Well I suppose you could say we were maybe at fault. I am talking about the recent brief blackout that affected a portion of downtown Toronto. My attorney and I spent a reflective couple of hours in a local establishment debriefing the events leading up to the aforementioned blackout.

 

This twisted saga, like most great tales do, started out with a copy of the nineteen fifty-two Guide to Lubyanka English-Russian dictionary, a desire to create an alternative power source and a churlish short-legged omnivore.

My attorney, a home schooled physicist, has long sought a means of self-sustaining power so he can disentangle himself from the national grid, therefore freeing up much needed capital for other pursuits. I had been idly chatting with a one of my less moral Slavic acquaintances when he happened to mention, in passing, that he had come across the power plant for a Plavnik class nuclear submarine. Postage and packing would be waived on a cash settlement. I, of course, immediately called my erstwhile attorney knowing that he had been looking for something in that vein. Things progressed rapidly and to cut a long story short, the package arrived at my friends house. The stairs to the basement were swiftly widened to accommodate the various apparatuses and the march to electrical freedom commenced.

 The first obstacle we encountered was the instruction manual. Unfortunately the English version had become welded together with an unidentifiable glutinous substance rendering many of the pages unreadable. The Russian handbook was intact however and, unsurprisingly, written in Russian, a language neither of us was fluent in. This led to the first error in judgment of the proceedings. I nipped home and retrieved my English-Russian dictionary and returned certain I had saved the day and building this magnificent beast could resume. There were two things that in retrospect we should have acted upon. The first being the date of when the digest was written and secondly the fact that word Russian was spelt with one ‘S’. I naturally assumed when I purchased this volume that I had stumbled upon a printing mistake that would eventually triple my original outlay. The second word we looked up was the Russian for danger. Which is, опасность.  I’ve found that this is always a good word to know in any language.

Thus, things began to move on rapidly from this juncture. We were surprised by some of the instructions, in particular ‘place the badger on the spindle and rotate one hundred and eighty degrees’. This held us up a bit, but not as you might think. The badger was randomly selected from the cages in the sub basement. No, the real interruption in the assembly of the machine, is that nowhere did it specify what state the omnivore should be in. To put it simply our dilemma was; alive or dead. After quite the moral discourse we deduced the animal had to be alive to perform whatever function it had to achieve in the successful operation of this machine. Therefore the badger was tied securely, or so we assumed, to the spindle and inserted into the mechanism. There were other oddments that I do not wish to discuss in any detail for fear of reprisal from various local businesses.

Well, around three oh five in the afternoon came the time to turn the contraption on and test my attorneys competency in electro thermal dynamics. The big green button was pushed, there was silence for a brief moment and a slow whirring began. A variety of lights flickered off and on casting ominous shadows on the walls, there began a serious of clicks, hums and whines. Then were heard hissing, and a sound not unlike a very angry Mydaus thrashing against polished stainless steel. The hissing got much louder as did the thrashing sound. My attorney shouted, “The badger is loose, the badger is loose” several times in succession prompting both of us the evacuate the area, it was as we were screaming like pubescent Taylor Swift fans heading for the exit all the lights went out and the machine fell silent except for the terrifying wails of a trapped and angry Mustelidale.

 The official reason for the power outage was an overloaded main trunk cable in the Ossington- College area. We felt it was important to give an alternate version of events and offer our apologies if we were indeed the cause. Message ends.

No wildlife was hurt, abused or offended in the course of this narrative