Author’s Note, or, Shoe Shine Bear: A Primer
My dad, brother and I were in an antiques shop in downtown Beaufort, NC, without my mom, which is more or less a guarantee that something incredibly stupid and/or unnecessary will be coming home with us. On this particular outing we managed to stumble across the thing which I am convinced will eventually be proven the Most Haunted Thing I have ever encountered. Sitting at about 10 inches tall, Shoe Shine Bear is a relic of that age where everyone somehow confused “whimsical” and “adorable” with “bone-chillingly terrifying” and “dead-eyed demi-demon.” He’s got a special quality to him; if you stare at him long enough you could start to believe that his corn-cob pipe and slight smirk make him a genuinely fun accent and not at all evil, but the second you avert your gaze you’ll be somehow filled with conviction that he’s somehow moved slightly and the vicious cycle begins again.
We had to have him.
I was the one that made the strongest case for him, mostly as a social experiment to see how deep my power to make my dad make unwise purchases ran, but it was a done deal when I discovered a switch on the side of Shoe Shine Bear’s metal perch; when pressed, the bear would click to life, alternately rubbing his two shining brushes together and exhaling a tiny puff of (most likely asbestos-ridden) smoke from his tiny pipe. I could physically see my dad’s resolve weakening behind his eyes as the bear emitted puff after puff of nostalgia-laiden definitely-toxic smoke. Finally,
“I’ll make you a deal,” he told me.
The deal was this: If he purchased the little, possibly demonous creature and brought it home with us, I would have to write a story about the thing. My dad was often engaging in little bets like this, probably sensing that my writing was the only skill I possessed that even approached marketable and hoping that by strengthening it I would potentially not have to wind up starving to death in my mid 20s.
I took him up on the offer, several times over. Turns out, my dad is one of those guys that is notoriously hard to shop for, but one thing he never has come birthday season, go figure, is a short story starring a miniature bear that is living in his basement and will most likely eventually lead to his grisly demise under mysterious circumstances.
And thus, the saga of Shoe Shine Bear was started.
Shoe Shine Bear Goes to Hollywood
It was the Bear-1920s (which happened to occur during the human 1980s, as the entire Bear civilization had set itself back several decades during the Great Hibernation Incident of 1880). The place was Bear-Hollywood (which everyone knew was human Canada). And there was one bear who was prepared to do anything to be a star. The way he went about this was mostly by shining a lot of shoes, which, in all fairness, no one had ever told him was the path to stardom. But Shoe Shine Bear still believed, deep within himself, that if he shined enough shoes that he would one day become a star.
“Plus,” he would say to bears whose shoes he was already in the process of shining and who were thus very much trapped and forced to listen to his story, “my name is already Shoe Shine Bear, and it would be a great pain to change it now, nyah, see?” Because this is the way bears talked in the Bear-1920s.
And so Shoe Shine Bear went about shining shoes for years right outside the gates of all the major Bear-studios, which, much to his annoyance, resolutely refused to transform him into a star. There were several times he considered giving up, packing up his comically small box of shoe shining supplies, and going home. But, “My name was still Shoe Shine Bear, ya see? What else could I do? Wash cars? Pfah!” He would tell to the still-trapped customer who by this point would be very seriously considering gnawing off his own feet to escape Shoe Shine Bear’s never-ending narrative.
This is how Shoe Shine Bear’s life went, shining shoes by the Bear-ton (which is also, inexplicably, exactly equal to one human ton, even metaphorically). All in all, this was not a bad mode of employment, as bears took a lot of pride in their shoes and had an innate desire to keep them fastidiously clean. This, combined with their habit of mauling hunters in grisly ways, ensured that Shoe Shine Bear’s business was booming, which made him proud enough. He was happy to be earning his own way and making honest money, having grown up listening to long tirades from his father about the merit of hard honest work.
“Bears these days are all the same,” he would grumble at the breakfast table, sticking his greying muzzle into a mug of Bear-coffee (Folger’s, in human), “expecting Bear-handouts all the Bear-time instead of doing hard Bear-work.” Shoe Shine Bear’s father’s rants were always somewhat distorted from his preference for using “bear” as a prefix for too many words, an accent he had picked up working long Bear-hours on the Bear-docks, but the point had still been made clearly enough to Shoe Shine Bear that he was proud not to be one of these lazy bears his father Bear-detested.
