “The romantic bleeping.”

Ziva started snorting with suppressed laughter and Marissa had to wait for her to catch her breath.

“Oh gawd! Did you know, by chance, that Nick accidentally walked in on Vern and Millie the other day while they were…”

“Making romantic bleeping noises?” Marissa finished dryly. “No, I didn’t. I would not have told the boys to go ask their Dad and Uncle Nick if the noises were right if I had. They overheard Mooney and Nick talking about it on the phone this morning.”

“Well, now my honey has yours trapped at the top of the flag pole.”

“Wait, what?”

“Yep. You know Nick. No one gets away with making fun of an alpha. Mooney started laughing as soon as the boys started their bleeping. The next thing I knew, Mooney was running like hell, giggling like a little girl, with Nick hot on his heels and the twins bringing up the rear…”

Wolf pups, Marissa though. Be they eight-years-old or thirty-eight…