So I glanced out the window today, and saw a lumpy squirrel on the landlady’s feeder. Two big hairless bots, one in the armpit, one centered more or less between the shoulderblades.

It’s a sign of how deeply living in the Wildlife Vortex has warped me that I felt a bizarre sense of relief, as if normalcy had somehow been restored. There had been no botflies earlier in the year, but now, at last, the lumpy squirrel. The sun is shining, hideous parasites are afflicting the squirrels, god’s in his heaven, all it right with the world.

Two Lumps, welcome to the defective wildlife pantheon!