"The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still"

--And now for a short Themindtaker story--

Once upon a time there was a small village of woodland creatures living on a vast green plane under a crystalline blue sky. Mickster McAlister the muskrat lived in a beautiful split-level suburban hollowed-out log with his stunning muskrat wife Melinda (a real looker, as far as muskrats go) and his two and a half muskrat kids. All of the McAlister’s friends agreed, Melinda and Mick were a great couple… even if their split-level log wasn’t exactly the cleanest. You see, from a young age Mick had collected toilet paper rolls, and his collection of mint condition rare and precious rolls had gotten rather out of hand. But Melinda had great fun arranging it, finding new and different ways of displaying the humongous hoard of lavatory paper. She had helped Mick with his collection since their courtship.

The muskrat community gave Mick and Melinda a lot of flack over the strange cache of toilet paper that had amassed in their house over the years. I should point out that muskrats almost never use toilet paper at all—they’ve been quite fond of the bidet ever since a door-to-door salesman came and introduced them to their town. The muskrats even held a town meeting over the ridiculous amount of toilet paper bulging out of the McAlister residence. They decided that it was a bit of an eyesore (“why couldn’t it be something other than toilet paper?” they asked), and it couldn’t be a very suitable environment for the two and a half McAlister children to grow up. Something had to be done.

Unfortunately, Mick wasn’t in attendance at this meeting to defend himself, because he had camped out that night in front of the local Musk-o-Mart to be the first in line to buy the new Softin’ Fluffy three ply, Extra Absorbent 7-Series Toilet Tissue which had just been released (Mick was not only the first in line, but the only muskrat in town to buy ANY toilet paper that day whatsoever, save for the kindly Miss Marjorie who accidentally bought some thinking they were paper towels).

When Mick got home, his loving muskrat wife informed him of the town’s decision to burn their pile of toilet paper. Melinda snuggled up with the distraught Mick in a very soft (very absorbent) pile of TP outside under the stars, which Melinda had laid out for the two of them upon hearing the terrible news. Melinda and Mick held each other and spoke of the great times they had buying and arranging the great reserve of loo paper. Like the time uncle Meyers had used an entire roll by himself, or when they had forgotten to buy baby clothes for their first child, so they wrapped her in toilet paper for the first day, or that funny roll of tissues they had received as a gift with little pictures of muskrat politicians of it, like George W. Muskrush.

They spoke until dawn of the fond times they’d shared over the years, but decided that even to lose the great TP collection wouldn’t take any of those memories away from them, and their love was stronger than it ever had been. “Bring on the townspeople!” said Mick. “Let ’em take my collection of ‘shit tickets,’ they can never take away my happiness!” Just at that moment, it started to rain. First innocent little drops that Mick and Melinda danced around in, and then big dense rain drops that almost hurt your head when they landed on you.

Before too long, it became the biggest downpour that the little muskrat village had ever seen. The water level rose and muskrats came bursting out of their houses to look at the phenomenon. It was unbelievable. Everyone started to get nervous as the floodwater grew deeper and deeper. Mick and Melinda looked out the window and held their children tightly, when they saw a boat come floating up to their house. Martin Mitchum, the head of the town council shouted at the McAlisters to start throwing their rolls of toilet paper out the window. “Let the tissue issue go, Mitchum!” shouted Mick. “At least until this rain clears up!”

“No, you don’t understand!” responded Mitchum. “It’ll help absorb the flood!” Melinda and Mick looked at each other as a slow smile grew upon both of their faces. “No one else has any paper, they’ve all got bidets!” Soon the whole town was over at the McAlister log throwing little muskrat handfuls of toilet tissue out of the house. Slowly but surely the floodwaters receded. The great current was impeded by a great dam of toilet paper, which as quickly as the rain appeared absorbed and disintegrated into nothingness, leaving no traces of the great flood, or of Mick’s fantastic TP collection.

Mick and Melinda were heralded as town heroes from that point on. And the town council apologized for plotting to force them to get rid of the life-saving pile of toilet paper they had collected. Mick and Melinda (especially Melinda) took it all in stride and said that everything must have worked out the way it did for a reason. “Easy come easy go, I suppose,” said Melinda in front of the town council. Mick never regretted losing the collection because that rainy night, he realized that the TP never made him happy, it was sharing the collection process with Melinda that had brought him joy all these years, and no floor or town council or anyone else could ever take that away from them.

That night the McAlister kids had a sleepover at a friend’s house, and Mick and Melinda made sweet sweet muskrat love, all night long.

THE END