And so he kept his modest business going, not even knowing that his chance of stardom was rapidly approaching. In fact, he was so unaware that it literally almost hit him in the face; he looked up from organizing his array of shining supplies to see a solid gold boot staring him straight in the face. He knew that this shoe could only belong to one bear.
It was none other than Bear-Hollywood’s brightest star, Bearold Lloyd. The pun was a complete coincidence and would go unnoticed by bearkind as they paid very little attention to human affairs and celebrities, but if it had been he would have been executed on the spot.
Bears hate puns and had outlawed them in the Bear-1830s (otherwise known as the Squirrel-3000s, because squirrels are terrible at timekeeping and nobody ever knows what they’re up to anyway).
Shoe Shine Bear found himself speechless, which, at any other time, would have been met with cheers and tears of joy from any of his regular customers. As it was, it went totally unappreciated by Bearold Lloyd.
“Well, don’t just sit there gawking, boy. I’ve got a picture to shoot in half a bear-hour and there’s hunter guts all over these.” It was hard for Shoe Shine Bear not to gawk; even underneath what had to be several layers of hunter blood, the trademark golden shoes of Bearold Lloyd were unmistakable. He had gotten them made after his first hit and they had become his trademark.
“Step right up,” Shoe Shine Bear motioned to his chair and allowed the Bear-celebrity to sit and prop his feet up. “I bet you’re wondering what a bear like me is doing shining shoes in a place like this,” Shoe Shine Bear added hopefully, wanting a chance to launch himself into his saga which had been the unfortunate fate of so many customers.
“I am not at all interested in that” was an answer that had never stopped Shoe Shine Bear in the past, and it failed to stop him now.
He decided to give Bearold Lloyd the full nine Bear-yards, starting with his childhood dreams and ending with a shockingly intricate account of every shoe he had ever shined. When he was about halfway through his running description of a pair of particularly nondescript shoes, he found himself interrupted by a sharp, ringing snort. He realized that Bearold Lloyd, out of self defense, had fallen asleep and was now snoring loudly. As Shoe Shine Bear looked at the unconscious celebrity, his father’s voice rang clear in his head: “This is your Bear- chance, Bear-son. These don’t come along every Bear-day.” Before Shoe Shine Bear knew what was happening, he had grabbed both now-immaculate shoes from Bearold Lloyd’s sleeping feet and was running down the street towards the nearest studio.
As he rounded a corner he slipped the shoes, which were almost entirely the wrong size, onto his own feet, and started looking around. Bearold Lloyd had said he was shooting a picture somewhere around here ... He came upon a sound studio, full of angry looking Hollywood bears and all sorts of equipment. He took a deep breath and approached them.
“It is I,” he declared, “Bearold Lloyd.” The assembled crowd turned to look at him, and a moment of silence fell upon the area. It was broken by the Bear-director.
“You don’t look very much like him,” he said in a growl, revealing a tone of high suspicion and also a bit of hunger because they hadn’t had lunch yet. Shoe Shine Bear’s heart skipped a beat and he began to sweat. He wondered if this was the end, until a second voice broke the silence.
“Look at his shoes, though.” Every Bear-eye fell upon the remarkable glittering shoes of Bearold Lloyd. The Bear-director looked for a second, then gave the best approximation of a shrug he could, given the shoulders that were available to him.
“I guess it has to be him then.” Shoe Shine Bear almost started to breathe again when another voice arose, this one full of deep disapproval. It was the producer, a stork who had worked his way up in the ranks of Hollywood. He was known for being sharp and good at his job and thus was allowed to go unmauled, even though everyone agreed he was a bit of a buzzkill.
“That is most certainly not Bearold Lloyd. Bearold Lloyd is a grey bear, and this bear is not that grey at all.” He looked at the Bear-director, who stared back at him with eyes full of rage.
“Are you telling me,” he growled at the stork, “ that you are doubting the shoes right now?”The room grew incredibly tense. Bears trusted shoes above anything. Their motto had been, and always would be, “If you can’t trust a shoe, you can’t trust anything.” This could be applied to startlingly few situations and thus left the bear population largely without guidance in most situations, but anyone who spoke up about changing it would be inevitably mauled. The stork realized his grave mistake in questioning the trustworthiness of a pair of shoes and knew that his only choice was to let the matter pass, or else risk being mauled on principle. He squinted at Shoe Shine Bear.
“Oh, I guess it is him. My mistake.”
