Windfall: An Otter-Body Experience

by Tempe O'Kun

  Kylie nodded. “Yes.”

  Max glanced down at her in disbelief. “No!”

  The otter groaned. “Okay, so this is the first in what’s likely to be a string of monsters.”

  Her lover crossed his arms over a resolute chest. “No.”

  “Oh, come on!” She bounced in place, wiggling with objection as she clung to his arm. “We can’t stop now.”

  The large dog didn’t budge, though he looked down at her with concern as she dangled from his elbow.

  Sarah cleared her throat and lowered her ears, as if trying to enforce calm on herself. “So, why’d you guys do all this?”

  “We wanted to prove my family wasn’t crazy.” Kylie twirled a webbed finger by her head, then around at the house. “Turns out they were even less crazy that we thought.”

  The bunny froze for a second, then blinked. “So what happens now?”

  Max nodded. “We’ve kind of been worrying about that.”

  “Duh!” The otter chattered. “We’re going to use our position as TV monster hunters to inform the world about real monsters.”

  Leaning against the kitchen counter, Shane lashed his long tail. “How are you gonna do that?”

  The husky shrugged. “We have a blog. Or will soon.”

  Tan bunny ears lifted. “A blog?”

  “It’s basically fan fiction, but I live in the same house as the original creator.” His eyes flicked toward the stairs, following Laura’s exit route. “And she’s going to give everything her stamp of approval before I post it.”

  “Mom gave him the keys to the kingdom.” Kylie elbowed him for his modesty. “Max is now the official lead writer of Strangeville.”

  “Wow. That’s really cool.” Sarah nodded, impressed. “I’ve never known someone connected to a TV show before.”

  “I’m also the coffee boy.” His paw tilted in the direction of the steaming carafe.

  “Good luck there.” The rabbit fumbled for a gestured and eventually settled on a thumbs-up.

  Max nodded with a self-effacing wag. “Thanks.”

  A phone buzzed. Shane pulled it from his pocket. “Dad wants us to watch the store for a couple hours while he runs errands.”

  Sarah planted her hands on her hips. “If he wants us, why did he only text you?”

  “He’s using the royal ‘us.’” He regarded his sister, unflappable indifference restored. “It’s pronounced ‘Shane.’”

  She shook her head. “Well, we rode together, so I guess I’m leaving either way.”

  Shane patted Kylie on the shoulder. “Not every day someone collapse my neighborhood. Congrats. We’ll put a tracking collar on Sarah so you don’t collapse any cave she’s in.”

  The otter glanced at the lapine in question. “Do you have a Sarah-tracking app?”

  “Just let me know if you’re going into my tunnels.” Her finger poked toward the ground. “Or plan to destroy them.”

  “Can do!” Kylie offered a paw, which the bunny puzzled on for an instant, then shook.

  With a deadpan nod, Shane headed unceremoniously out the door and toward their car.

  Sarah moved to follow, but stopped at the doorway and turned around. “Are you guys okay?”

  “Yeah, I just need more coffee.” The otter hoisted her cup.

  “No, I mean really okay.” The bunny’s paw reached just short of touching her.

  Kylie paused in thought, then slowly settled back into motion. “I stand by the coffee thing.”

  Max bumped her with his elbow.

  “I dunno! I’ve never battled aliens before. And it’s cool that my ancestors weren’t all crazy, but it’s crazy that my ancestors were right about monsters.” She throw her webbed paws in the air. “I’m used to being an actor on a silly TV show—”

  The dog looked around for Laura with concern.

  “—and now I know all this stuff that, if I tell the world, the world’s gonna think I’m just another crazy celebrity, lying for attention.” The otter wobbled. “So I’m trying to get my bearings.”

  The bunny looked to Max.

  He nodded in agreement.

  “Okay, well, keep in touch. Let’s talk about this soon. It’s not healthy to only talk about monsters; any therapist will tell you that.” She ducked into the car. “We’ll go to Salad Days.”

