Catch me on Chacho
Picture this...
You're in one of those Thai Hot Pot soup places and it smells like an unwarranted spritz from an essential oil perfume vendor hocking beef bouillon as a stink. You've dressed to the fucking elevens and you're waiting for your date from Tinder or Grindr or Bumble or Mindr or Humpus or Chacho or Voop or whatever the fuck.
"Hot or pot soup?" The unimaginably distressed soup-seller says to you, carrying another half-dozen small metal pots full of scalding peanut-based lentil slurp.
"Oh, in a bit." Your chin-length pleated skirt of hair you maintain flawfully slides away from your miscellaneous face as you nervously bob your noggin toward the empty chair. "Waiting on my date."
The soup-creature doesn't care and is already scouring the place looking to make their next dinero on someone who will suck down five-dollar chicken-oil pudding. You hate this stuff, but this person could be the one.
They could be between three and eight feet tall and wearing clean clothing. They could have all their skin still attached to their body. They could be self-motivated and freshly showered. They could finally be entertaining.
Charming? Don't push it. You'll be lucky if they aren't a burgeoning man-stabber, looking to stab their next man.
The door chime yanks you from your day dream of something better and back into the uncomfortable heat of this soupy pig-wallow. In meanders a frock-coat and hat that cuts a downright dashing portrait that clumsily knocks into a table, spreading the napkins and menus about.
Mystery abounds, dear reader. Mystery that didn't howl into the room with stench or the aforementioned man-stabbing. Otherworldly decor and decorum, sure, I'll give you that. Unsteady on the feet and a little unwieldy around the sleeves, but not the worst you've seen.
The last person face-planted into a Honda after arranging a picnic in a Walmart parking lot. And most of the priors all wanted to meet at Chik-fil-A. Chik-fil-A. They may as well have asked you to their cult's den of venomous snakes in Some-Dumb-Fucksville, Utah.
No, this is for REAL, dog. They're swaggering like they own the MOON, dog. They're wearing expensive French COLOGNE, dog. They smell a little like DOG PEE, dog.
A long sweep of a hand reveals a haired palm of lengthy fingers and thoroughly haired pads. But that one guy owned a Datsun, so like again, whatever the fuck.
"Uh, Hello... Michael?"
The dashing man makes a sound. It's the sound of tinkling glass rubbing against a cheese grater.
You've found yourself in the charm zone, baby.
"Michael" goes to pull out the chair and the arm just keeps coming and instead of sitting he sort of DECANTS into the seat. Something in the middle of him settles with a noise.
And then the left lapel gaps maybe an inch and a squirrel, glossy and feral, leans out and regards you with the moist devastated longing of a man who has read exactly one book in his life and it had a map in the front.
You knew. Come on, you KNEW. You knew at the sleeves. You knew when the "hand" turned out to be nine knuckles of wet November and the "expensive French cologne" was a mid-level raccoon's idea of Paris. This dude is not a man.
Michael is a trench coat with an alarming number of squirrels in it: the top three form the mouth like a giant mammalian Voltron, several around the belt that do all the walking and the handling, and there's a middle layer whose whole job is to "gyrating fixatingly". There is no Michael. There was only ever the coat, and the squirrels, and the terrible chittering DESIRE.
He's mysterious: You can't see him, he is several squirrels in a fucking trench.
He's dangerous: Rabies.
He doesn't have a troubled past, he has FORTY separate troubled pasts. At least one of these squirrels owns a magical talking sword. At least one of these squirrels owns a car wash.
He's touch-her-and-you-die, where the "her" is you and the "die" is also you of a bite you'll barely remember getting. He's the brooding one and the possessive one and the enemies-to-lovers slow burn all at once, but the burn is a small electrical fire he started trying to steal bagels from your toaster.
Fated mates? There's forty of them, fated to you at the exact same time.
Is this a found family? Fuck yeah it is; they're all probably inbred as shit. Is that harem, baby? You fuckin' bet your horny little ass off.
Where is that decrepit soup-monger? Tell them to make it like Chappell Roan: HOT TO GO!
Let me show you my butthole.
Is This A Court of Thorns and Roses By Famed Porn-author-er Sarah J. Maas?
No, its a coat of squirrels and rabies. But this is romantasy, baby!
The one genre on the clearance shelf where the love interest gets to be nine feet of morally grey fae war criminal, or a dragon who is also somehow a duke, or a fucking ghost with a jawline and unresolved daddy issues, or a promiscuous squid-person, or a lamp, and the only note the editor ever writes in the margin is "taller, meaner, and give him a tender moment where he shares a snack."
And the SPICE. Do not get me started on the spice. Chapter one is four thousand words of eye contact. His forty little eyes, your regular disappointing two. And by chapter nine there's a scene so unhinged our Brother printer ejaculated ink while printing it and we had to describe the whole thing using nothing but the phrase "his many filthy hands."
It's written at a sixth-grade reading level on purpose, because you are not here to think, you are here to feel a coat full of rodents call you "little one" in a voice like a reanimated corpse of Shirley Temple. BookTok is already fist-fighting about it in a Barnes & Noble parking lot.
Now listen. Do I think you should date a coat of many squirrels? Fuck no. But you're not me; you're braver or lonelier or both. And for our purposes down here it genuinely does not matter which one.
Purchase "A Coat of Many Squirrels" at your local book store if such a thing even exists at the time and space where you are reading this.
Listen you WANT more of this. You need more of it because it isn't Harry Potter but it is just as fucking fantastical. All you gotta do is drop a little cash in our old pickle tickler here, we'll match you with a beautiful local feline, and you can just live out your wastrel days dating all matter of motherfuckers.
Donate to start swiping!
The uploads folder came back empty. Someone was supposed to fill it with cats. We found that someone asleep inside the folder. Don’t ask us how that works, this is an IT matter.
