The Little Old Lady Who Loved Dolphins, Hummingbirds, Unicorns, and Bears

Once, in case you haven't read the title, there was a little old lady who loved dolphins, hummingbirds, unicorns, and bears. "Oh, they are just sooooo wittle and soooo cute!" she would say to herself (while eating dog food so that she could afford prescription medicine and happy that her phone had been turned off so that she couldn't get the calls from the bank telling her her mortgage was three months past due), "Oh, I just wuv them so, so much!" In fact, the little old lady loved dolphins, hummingbirds, unicorns, and bears so much that she had pillows with them embroidered across the top and suncatchers of them in every window and framed pictures of ripped-out magazine pages containing pictures of dolphins, hummingbirds, unicorns, and bears. No matter what else went wrong in the world, the little old lady could sit happily and look at the beautiful images of dolphins, hummingbirds, unicorns, and bears that she had used to fill her otherwise drab and empty house. These animals made her happy.

One beautiful sunny day, the little old lady went out for a walk in the woods, enjoying the warm weather and fresh air, when she stumbled upon a quiet and sun-dappled glade. Coincidentally, this was the very same day and location that Dolphin, Hummingbird, Unicorn, and Bear gathered for their weekly poker game. The little old lady's heart began to flutter as she saw all of her favorite animals gathered together, focused intently on playing cards. "Oh," gasped the little old lady, "This is my magical dream! All the wittlest and cutest animals gathered together for a sunny and funny game of cards!"

The animals, however, were angry at this interruption of their very high-stakes and long-running poker game. They came out to the middle of the woods to get away from the squawking voices around them, not hear more. Angry, Dolphin took the cigarette out of his mouth and cocked his long snout over his shoulder. "Lady, can you keep it down, here? We're tryin' ta play cards!"

"Oh, Dolphin!" the little old lady squealed. "You are just the squeakiest-voiced picture of magic and peace! I am so happy to meet you!"

The Dolphin snorted polluted salt-water out of his blowhole (causing all the other animals at the poker game to cover their eyes and Unicorn to shoot him the finger). "Lady, you don't know a damn thing about dolphins, do you? We are highly intelligent, however we use this intelligence to torment each other and the animals around us. We kill porpoises for fun, then play with the mangled corpses for no reason other than to get our rocks off. We murder our own offspring with no regards to the propagation of species. Several of us males will gang up on a female, swim her to exhaustion while we engage in homosexual stimulation with each other, then rape her repeatedly, sometimes keeping her captive and repeating this horror show for weeks at a time. And we are so sexually aggressive that we will even attempt to rape humans that swim in our waters, sometimes even killing other humans we see as rivals. In short, we, as a species, are homicidal, psychopathic rapists. Nice talkin' atcha!"

"Oh," the little old lady said, fanning herself, her eyes wide. "Well, maybe I should throw away that "Mystical Dolphin" calendar I got last year. But, at least I still have the beauty and purity of you, Hummingbird!"

"You talkin' to me?" Hummingbird responded, fluttering his wings so fast that he scattered cards (including two he had been holding in his pocket) all over the forest floor. "I said, YOU TALKIN' TO ME, LADY! What is it that you find so amusing about me? Do I amuse you? Am I a clown to you? I mean, really--we hummingbirds are one of the most aggressive species on Earth. We have almost no social skills. We kill each other with our long and razor-tipped beaks as quick as you can say, "Nectar-ream!" and, if we were just a little bigger, we'd attack your ass, too. There is no use in the hummingbird world for other hummingbirds, unless, like our dolphin friends, it is in raping the female of our species. We are compulsively hyperactive and, because of our insane metabolism, we must eat constantly, and I mean CONSTANTLY, stealing food from any bird or bee that comes down the pike. And what goes in must come out, ya know, so we are almost constantly, and I mean CONSTANTLY, dripping urine and feces. That liquid splattering you as you watch us tear into our sources of sugar ain't the mist of happiness, toots, knowwhatamean?"

"Well," the little old lady gulped, a single tear running down her cheek five or six times out of each eye. "I, uh, don't know what to say, Hummingbird. I guess, at least, I still have the purity of the Unicorn to hold my faith in the animal kingdom and give me some comfort in the form of resin tchotchkes as I move through a dark and difficult life."

"Dat's MISTER Unicorn to you, Granny," said the Unicorn as he spit a glob of phlegm onto the forest carpet. "And, come on, really? You are going to put your faith, love, and ideas of peace on ME?  A horse with a phallic symbol on its forehead? Yeah, let's just ignore the fact that I don't friggin' exist, okay? That there is no real animal that is actually pure and amazing enough, so I had to be invented? Let's ignore that. Instead, let's focus on the fact that, pre- my-hijacking-by-Christianity, I was a goat with a horn on my head and a crazy bushy tail. A friggin' goat, the animal symbol of sexual depravity. So then, lose the goat, turn me into a horse. All happiness and rainbows, now, right? Not so fast, dusty drawers. According to everyone from the Egyptians to the Greeks to the Bible, I'm the symbol of untamed strength and raw, human destroying power. And how can you tame me? Well, by sending a virgin into the woods to find me. Me, a horse (and check the motion of a woman riding a horse, see what that reminds you of), with an erection sticking out of my forehead, out in the woods all night with a virgin? Heh, heh, heh...might as well swim with the dolphins, babies. Which, of course, brings me around to the fact that, being a friggin' MADE-UP CREATURE, in order to get my magical healing horn, people had to lie and kill all kinds of other endangered species in my name, from the rhinoceros to the narwhal. Ouch, boys, too bad you were so horny! Seriously, though, thanks for the bony protrusion, and I'll be off spending time with your virgins."

"Oh dear," the little old lady moaned softy, "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear..."

"HA!" laughed the Hummingbird, "Please! Don't even get me started on the habits of the deer in this forest..."

"But what about you, Mister Bear?" the old lady asked hopefully, "Surely you won't dash my animal kingdom, plastic knick-knack hopes and dreams? Surely you are as cute and kind and pure and noble as your marketed image suggests? Surely there is some benefit to ascribing cartoon-like human ideals on various wild animals?"

Bear looked around the table at Dolphin, who nodded, then Hummingbird, who may have also nodded, but it was difficult to tell because he was darting around so fast, then to Unicorn, who also nodded, causing everyone else to duck under the table until he was finished. Then, without saying a word, Bear laid down his cards (he actually was holding three Queens), and slowly, silently, pushed away from the table and rose to his full height of over nine feet. He sighed, shook his head enormous head, scratched the side of his face with his four-inch long claws, and looked across the sun-dappled glade. At the edge of the forest, he saw the little old lady quietly calculating how much unicorn placemats and hummingbird fan pulls and dolphin hand towels would go for on eBay. The bear did some quick estimation and, with surprising power, he pounced and bounded across the clearing. Within seconds, he began to rip the little old lady apart limb by limb and eat her alive, shaking her broken body in his locked jaws like a rag doll.

And the last thing she thought she heard before her temporal lobe was torn from her head and her sense of hearing ended was the deep, bear voice muttering something about being "one of the few animals who will attack and kill humans in the wild unprovoked".

After it was over and the shots of whiskey were refilled and the hand of cards resumed, all of the other animals at the table agreed that, for the little old lady's sake, it was a good thing Hippopotamus had a dentist appointment that morning and couldn't make it to the weekly poker game.

Moral: Someone should sell plastic tchotchkes of gnus.