Six days on Nizgidge Ridge
Not survived on August 31, 2025.
A clutch of angry, hairy beavers were making all the trees fall down. No one was around so they didn’t make a sound at first. Becasue’s own hairy beaver was angry too. But I knew how to deal with that one without felling any trees.
On Monday, our to-and-fro-ing led us to a smurf village. On Tuesday, we thought we discovered some pixies—but it turned out to be only a clutch of fairies instead. On Wednesday, we went back to that smurf village and, oh!—There were so many luscious, gleaming, red-&-white mushrooms as far as the eye could see & the hand could pluck. On Thursday, we stopped eating those mushrooms. Monday returned & the smurf village went away. (The fairies also turned out to be only ferrets.)
Then the ferrets turned out to be stoats.
Becasue could sure use a nice ermine coat to go with all that goat-leather, I thought. But the stoats could hear my thoughts & scattered. So much for that. Off in the distance, a tree fell. I started thinking about beaver hats.
Tuesday (the real Tuesday) prodded us awake with the mellifluous sound of an early-dawn katydid raid. I wasn’t even sure what that was but I wrote it anyway. Take that, dummies.
Corn was what’s for breakfast: Sweet corn, cornbread, corned beef, corned corn, corn on the cob, and corn off the cob. Only my big little redheaded huzzey-muffet made corned beef with 100% real corn. After breakfast, we ate more corn. We had 15½ weeks of corn, so why not? After that, my cornfed cutie fed me more corn.
Then we got back to wandering to and fro. By this week, we’d fully resigned ourselves to being the last two humans in the Universe: I a six-foot-tall man–squirrel and my Becasue a 5½-foot-tall girl–chipmunk. And we knew there was no escape from this unending forest. Two weeks ago, someone had disappeared my Trabi, rolled the road up behind her, and turned Nizgidge Ridge into a wooded valley. Everything out here was trying to kill us (except the Moon, who was content to just pee on us from high above) but we had survived. So far.
We were a pair of goat-leather–clad wildmen but we had survived. So far.
My huzzey-muffet asked if there are sasquatch in these woods. I assured her there are none—but an errant yeti or two might descend on us and tear us limb from limb. Curiously, this did not comfort her. I admitted to her my fear that I was now a werewolf. This also didn’t help. Then I reminded her about the wendigos.
We camped under a tree shaped like Strom Thurmond. It sure was an old bugger: When it was but a seedling, my ancestors were still back in the old country perfecting their meatball recipe. Becasue stared wide-eyed at a hole in the tree—a foot wide and twice as tall—which appeared to descend into the depths of the Earth below the wizened trunk. I went to work straightening out my nose out again.
“Do… do you think there are more gnomes down there?”
“Nah,” I tried in my most soothing voice. “Probably just poisonous snakes. Or bloodsucking bats.”
Becasue told me to go sleep in a tree that night.
The forest was out of mushrooms. So we took to eating the jimsonweed. I spent 7.5½ hours staring up at the leaves of the trees. The aspen fluttered in the most elegant way—like a television tuned into a wondrously nonexistent channel—and the sumacs made the most lovely moiré pattern reminiscent of an old computer monitor. The maples shouted obscenities at me. And the pines stabbed me in the eyelids with their needles from afar. I stumbled around looking for Becasue to warn her to protect her precious corneas. But walking with my head submerged into my chest and my arms swapped with my legs proved awkward. I fell over and started drooling on myself. I found Becasue already immersed in the same sialorrheic pastime. We were a pair of Blemmyes now.
A thunderstorm rolled in; it started raining a catchy melody that smelled so sweet. I tried to hum along but my mouth had migrated too far south. My navel couldn’t even hum anymore. But my huzzey-muffet’s could.