At this the assembled crowd growled their assent and went back to their various tasks. The Bear-director lead Shoe Shine Bear in front of the Bear-camera (which, being made primarily of twigs and honey, was actually rather ineffective at capturing anything in the way of moving images), and thus his career was made. Bearold Lloyd’s career, under Shoe Shine Bear’s new guidance, experienced a new resurgence, as the public opinion had always been that Bearold Lloyd was just a bit too grey, fur-wise. Even at the time of his highest fame, Shoe Shine Bear would always take one day to remove his golden shoes and resume his work at his old shoe shine stand, wanting to never forget his bear- roots.
Without his shoes, Bearold Lloyd was never able to prove his true identity, and had to either hold his peace or be placed in front of a Bear-tribunal for the crime of Doubting The Honesty Of Shoes.
Shoe Shine Bear Goes to Space
Once upon a time, there was a bear named Shoe Shine Bear, though by this point he had been through so much that he could no longer recall exactly why he was called that.
Shoe Shine Bear looked out the portal closest to him, down to the distant clouded blue marble that slowly rotated far below. He’d lost track of how many days he’d been in space.
Three, maybe.
He had become unsure after his Samsung Galaxy S6 with the clock on it had died two hours after lift-off. To his devastation, Shoe Shine Bear had discovered that the craft was only fitted with iPhone 6 chargers. He shook his paw wrathfully at this final poetic injustice to his Android kind.
It had all begun about a pawful of days ago. A bloated Shoe Shine Bear, filled with approximately 6.78 boxes of Starry Blast-Os cereal (roughly 2.76 Shoe Shine Bears worth of stomach capacity) triumphantly pulled his prize from the final box. A little cartoon astronaut told him to report to the nearest Transmissions, Research, and Assessment of Planets (T.R.A.P.) Station for his official Space Victory tour and Astro-Winner Astronaut Training immediately.
This had been the target that Shoe Shine Bear had kept in his sights relentlessly for all of the grueling hours it took to go to Harris Teeter and glumph down as many boxes as his paws could grab off the lowest shelf.
A sudden noise caused Shoe Shine Bear to look up; a Harris Teeter employee had caught wind of what Shoe Shine Bear was getting up to in Aisle 6 and had come to express his discontentment with Shoe Shine Bear’s plan. As the employee ran towards him, shouting something that Shoe Shine Bear wasn’t really interested in hearing, Shoe Shine Bear leapt into action, promptly vomiting up three Shoe Shine Bears’ worth of Blast-Os and fleeing the scene.
When Shoe Shine Bear arrived at the T.R.A.P. Headquarters, economically tucked between a Supercuts and a Western-themed pet store called Fistful of Collars, a somewhat sweaty, if friendly, summer intern named Brian was there to greet him. Brian gave Shoe Shine Bear a quick tour of the cereal-making facilities as well as the space travel facilities and explained that the funds for the space program came from all the money they raked in by tricking young children and unemployed adults into buying Starry Blast-Os. Brian remembered to whom he was talking and quickly amended “young children and unemployed adults” to “brave space enthusiasts,” which almost made Shoe Shine Bear forget about being called either a child or poor.
After the tour, Brian the intern sweatily and friendlily handed Shoe Shine Bear off to a sharp-looking woman in a power suit named Tamara. Tamara explained that she was the Executive VP of Space Traveling Things and would take over for Shoe Shine Bear’s Astro-Winner Astronaut Training.
She took Shoe Shine Bear to their “space simulator” which eerily resembled a completely actually functioning spacecraft. Which made Shoe Shine Bear all the more excited to jump into the driver’s seat and press a ton of buttons. Tamara told him to make sure and press the gigantic, ominous red button to the left of the Official Blast-Os Astro-Winner Chair.
This is a really very realistic spaceship simulation, thought Shoe Shine Bear to himself as the doors began to swing shut and the seat began to rumble beneath him. Through the door, he asked Tamara how long the training was supposed to last. Tamara responded, indefinitely.
Shoe Shine Bear was beginning to have some reservations about the nature of his prize. He called out to Tamara to verify that this was indeed a simulation. Tamara responded in the negatory, which gave Shoe Shine Bear even more reservations about the nature of his prize.
Tamara explained that to make up for sales lost after their competitor, Cosmic Nutty Bites, sent a squirrel into space last month as a promotional gimmick, the Blast-Os-T.R.A.P. conglomerate really had to up the ante. Thus, Shoe Shine Bear’s training was going to be a bit different than he had expected.
