Theresa Lewis

Life is funny at times. Sometimes you know things and you don’t know how you know them, but you just do. Other times, you just don’t know what you don’t know.

 

I have always had a great fascination for things that I don’t know nor understand… like squirmols for instance. You may not know what they are or even what their name is, but you have probably seen them on television, or in a shopping center demonstration. Squirmols are those googly-eyed fuzzy creature things that demonstrators get to jump into wine glasses, or shoot through the air. For all intents and purposes, squirmals have a life of their own.

 

I never knew how they worked, but they totally mystified me. One day around Christmas time, I was doing my shopping when I stumbled upon a crowd of people watching a squirmol demonstration. There was a man and a woman putting on an elaborate demonstration. I was mesmerized in a state of awe. The show they put on was nothing short of spectacular.

 

I had seen these performances on television, but I had never seen a demonstration just a mere ten feet in front of me. Wow! I watched the demonstrators for what I thought was a good half hour and had completely abandoned my Christmas shopping. As I was about to leave the throng of onlookers, a woman approached me and tried to sell me a squirmal. I promise you that it wasn’t a tough sale. I bought ten of them at five dollars a piece. Oh, my goodness was I ever excited. I couldn’t wait to get home and show my husband and my Dad how these little squirmols could dance and shoot through the air and jump from hand to hand and wine glass to wine glass. In a way, they reminded me of Mexican jumping beans. I believed squirmols to be something like that.

 

I went to my china cabinet and selected a wine glass and put it on the table in front of us then I opened the package and let the squirmol out. To my utter disappointment, it flopped on the table and wouldn’t move. I poked at it a few times, but it was as dead as a door nail. Maybe it needed a little time to warm up. I started to get supper ready in the meantime. As supper was cooking, I thought that perhaps I should have kept the squirmols inside my jacket in a pocket close to my body for warmth instead of leaving them exposed to the cold in the shopping bag.  

 

After supper, when the dishes were done I figured that the squirmols would be warm enough to dance like I had seen at the hands of the demonstrators. No such luck. It was really dead and there was no way to revive it. I opened the other packages and found that they were all dead. I got back in the car and decided to return the dead beasts, if possible, but when I got there, the demonstration was over and the people were gone. I was grossly disappointed and even angry that I had wasted fifty dollars on a bunch of dead squirmols.

 

When I got home, I decided once again to try to revive them. I noticed some writing on the back of the package. It was instructions. It said to tie the squirmol’s nylon leash to the button on my shirt to activate it. Oh, so that’s it. I did as instructed, but nothing happened. It said to let the squirmol slide off your hand. I did that too. It just dangled from its leash, but it was still very dead. I understood the need for the leash if it was still alive, so it wouldn’t escape, but this was dead… dead as a freaking door nail.

 

I decided to remove the leash and see if it would come back to life. I couldn’t find the end that was attached to the squirmol, so I gave it a little tug to try and break the nylon leash.

 

Oh, my goodness! All that happened was a bunch of red fluff flew up in the air and the googly-eyes landed on the table in front of me. I stood frozen for a few moments then I understood what had just happened. There was no jumping bean inside. Squirmols are nothing more than fluff and eyeballs.

 

No, I’m not blond… just very naïve. I felt like an absolute idiot. Thank goodness that I wasn’t able to return the squirmols. I just sucked up the fifty dollar loss and went on about my business.

 

THE END