Two eyes glow red in the bushes of a family’s backyard in Mississippi. It’s the black of the night. It glares into the empty house of the humans, and the interior lights that've been forgotten to be turned off.

It’s perfect… It thinks, a smile of fangs growing on its face. The creature jumps out of the bushes to seize its moment. Now, this creature has been called many things. “The backyard bandit”, “a disturbingly large rat”, ect. However, its most common name is simply a raccoon. Goldie the fluffy racoon plops out of the bushes landing on his tiny paws, eyeing the doors and windows looking for an opportunity. Despite racoons not being an actual “beast” of some sort, they were still definitely a menace.

Goldie skids up to the windows and starts to fiddle with its locks. After tempering with it a little bit, he decides it’s best to try the next window, only to have a similar result of failure. Then, the brassy doorknob catches his eye. He skitters up a drain pipe next to the door and pulls out a bobby pin from his tail. He shoves the pin in and starts tinkering with the lock, his ears twitching while expertly listening to the lock’s innerworkings. However, after a few moments of no progress, the pin movements get more and more aggressive until Goldie completely forgets the pin and starts to erratically shake the doorknob until he falls off the pipe and lands on the doormat. This is when he looks up to see a doggy door on the big wooden door. He slips through into the house feeling quite crafty indeed.

Upon infiltrating the house, Goldie immediately beelines to the kitchen with food on his mind. But the moment he hits the shiny tile, he slips, and glides across the floor. After losing enough momentum, he attempts to stand up and walk, but just ends up sliding around until he finally claws onto a drawer and shimmies up the counter until he’s sitting on its marbly surface.

Now… to FEED. Thought the scrappy little trash panda. He then starts to rummage through any cupboard he could manage to open. He finds a drawer filled with technicolor bags of chips, their packages shimmering in the kitchen lights. He eagerly rips open the first bag like a greedy pirate stealing treasure, and eats the red chip. Then immediately regrets.

Too hot! Too hawt! TOO HAAAAAWWWWWTTTT!!!!! Goldie screams internally. Making all sorts of spitting and clicking noises with his tongue to attempt to stop the spice. Once the heat starts to cool he rips open another bag of chips and digs into that one.

…Too bland. He thinks, shoving the bag aside. I mean, if I wanted to eat garbage, I’de go out and eat garbage. He moves on to the last package, which was in a tube container.

Goldie quickly tries to shove his little fingers under the flexible plastic lid, and with a little straggling it finally pops off the top. Goldy paws at the chip and nibbles its edge.

Mmmm… just right… Goldie almost eats the rest of the chip, but then hesitates. Goldie quickly scampers to the side of the sink and fiddles with it until it turns on. Then, Goldie dips the chip into the streaming water and then nibbles on the soggy chip.

Yessssss…. Goldie thinks. I’m the ratatouille of the Racoon world.

After eating another chip, and another chip, and another chip until the entire package of chips were gone, Goldie felt that he needed a good chew for his teeth. His eyes drift across the kitchen to the dining room where he sees three wooden chairs, perfect for gnawing. He crouches at the edge of the counter, bracing for impact, and nearly gracefully splats the landing. Then he attempts to walk to the kitchen, his sliding on the tile evolving into a sort of clumsy skate. He finally reaches the three chairs circling the tall, round table. Goldie skitters up the first chair, which was also the tallest of the chairs. Goldie eagerly bites into the deep, dark wood. Or more like, he eagerly bites onto the wood, because he quickly finds that the wood was about as solid as the stone cabinet. Goldie jolts his head back, licking his aching teeth

MUCH too hard. He thinks. He hops onto the next chair, this one was a light aspen color and was slightly shorter than the last one. He sinks his teeth into the chair, then rears his head back to see a perfect imprint of his canines in the chair like a teeth mold at a dentist’s office.

Way too soft. This is barely a chew at all! Might as well gnaw on mud. He hops to the last chair, the shortest of them all. With caution, he bites into the warm-colored oak chair.