Shoe Shine Bear argued that that didn’t sound as much like training as it did “involuntary space imprisonment” to which Tamara responded that it qualified as training in that “you now know not to trust people who run joint cereal production and space travel programs,” which Shoe Shine Bear still took some issue with as far as definitions go.
Before he could voice these further objections, however, he was rocked back into his seat as four giant jets blasted the rocket into the air, the hemisphere, and into space.
At least I have Angry Birds, Shoe Shine Bear thought, as he whipped out his Samsung Galaxy S6 and wondered how many levels he could get through on 46% battery.
It was three days later, and Shoe Shine Bear was beginning to doubt the wisdom of having immediately eaten all of the provisions on board. At the time, Shoe Shine Bear had been convinced he could call upon the wisdom of his ancestors and put himself into hibernation until something interesting happened, but it turned out that eating fifty-six boxes of Starry Blast-Os (and one seasonally themed box of Snowflakey Blast-Os) had only led to a hibernation of about eight hours, and that hibernation was really more of a “groany diabetic deathlike coma.”
Shoe Shine Bear had just finished constructing a real-life Angry Birds set out of empty Starry Blast-Os boxes when a sudden bump threw him into them, knocking them all down (like a real-life Angry Bird). Shoe Shine Bear looked out the portal and saw that his ship had hit something: another ship!
He could hardly contain his excitement at the prospect of a companion that wasn’t an imaginary Angry Bird. Suddenly he heard a sound a lot like his spacecraft’s doors unsealing. He was being boarded!
He smiled. Then he stopped smiling. Wait. He was being boarded. He quickly thought of all of the things that could be boarding him that he would like to not board him. This greatly outweighed his tally of things he would enjoy being boarded by, such as an ice-cream-truck-shaped alien, or an Android charger. He had no more time to contemplate his fate, however, as a mysterious figure entered Shoe Shine Bear’s main deck.
It was a squirrel.
More specifically, it was a rather ticky, mangy little squirrel wearing a space suit. The space suit was emblazoned with the symbol of a peanut with kind of a douchey expression, extending an equally douchey thumbs up. This must be the Cosmic Nutty Bites squirrel!
Before Shoe Shine Bear could inquire about his theory, the squirrel declared that he was indeed Ivan the Cosmic Nutty Bites CosmoSquirrel. He declared this in a strong Russian accent, which Shoe Shine Bear was a bit surprised by but pretended to not be surprised by at all in order to not appear uncultured.
Shoe Shine Bear offered Ivan the CosmoSquirrel a seat on a pile of abandoned and slightly crumpled Starry Blast-Os boxes, and Ivan the CosmoSquirrel began to tell his mournful tale.
Apparently, the Cosmic Nutty Bites PR team, without an even cursory understanding of how space works, had come up with the plan of moving a bunch of stars into the shape of a giant peanut. When Ivan the CosmoSquirrel, with a double degree in Space Engineering and Astronomy, had tried to explain to the team how many different types of impossible this was, their response was to blast him into space for Being A Wise-Ass. Ivan the CosmoSquirrel’s fuel had run out as soon as he had exited the stratosphere. He had been aimlessly drifting in orbit ever since.
Shoe Shine Bear asked what Ivan the CosmoSquirrel’s ship ran on for fuel. Ivan responded, incredibly cheap cardboard, actually. Shoe Shine Bear’s face lit up. He had a plan.
Shoe Shine Bear awoke blearily, which was really no change from how he normally woke up. The difference was that this time we was covered in sand and debris. It appeared that the Blast-O boxes had worked almost too well in propelling Ivan the CosmoSquirrel’s Crazy Nutty Spacecraft™ back to Earth into the middle of a deserted desert.
He looked around for Ivan the CosmoSquirrel and found him fastidiously stacking wreckage. Shoe Shine Bear saw that what Ivan the CosmoSquirrel was stacking specifically were volumes of law books.
Apparently Ivan the CosmoSquirrel had always wanted to be a lawyer rather than a low-ranking, fated-to-be-blasted-into-space-in-a-giant-nut-shaped-spacecraft PR executive, and had used his time in orbit to become a pretty handy lawyer.
This struck Shoe Shine Bear with a second brilliant idea, fulfilling his yearly quota for brilliant ideas.
