Surprising turn of events.

I don't know how many of you have been up to date with SamBakZa's flash series (a.k.a. "the really cute flash vids of that bunny chasing around this cat"), but I only found out recently...and it's nothing short of shocking, to say the least. =/

(Please actually click on the link and wait to watch before reading any further. Unless the seemingly randomness of the following semi-memoir doesn't bother you...in which case, please watch anyway.)



Hedgehogs.

There once had been two in our rather-ghetto cellar in China. I was a bit too young to have understood its exact architectures then; in retrospect, it was perhaps just a simple square hole dug into the ground lined with bricks, covered by a pile of logs. In winters we'd store white cabbage there, though we did have a real refrigerator-- there was just something special about the taste of nappa stored and dug out from underground.

And one year, instead of bringing inside another cabbage, my father motioned me and Mother to come out. There, under the space made by logs. There were they: two gray-brown ball-shaped masses, huddled close together and not a muscle shifting. Especially impressionable had been their spikes, the tips of all of which a bleached color fading close to ashen white.

Not the same at all as I'd seen them in books and cartoons.

We laid out food for them, small pieces of meat and yam among other things, and checked at weekly or biweekly intervals. My mother had forbidden me to disturb them on a daily basis after we'd carefully removed all cabbage from around them, still enclosed in plastic bags, though they never seemed to notice anything we do. The meat, however, was always gone. The other foods, not so much.

We kept the area quiet through all winter. Dogs, children, meddling neighbors; none had known about our pair of spiky visitors sleeping under a pile of logs.

'Til one early spring day, of course. They had gone, as quietly and unobserved as they had come, leaving us a gift of an empty cellar now smelling ever so slightly of certain odors left by wild animals.

The cellar had been empty since.