Once upon a time, there was a marmot named Beatrice. Beatrice was a very special marmot because she had three eyes. You might think this was a useful trait, but it merely triplicated her vision and made everything so blurry she couldn’t hunt. She depended on her boyfriend Reginald for food, and Reginald was a lazy, good-for-nothing loser who usually just brought home roadkill and pretended he’d killed it himself. Beatrice wasn’t stupid, but she was usually too hungry to care.
They lived in a hollowed out tree in the forest. They slept till late in the afternoon, since Reginald was in a marmot rock band and stayed out until all hours of the night. Beatrice didn’t really care for their sound, which was mostly hissing and screeching, accompanied by Bernard, the French import marmot, banging on a rabbit skull. Despite her distaste, she tried to be supportive of Reginald’s creative endeavors.
One day she was sitting in the tree feeling sorry for herself. She felt ugly and freakish because Reginald’s band members had been making fun of her third eye, and she was really hungry because last night’s dinner had been nothing but muddy, rotten frogs. Just as she began crying, there was a poof of green light and a fairy appeared.
Beatrice had always distrusted fairies. She didn’t like the way they pranced around and sang stupid songs about love and flowers, and their clothes were always ragged and rather suggestive. They acted like they were sweet and kind, but she’d heard rumors about them eating human babies and such. Not that she much cared for humans, but eating their young was kind of revolting. This fairy hovered gleefully above her, sprinkling rose petals and glitter in a very annoying manner. A petal got into Beatrice’s mouth and she choked and had to spend several minutes trying to cough it up while the fairy waited patiently, as if she were used to this sort of thing.
“Oh Beatrice,” sighed the fairy in a wispy, sweet voice. “Don’t cry about your third eye, for in it lies more power than you could ever dream of.”
Beatrice said nothing and watched the fairy skeptically. The fairy seemed disappointed in her cautious reaction. She flapped her silvery wings and flew over to Beatrice, touching her third eye.
In a flash, Beatrice could see clearly! And it wasn’t just ordinary sight—she could project some sort of silvery-green light through the third eye. She trained her light beam on the fairy and was about to utter words of gratitude when she saw exactly how froofy the fairy was. Glitter and rose petals? Were those flowers poking out of the tips of her antennae? Those little purple slippers with the curled-up toes were obnoxious, there was no way around that.
“Damn,” thought Beatrice as she examined the fairy. “Get some real shoes already.” Suddenly the fairy plummeted to the ground, and Beatrice saw that the ghastly slippers had disappeared and were replaced by steel-toed combat boots, whose weight her wings could not support. The fairy lay in a bloody heap on the ground.
Beatrice felt momentary remorse, but it was soon overcome by an overwhelming sense of power. Her new light beam could mold reality to her wishes! All she had to do was focus her beam of light, and whatever she desired would happen!
A marmot had never felt so much power.
Beatrice smoothed her fur and left the dead tree for the last time. She marched down to Reginald’s band practice space. There they were, all five of them, making a racket and galloping about like they were God’s gift to rodents. To hell with that, she decided. She fixed her beam on Reginald’s face (he was quite ugly, now that she could really see him) and said, “This is for all the stinking, maggoty possums you brought me!” and Reginald was covered in insects squirming all over his body.
She turned to Bernard. “This is for making fun of people with deformities!” and suddenly Bernard had six arms, none of which worked.
Systematically, she exacted her revenge on each marmot, heedless of their shrieks of terror. When she finished, she walked out of the forest, contemplating how she would take over the world with her new powers. She saw a car approaching on the nearby road. Boldly, she stepped into the road and stood on her hind legs with her mouth open, thinking, “Stop and give me your food!” To her delight, the humans rolled down their windows and squealed, “Oh, how cute!” and dropped peanuts into her waiting mouth. She did this to several more cars until her belly was heavy with rich food.
This was unfortunate because her overloaded gut deadened her senses. She was sadly flattened when she failed to hear a driver approach. Reginald later came along and dragged her body to the band members, where they ate her, consuming her flesh and eradicating the terrible spells she’d put on them. They used her bones for musical instruments and lived out their pathetic, gory marmot lives in infamy.
Therefore, I say to you: never binge on newfound magic powers.
I also say to you: this is based on a true story. There was a marmot in Rocky Mountain National Park that stood in the middle of the road while people dropped food into its mouth. I saw it. Was it using supernatural powers? What do you think? All I can say is don’t feed the wildlife. You might be the unfortunate recipient of magic powers controlled by power-hungry rodents.