Shoe Shine Bear awoke blearily once again. This time he was in Medium Claims Court, taking on T.R.A.P. with Ivan the CosmoLegalSquirrel as his representation.
Upon returning to civilization Shoe Shine Bear discovered that he had been rebranded as the Starry Blast-Os SpaceVenture Bear and was world famous for his daring (if commercialized) space exploits. With the help of Ivan, Shoe Shine Bear was able to bring a pretty solid image appropriation case against the corporation.
T.R.A.P. didn’t have a chance against the squirrel’s legal adeptness, and quickly folded. Shoe Shine Bear took over the entire Blast-Os-
T.R.A.P. conglomerate, swearing to run it for good instead of evil. He was quickly distracted by a balloon being blown in the wind and promptly forgot about the whole thing, causing the business to be closed forever leaving hundreds of employees out of a job and Brian the intern out of valuable academic credit.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Now that you’ve read the story, make sure you’re all caught up on the hip space lingo! Impress your friends and humble your enemies using these exciting space terms, just like the real Shoe Shine Bear!
ASTRO-WINNER: Like a regular winner, but astro.
BEING A WISE-ASS: A heinous crime punishable by being blasted into space in a giant nut-shaped spacecraft.
COSMOSQUIRREL: A squirrel, but in space.
COSMOLEGALSQUIRREL: A CosmoSquirrel who has gained a law degree.
GLUMPH: Fitting any amount of food in your mouth that is more than your mouth should reasonably be able to hold. Onomatopoeiac.
HARRIS TEETER: in the upper tier of grocery stores, above Food Lion but below Whole Foods. Establishment where they don’t take kindly to people glumphing unpurchased product.
HIBERNATION : Something you can only achieve a weak imitation of by glumphing 57 boxes of Starry Blast-Os.
PAWFUL: A handful, but for bears.
POWER SUIT: Like a suit, but more powerful.
REAL-LIFE ANGRY BIRDS: A game Shoe Shine Bear invents out of a combination of Space Madness and Dead Phone Fever. Involves carefully forming delicate structures out of Starry Blast-o boxes and then painstakingly destroying all of it as soon as possible.
SAMSUNG GALAXY S6: Dumb, annoying phone for a person (or bear) to have that makes all your messages to them turn green instead of blue. Who can live like this?
SPACEVENTURE BEAR: Like a Shoe Shine Bear, but goes on SpaceVentures.
SUMMER INTERN: Sweaty, unpaid, self-conscious worker. Often pale and suffering delusions of future gainful employment. Wide-eyed suckers whose dreams serve as tasty fuel for the soulless corporate machine.
STRATOSPHERE : A space word.
VP: Business term. Stands for Very Posh.
Once upon a time, there was a bear named Shoe Shine Bear, though by this point he had been through so much that he could no longer recall exactly why he was called that.
Shoe Shine Bear looked out the portal closest to him, down to the distant clouded blue marble that slowly rotated far below. He’d lost track of how many days he’d been in space.
Three, maybe.
He had become unsure after his Samsung Galaxy S6 with the clock on it had died two hours after lift-off. To his devastation, Shoe Shine Bear had discovered that the craft was only fitted with iPhone 6 chargers. He shook his paw wrathfully at this final poetic injustice to his Android kind.
It had all begun about a pawful of days ago. A bloated Shoe Shine Bear, filled with approximately 6.78 boxes of Starry Blast-Os cereal (roughly 2.76 Shoe Shine Bears worth of stomach capacity) triumphantly pulled his prize from the final box. A little cartoon astronaut told him to report to the nearest Transmissions, Research, and Assessment of Planets (T.R.A.P.) Station for his official Space Victory tour and Astro-Winner Astronaut Training immediately.
This had been the target that Shoe Shine Bear had kept in his sights relentlessly for all of the grueling hours it took to go to Harris Teeter and glumph down as many boxes as his paws could grab off the lowest shelf.
A sudden noise caused Shoe Shine Bear to look up; a Harris Teeter employee had caught wind of what Shoe Shine Bear was getting up to in Aisle 6 and had come to express his discontentment with Shoe Shine Bear’s plan. As the employee ran towards him, shouting something that Shoe Shine Bear wasn’t really interested in hearing, Shoe Shine Bear leapt into action, promptly vomiting up three Shoe Shine Bears’ worth of Blast-Os and fleeing the scene.
