Vignette 1: Pink Underneath
#6 of Human Mask Removal (Sketches)
For the rest of the winter season, I'll be uploading vignettes and poems alongside the full-length short stories. I want to try doing this a little more regularly.
Nature, in its sincerest self-presentation, surrounded Raccoon June and her campfire. It was all sheltered from the artificial man-made civilization by a horse-trodden trail. The clean, star-spangled sky was screend only by the fingers of trees, so June played it all John Denver's odes on an old guitar. As she sipped her steamed marshmallow lattè, she thought she might associate with nature even more closely. She tucked her claw under her chin and began to peel.
A wandering deer walked by and stopped at the sight of an emerging pink neck. A gopher, digging its way through the forest network, popped up to watch the commotion. His scalp met the campfire and together they conceived a scorching mohawk. He went straight back to where he came from. A yodeling owl serenaded his sleeping neighbors, but the familiar 'coon muzzle letting loose so foreign a beak--maybe even a bill--gave him pause. It resembled so closely a lethally ripe banana that a passing family of foxes gasped in horror and sheltered their litter's eyes. Their moral indignance was ill-aimed, for slithering along were a pair of homosnakuals, intoxicated from the vemon they exchanged through their savage passion. Even so, the stripping 'coon caught their interest.
"So deck! This babe is losing those extra layers."
"I'm gonna say Raccoon like Raqoon. That's so deck."
"Deck. Like what's that underneath?"
They illusionated that June and the campfire became one, they were so drunk.
"Like, dude, that chick's flaming! She's a Flaming-o flamer!" And that's exactly what she was.