I thought about that potato I sneezed out once. The rain—hot & spicy, sweet & sour now as it poured down in satin sheets—a hard, taxi-driving rain—washed all the scum off the streets. But there were no streets in the depths of this sinister forest suffocating & choking Nizgidge Ridge. We were both sinking into the mud. But there would be no suffocating on our part—I reached out and stole a pair of gills from an unsuspecting grunion. And a pair for my huzzey-muffet.
My girl and I were both frogs now. That swamp last Friday had transformed us into slimy amphibians. My redheaded froggy-muffet ribbitted contentedly as the rain fell, the mud rose, and we sank into it. The rains poured down until all the water in the world washed through that forest and washed the scum away.
There in that muddy field of delicious thornapples, Wednesday ended with us schtupping like rabbits.
“Where, oh where are my underwear?” The rain had ceased. The mud had not. I stumbled around on hands and knees, rather pig-like, looking for my errant underwear. “Where, oh where… oh, the gnomes stole them.” I ate some more jimsonweed.
Becasue was still looking for her underwear. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the gnomes stole hers, too. Those cornflower-blue panties had been her favorite. I ate some more jimsonweed.
The rain had ceased—or had it been just our torrential ptyalism from all that jimsonweed?—but there was still scum everywhere. It covered the Earth, the Sun, the Moon: ’Twas a lurid film of viscid, equine phlegm. There was only one thing to do: We ate some more jimsonweed.
I fashioned some fresh underwear out of sumac leaves. The sumac warned me that was dumb but I didn’t listen. I never listen to advice from plants. I ate some more jimsonweed.
I also didn’t have the heart to tell my huzzey-muffet we were not actually ensconced in an endless morass of mud but inhumed within a giant carnivorous fungus, unconscious, and it had been digesting us for a week now. Everything was a hallucination—everything was a lie. (Except the horse mucus dripping from the walls.) This dogforsaken forest trying to kill us in myriad horrifying and painful ways was just a pleasant dream the fungus had conjured up in our soft, squishy brains to lull us into complacency while it dissolved us into mucus. I ate some more jimsonweed.
A burning bush tried to talk me into eating its berries but I knew better: I ate some firebush instead. Then I ate some more jimsonweed.
There in that quag, Thursday ended with us porking like pigs.
Unfortunately, we did that in a patch of fiery-red poison ivy. We stopped eating jimsonweed then. I thought about that köttbullar recipe again. How badly I wanted some of ol’ Åaårp’s meatballs now! Nothing but jimsonweed and corn-in-the-can was driving me crazy.
Right then, my barefoot huzzey-muffet melted into a thick puddle of horse mucus before my very eyes. The crows (whom I was quite certain were waiting to swoop down and pluck our corneas out!) melted into horse mucus. Then everything else melted into goo too, and—
We found another pond to bathe in—this one Goa’uldless. A bottle floated serenely by. In it I found a missive from my Editor, lambasting me for pretentiously using “’twas” rather’n “it’s” a few paragraphs behind this one. My mood darkened. This conundrum had dogged me before. Was my authorial credibility at stake? I grinsped. But in this dogforsaken forest, nothing could dog me now—not even that crab-faced assassin of joy who weekly spares no effort at and pulls no punches in basting the sacrificial lamb that is this docile & perfunctory blog.
Mixing my metaphors like a Cuisinart, I continued pontificating, all wrapped up in the highest of dudgeons, until my froggy-muffet swam over and calmed me down with a mere two words. I quacked. Then she started quacking.
There in that pond, Friday ended with us f———ing like ducks.
With the knowledge that this godforsaken week would end with one of those horrid, smelly fifth Sundays, I was certain that I would rather be eaten by a grue (or a Langolier) than have to twickle out yet another dogforsaken blog entry. My huzzey-muffet wasn’t so certain. But an exhaustive recounting of every fifth Sunday we’ve lived through—“Remember that one with the exploding whale carcass?” was the clincher, I do believe—proved thoroughly convincing.
So on Saturday, we both died on Nizgidge Ridge. At 3 o’clock & 14 in the morning, the grues (and a single Langolier) finally got us.
Shit.