When Shoe Shine Bear arrived at the T.R.A.P. Headquarters, economically tucked between a Supercuts and a Western-themed pet store called Fistful of Collars, a somewhat sweaty, if friendly, summer intern named Brian was there to greet him. Brian gave Shoe Shine Bear a quick tour of the cereal-making facilities as well as the space travel facilities and explained that the funds for the space program came from all the money they raked in by tricking young children and unemployed adults into buying Starry Blast-Os. Brian remembered to whom he was talking and quickly amended “young children and unemployed adults” to “brave space enthusiasts,” which almost made Shoe Shine Bear forget about being called either a child or poor.
After the tour, Brian the intern sweatily and friendlily handed Shoe Shine Bear off to a sharp-looking woman in a power suit named Tamara. Tamara explained that she was the Executive VP of Space Traveling Things and would take over for Shoe Shine Bear’s Astro-Winner Astronaut Training.
She took Shoe Shine Bear to their “space simulator” which eerily resembled a completely actually functioning spacecraft. Which made Shoe Shine Bear all the more excited to jump into the driver’s seat and press a ton of buttons. Tamara told him to make sure and press the gigantic, ominous red button to the left of the Official Blast-Os Astro-Winner Chair.
This is a really very realistic spaceship simulation, thought Shoe Shine Bear to himself as the doors began to swing shut and the seat began to rumble beneath him. Through the door, he asked Tamara how long the training was supposed to last. Tamara responded, indefinitely.
Shoe Shine Bear was beginning to have some reservations about the nature of his prize. He called out to Tamara to verify that this was indeed a simulation. Tamara responded in the negatory, which gave Shoe Shine Bear even more reservations about the nature of his prize.
Tamara explained that to make up for sales lost after their competitor, Cosmic Nutty Bites, sent a squirrel into space last month as a promotional gimmick, the Blast-Os-T.R.A.P. conglomerate really had to up the ante. Thus, Shoe Shine Bear’s training was going to be a bit different than he had expected.
Shoe Shine Bear argued that that didn’t sound as much like training as it did “involuntary space imprisonment” to which Tamara responded that it qualified as training in that “you now know not to trust people who run joint cereal production and space travel programs,” which Shoe Shine Bear still took some issue with as far as definitions go.
Before he could voice these further objections, however, he was rocked back into his seat as four giant jets blasted the rocket into the air, the hemisphere, and into space.
At least I have Angry Birds, Shoe Shine Bear thought, as he whipped out his Samsung Galaxy S6 and wondered how many levels he could get through on 46% battery.
It was three days later, and Shoe Shine Bear was beginning to doubt the wisdom of having immediately eaten all of the provisions on board. At the time, Shoe Shine Bear had been convinced he could call upon the wisdom of his ancestors and put himself into hibernation until something interesting happened, but it turned out that eating fifty-six boxes of Starry Blast-Os (and one seasonally themed box of Snowflakey Blast-Os) had only led to a hibernation of about eight hours, and that hibernation was really more of a “groany diabetic deathlike coma.”
Shoe Shine Bear had just finished constructing a real-life Angry Birds set out of empty Starry Blast-Os boxes when a sudden bump threw him into them, knocking them all down (like a real-life Angry Bird). Shoe Shine Bear looked out the portal and saw that his ship had hit something: another ship!
He could hardly contain his excitement at the prospect of a companion that wasn’t an imaginary Angry Bird. Suddenly he heard a sound a lot like his spacecraft’s doors unsealing. He was being boarded!
He smiled. Then he stopped smiling. Wait. He was being boarded. He quickly thought of all of the things that could be boarding him that he would like to not board him. This greatly outweighed his tally of things he would enjoy being boarded by, such as an ice-cream-truck-shaped alien, or an Android charger. He had no more time to contemplate his fate, however, as a mysterious figure entered Shoe Shine Bear’s main deck.
It was a squirrel.
More specifically, it was a rather ticky, mangy little squirrel wearing a space suit. The space suit was emblazoned with the symbol of a peanut with kind of a douchey expression, extending an equally douchey thumbs up. This must be the Cosmic Nutty Bites squirrel!
Before Shoe Shine Bear could inquire about his theory, the squirrel declared that he was indeed Ivan the Cosmic Nutty Bites CosmoSquirrel. He declared this in a strong Russian accent, which Shoe Shine Bear was a bit surprised by but pretended to not be surprised by at all in order to not appear uncultured.