  The car motored away. On the twisting road, it sank below the crest of the hill and filtered into the woods. Soon, only the faint sound of the engine remained.

  Kylie flashed him an exasperated look. “Herbivores! Who goes to Salad Days?”

  He shrugged. “I hear they have a salad made of turnip shavings.”

  “That’s stupid, but I don’t even care because people are coming to us with supernatural problems!” Happiness buoyed her. Her grabby paws gripped his arm to keep her from bouncing away.

  He raised a fluffy finger. “They came to us because they thought we collapsed a suburb.”

  The lutrine sprang from foot to foot, clapping. “Ooooooh, we’ll form a mystery club!”

  Max stroked his chin. “While I hesitate to bring them into danger, I suppose it’s good to have people we can call for backup.” He nodded. “Granted, them knowing will make it harder for us to investigate in secret.”

  “Great!” Still clad in PJs, she twirled around him, tail trailing in a curl after. Her head nuzzled against his chest. “We want to do the opposite of a secret. We only want to keep the investigating secret until we can prove it.”

  His arm rising to embrace her, the canine stood in silence. A moment of assessment gripped him. He’d started dating his best friend. He’d uncovered extraterrestrial carpentry. Which of those was wilder, he wasn’t sure. As he gazed off into the wind-caressed woods, he wondered how the future could top that.

  In the face of that, writing a Strangeville blog seemed downright achievable.

  Max had handed Laura the proposed blog post, still hot from the printer. It was the first one that felt truly finished, so it’d felt good to hand Laura a physical copy. Now, though, as he sat watching her read it, flipping one page every couple minutes, sometimes flipping back, he found this all excessively dramatic. He’d been in writing classes, but the opinion of classmates or a professor didn’t hold the same weight as his idol and mentor. That he was writing official fanfiction of her work doubled the pressure.

  The cluttered office loomed around him. Awards and memorabilia from dozens of productions stood like sentinels, guarding stacks of manuscripts and hard drives. At the window, multi-colored glass buoys floated in an old net, glowing under ancient dust. Had she put them there? Or had they been hung there by some otter a hundred years ago? So much of her past was tucked into corners of this sprawling house. For all the years he’d worked for her, these gaps made him unsure he’d calibrated the story for the right audience.

  At last, she cleared her throat, wiggled upright, and smiled at him. “Great. A couple structural problems, but we can hammer those out together.”

  The dog’s muzzle swung open to emit a sigh of relief. She hadn’t hated it. He wasn’t hopeless.

  “You’ve been using the series reference guide, though, and your obsession over the show’s lore is paying off.” She shrugged. “An alternate-reality show like Strangeville lives or dies by its continuity. Fans are going to be demanding for that continuity even more since the property is changing formats.”

  He wagged. This was going pretty well.

  “After all, real life has great continuity.”

  Max looked up at her. Was she totally oblivious to the fact that she ignored whole slices of reality? The ones related to the supernatural, for instance. Oh well.

  She flipped back a couple pages. “Interesting that you have Serge carrying around a small baseball bat all the time.”

  He nodded, remembering bludgeoning an alien with it. “We found one upstairs.”

  The otter snickered. “If you’re finding your inspiration by cleaning, that’s twice as good for me. But you have a go
od understanding of the characters and setting. You do me proud.”

  He nodded. This was actually going pretty great.

  Leaning across her desk, she tipped the story back to him. “Now do it 49 more times.”

  His ears popped straight up.

  “What? It’s not a blog without content. If you can’t write a year’s worth of content before you start, you don’t have a sustainable idea.”

  The husky squirmed. “I thought I could just post them as I write them.”

  She shook a webbed finger up into the air. “And what happens when you get a cold?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t get colds.”

  “What happens when you get roped into another project? Or when my daughter gets you arrested?”

  Max snorted. “Am I likely to get arrested, associating with her?”

  “More likely than without.” The middle-aged otter waved a blasé paw. “You want a reservoir of content.”

  He nodded. “How’d you do this on the show?”