Yes! Just right. He thinks, as he continues to aggressively chew, gnaw and widdle down the poor little chair.

After the chair was completely covered in the scars of his delighted chewing, and Goldie’s gums were satisfied, he felt very tired. Because as you know (or at least you would know if you were a racoon) all the chewing and eating and breaking an entry is quite exhausting. He thinks back to a time he remembers spying on a sleeping human through a window. (Don’t think too much of it. If you think it’s too creepy and you must know why he was doing that, the sleeping human was an old man with a whistley nose. So as the old man snored, his nose would whistle, and Goldie found that hysterical.) From that moment he remembered that the human was resting in something that looked a bit like a cross over of a countertop and a cushion. He could only assume it was the human version of a nest. He’s never slept in a human nest before, and they looked very comfortable, so off he went wandering the little house to try to find the room where they kept the “human nests”. He wanders the carpeted halls, nudging the doors open with his snoot until he finally finds the room with the beds. He wanders into the dark and spacious room full of photos and humble decoration. He hooked his claws onto the blanket on the side of the bed and scales up the larger bed, figuring biggest was best. He hops the last distance onto the bed, only to find there was no cushioning to receive him.

What on earth..? He thinks. He started to bounce on the bed to further investigate, and found that he barely bounded any higher than if he was on a sidewalk. Too stiff. He thinks. What's the point of a nest if it’s not even soft enough to properly rest in. Did humans honestly enjoy sleeping on things as hard as stone?? When he finishes his inner dialogue of complaining, he decides to take his chances with the other bed. He crunches at the edge of the bed, twitches his rear end in anticipation, leaps across, and that is when the floor beneath him collapses. The moment he lands on the second bed he finds himself completely engulfed in the plush. And as time went on, the cushion started to slowly swallow him. In a panic, he started to squirm every part of his body. He starts to desperately claw the sheets around him, but like pinching a chubby person's cheek, it was hard to get a good grip.

I don’t want to get eaten by a human nest! I don’t want to get eaten by a human nest!!!! He finally manages to wriggle out of the cushion, and rolls off the side of the bed, and plops onto the carpeted floor.

Way. Too. Soft. After regaining his nerves, he felt very done with trying to find a human nest. However, he was now more tired than ever, and he REALLY wanted to be whisked to sleep in a very cozy human nest. He remembers that there were three human chairs, so the only logical conclusion was that there must also be three human nests.

But why on earth would they keep the last human nest in a separate room? I’ll never understand these humans. He trots back out into the hallways, and much slower and lazier this time, checks the rooms in the hallway. He finally runs into a room littered with toys and stuffed animals with a bed draped in a pink-princess blanket. Upon walking into the room, he catches blank, beady eyes with a raccoon plushie slumping on the floor. Goldie keeps unsevered eye contact with the plushie for the entirety of the climb up the bed until he reaches the top. Upon reaching the top, Goldie didn’t even bother with finding a good spot to lay and just collapsed onto the bed. The bed comfortably sunk in with his weight, and warmth started to spread in his body.

Juussst right, thinks Goldie as he quickly drifts asleep.

Soon, hours later, a human family of three will walk into the house to discover the giant chip mess on the counter, the running sink, the massacred chair, and the undone beds until they finally go into the young daughters room to find a sleeping racoon. While they were trying to figure out what to do, Goldie woke up. After a very long, awkward pause what followed was a trash panda launching itself off the bed, a madwoman swinging a broom, two girlish screams, pillows flying everywhere, a parade of footstep chasing a padded one to the door, and all around very satisfying chaos that was just meant to have orchestra music playing while it all went down. So now Goldie is outside of the home. Sitting there with nothing to say, remembering all that has just happened.

So what did Goldie learn?

Why nothing of course. He’s a raccoon, and is in fact very likely to try the whole thing again very soon.

THE END