Shoe Shine Bear offered Ivan the CosmoSquirrel a seat on a pile of abandoned and slightly crumpled Starry Blast-Os boxes, and Ivan the CosmoSquirrel began to tell his mournful tale.
Apparently, the Cosmic Nutty Bites PR team, without an even cursory understanding of how space works, had come up with the plan of moving a bunch of stars into the shape of a giant peanut. When Ivan the CosmoSquirrel, with a double degree in Space Engineering and Astronomy, had tried to explain to the team how many different types of impossible this was, their response was to blast him into space for Being A Wise-Ass. Ivan the CosmoSquirrel’s fuel had run out as soon as he had exited the stratosphere. He had been aimlessly drifting in orbit ever since.
Shoe Shine Bear asked what Ivan the CosmoSquirrel’s ship ran on for fuel. Ivan responded, incredibly cheap cardboard, actually. Shoe Shine Bear’s face lit up. He had a plan.
Shoe Shine Bear awoke blearily, which was really no change from how he normally woke up. The difference was that this time we was covered in sand and debris. It appeared that the Blast-O boxes had worked almost too well in propelling Ivan the CosmoSquirrel’s Crazy Nutty Spacecraft™ back to Earth into the middle of a deserted desert.
He looked around for Ivan the CosmoSquirrel and found him fastidiously stacking wreckage. Shoe Shine Bear saw that what Ivan the CosmoSquirrel was stacking specifically were volumes of law books.
Apparently Ivan the CosmoSquirrel had always wanted to be a lawyer rather than a low-ranking, fated-to-be-blasted-into-space-in-a-giant-nut-shaped-spacecraft PR executive, and had used his time in orbit to become a pretty handy lawyer.
This struck Shoe Shine Bear with a second brilliant idea, fulfilling his yearly quota for brilliant ideas.
Shoe Shine Bear awoke blearily once again. This time he was in Medium Claims Court, taking on T.R.A.P. with Ivan the CosmoLegalSquirrel as his representation.
Upon returning to civilization Shoe Shine Bear discovered that he had been rebranded as the Starry Blast-Os SpaceVenture Bear and was world famous for his daring (if commercialized) space exploits. With the help of Ivan, Shoe Shine Bear was able to bring a pretty solid image appropriation case against the corporation.
T.R.A.P. didn’t have a chance against the squirrel’s legal adeptness, and quickly folded. Shoe Shine Bear took over the entire Blast-Os-
T.R.A.P. conglomerate, swearing to run it for good instead of evil. He was quickly distracted by a balloon being blown in the wind and promptly forgot about the whole thing, causing the business to be closed forever leaving hundreds of employees out of a job and Brian the intern out of valuable academic credit.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Now that you’ve read the story, make sure you’re all caught up on the hip space lingo! Impress your friends and humble your enemies using these exciting space terms, just like the real Shoe Shine Bear!
ASTRO-WINNER: Like a regular winner, but astro.
BEING A WISE-ASS: A heinous crime punishable by being blasted into space in a giant nut-shaped spacecraft.
COSMOSQUIRREL: A squirrel, but in space.
COSMOLEGALSQUIRREL: A CosmoSquirrel who has gained a law degree.
GLUMPH: Fitting any amount of food in your mouth that is more than your mouth should reasonably be able to hold. Onomatopoeiac.
HARRIS TEETER: in the upper tier of grocery stores, above Food Lion but below Whole Foods. Establishment where they don’t take kindly to people glumphing unpurchased product.
HIBERNATION : Something you can only achieve a weak imitation of by glumphing 57 boxes of Starry Blast-Os.
PAWFUL: A handful, but for bears.
POWER SUIT: Like a suit, but more powerful.
REAL-LIFE ANGRY BIRDS: A game Shoe Shine Bear invents out of a combination of Space Madness and Dead Phone Fever. Involves carefully forming delicate structures out of Starry Blast-o boxes and then painstakingly destroying all of it as soon as possible.
SAMSUNG GALAXY S6: Dumb, annoying phone for a person (or bear) to have that makes all your messages to them turn green instead of blue. Who can live like this?
SPACEVENTURE BEAR: Like a Shoe Shine Bear, but goes on SpaceVentures.
SUMMER INTERN: Sweaty, unpaid, self-conscious worker. Often pale and suffering delusions of future gainful employment. Wide-eyed suckers whose dreams serve as tasty fuel for the soulless corporate machine.
STRATOSPHERE : A space word.
VP: Business term. Stands for Very Posh.
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