  “I’ve been writing Strangeville since I was about your age. Not that I knew what it would become, then. Sometimes, when you start something, you have no idea how it’s going to get out of hand. Like Kylie.”

  A voice from the hallway piped in: “Hey!”

  Laura cracked her webbed knuckles one at a time. “If you’re going to eavesdrop, I get to make fun of you.”

  One hand gripping the doorframe, Kylie swung into the room. “What’s the point of me learning where all the creaky boards are in this old mansion if I never get to eavesdrop?”

  Her mother’s battered office chair groaned mechanically as she leaned back to regard her daughter. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

  “I was supposed to be at work half an hour ago. I guarantee nobody has noticed.” Her fists propped on her hips. “How’s life aboard the S.S. Apprenticeship?”

  “Hasn’t sunk yet.” The older otter took a sip of coffee. “He wrote a good first short story.”

  Kylie’s small ears perked up at her boyfriend. “High praise, considering some of the things she’d say to the writing team.”

  He shrugged. “The special effects budget for prose is pretty generous.”

  “I still say we could just post as Cassie and Serge.” She gave Max a thumbs-up. “We’ll buy you a Cyrillic keyboard so you can write his accent.”

  “While I like the augmented-reality angle, that locks you into events that take place after the show. And thinking of all the stories in order. And in real time.” Laura scratched her chin idly. “And into only ever having it from their point of view. And—”

  “Yes, I get it, Mom.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re very smart and creative.”

  The older lutrine smirked. “It’s almost like I’ve been doing this for a while.”

  Max sat up extra straight. “Plus, she has some really cool old scripts from the show.” He gestured toward a box of hard drives. “I really want to adapt them eventually.”

  Kylie lifted her hands to either side. “Why don’t you just adapt them now?”

  “I thought I’d practice on small stuff like this first. TV episodes are pretty long when you write them out.” The husky leaned forward in his chair, his bulk making it creak mightily. “Plus, I want to do them justice.”

  “While I appreciate the thought, you don’t need to put me on a pedestal.” She waggled a modest wiggle. “They’re just half-finished scripts. I don’t have any grand designs on them. Take what you can use.”

  “I will.” Ears dipped, the massive canine glanced to his mentor. “Eventually.”

  His girlfriend slapped him on the back. “Look at you! Being all proud. You do it.”

  Max swallowed, nervous. “Well, I did it once. And they’re only a few thousand words. I guess I can just knuckle down and do it again. And then fifty more times.”

  Kylie popped into her boyfriend’s room. “Idea.”

  Max looked up from his computer. “No.”

  “TV action show: Covert Otts.” She made a gun gesture with both hands, then ducked back into the hallway.

  He leaned after her and woofed: “This isn’t the 70s! You need more than a species pun as the premise.”

  Her voice rang from down the hall. “I can’t hear you because I’m too covert!”

  Max wrote another blog post. And another. And the fourth one wasn’t as good, but it was done. And then the fifth one he left to percolate. And then he did the same thing to the sixth one. When he was two paragraphs into the seventh one, and was about to abandon it too, he noticed the pattern his life was taking.

  He stared at the screen, trying to focus. Half of the outline was there; he just needed to figure out the connective tissues. He’d given up on writing in the living room. And in his bedroom. And in the library. And now he was stuffed into a slightly-too-small chair in a spare bedroom that had mostly been excavated from decades of clutter.

  Indistinct otter noises rattled from downstairs.

  He lifted his ears and tuned in.

  Echoing up the stairs, his girlfriend chattered: “You’re stressing out my boyfriend. He’s making the noises.”

  The canine sat up straight. His throat stopped making a high-pitched whine he hadn’t known he was making.

  “I haven’t moved from this table all day.” Laura squawked back. “I don’t know what you think I’ve done.”

  “You gave him an impossible task and now he’s going to work on it forever.”

  “If he’s trying to focus, maybe we should leave him alone.”

  “He’s not focused—he’s panicking.” Kylie got even louder. “I haven’t heard him make these noises since he sat on a fire ant hill and didn’t want to react because he’d ruin the take.”

  Max wasn’t sure that was entirely true. He’d probably made similar noises when confronting a monstrous alien at the start of the summer. Kylie had been making a lot of noises of her own, so maybe she hadn’t noticed. Dog ears picked up a lot that otter ears missed, such as the conversation downstairs. Or two pairs of otter paws climbing the stairs.

  The pair of lutrines waddled into the spare bedroom.

  Laura pushed up her glasses. “Are you freaking out in here?”

  With a long look at the little laptop, he sighed. “I guess.”

  “Told you.” With a wiggle of victory, the younger otter sashayed around to face her mother. “You probably couldn’t hear his high-pitched noises because you’re old.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yes, the upper range of my hearing was mercifully worn away by your childhood.”

  Kylie squawked her displeasure.

  Laura tried in vain to straighten one of her whiskers. “Why are you freaking out?”

  He waved a heavy paw at the screen. “I just can’t get this stuff written.”

  A bitter laugh chattered out of her. “That is the primary state we writers exist in.”

  “When I started off it was all coming together, then…”

  “Then you used up all the well-developed ideas and your creative juices dried up?”

  The husky looked to her in mild surprise.

  “That’s the primary thing that happens. Being an artist is just learning how to trick yourself into it happening less.”

  The large dog squirmed. “I like being relied on.”

  “And you are reliable.” Laura tossed her hands into the air. “That’s not the same thing as magically doing everything.”

  He pondered that. Falling short of expectations wasn’t something allowed by his mom, growing up. “It feels weird to not be able to do something you wanted.”

  His girlfriend snickered. “Yeah, that’s because she’d ask you to look like you could beat up a foam-rubber monster.” Raising her webbed hands, she clawed at the air playfully. “And then you’d pick up cars and stuff.”

  “That was a go-cart. Once.” He crossed muscular arms over a broad chest. “And that was a lot easier than this stupid blog.”

  “Max, sweetie, it’s online bon
us content. We’re starting you out small on purpose here.” Her webbed paw chopped vaguely at the computer. “You could take years to write these and it wouldn’t matter.”

  Kylie smacked her tail on a battered dresser, causing the attached mirror to wobble. “But we told the Internet!”

  With a woof of agreement, Max tilted a paw at his girlfriend.

  The elder otter rolled her eyes. “You told that rhino kid’s podcast. Which has…” She looked Strange Times up on her phone. “…409 subscribers. There will come a day when you dream of only disappointing 400 people with your writing.”

  The dog nodded slowly.

  “I’m sorry for making you put all this pressure on yourself. I just didn’t think about it because you kids both surprise me with what you’re capable of.” She set a paw on her daughter’s shoulder, then turned to Max. “Plus, you’re largely self-parenting.”

  A long sigh escaped him. “I know. I thought I was good at this. I thought I could just sit down and do it.”

  “If we were talking about how to carve a whistle, sure. Once I taught you, you could do it a thousand times. But you’re whittling something new every time you start.” The middle-aged otter sat with care on a stack of old cardboard boxes. “It’s possible to be creative on demand, but it’s not something you can do through brute force. Just like you need a reserve of material for that blog, you need to learn to cultivate a reserve of creativity.”

  “Don’t give him all your secrets at once, Mom.” Kylie snorted. “I can’t drag him along on wacky adventures if he’s an overnight success.”

  He regarded his mentor. “So what do I once I’ve made it?”

  She shrugged. “Same thing as before. Chop wood, carry water.”

  His ears rose.

  “Yeah! Make him do training like in a kung fu flick.” The slimmer otter attacked the air with a flurry of punches and tail-slaps. “Montage!”

  Laura lifted an eyebrow at her offspring. “It’s an expression. After you become the person you want to be, you still have to do the same work that got you there. People get jealous of talent because they think it means you automatically get to do great things, like you’re favored by the gods.” Curling her tail, she brushed a spiderweb off the tip. “But the world’s full of people with natural talent they don’t bother to develop.”