Ice Cream Moose

I woke up one morning and found a moose sleeping in my driveway.

I walked up to the moose and gave it a shove with my foot.

"Yo Moose," I said. "Wake up. You're blocking my car. Get outta my driveway!"

But the moose didn't budge. It lifted its head up real lazy-like and gave me this real stink-eyed look as if I was a dickhead for waking it up. Then the moose lay its head back down on the ground and closed its sleepy eyes.

"Come on! Moose! Seriously," I said. "You gotta move!"

"I ain't gotta do nothing," the moose replied. Its eyes were still closed, and its voice was sleepy.

"Ugh!" I said. Then I thought about my situation for a couple minutes. "What if I give you some ice cream?"

The moose seemed to dig this idea. Its eyes opened, and its head perked up.

"Ice cream? What kind of ice cream?"

"Shit, I don't know. Whatever I've got in the freezer."

"It doesn't have nuts in it, does it? Because I'm allergic to nuts."

"Uuuh, no, I don't think so."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm pretty sure…."

"Well, you better be certain 'cause if I eat nuts my throat will be constricted and I'll die. I mean, I won't be able to breathe. It's awful. One time, when I was still a little moose, I accidentally ate a peanut butter sandwich and I swear to God I thought my life was over. I saw it flash before my eyes just like they say. I thought I was going to die right there for sure. Fortunately, there was this dude in the forest where I was living who specialized in moose allergies. If not for him I could have died. He gave me some pills and afterwards I went out for some ice cream."

"Where did you get the peanut butter sandwich?"

"I don't know. I think I found it in some garbage."

"Dude. You ate from the garbage?"

"Yeah."

"That's so gross."

"Fuck you. Anyway, about that ice cream…."

"Oh, yeah, I'll go check…."

"Wait, wait – if it's too hard, make sure you microwave it for a minute."

"What?"

"If the ice cream is hard you need to microwave it to soften it up. My teeth are sensitive."

"Dude.…"

"Seriously. If ice cream is too hard I can't eat it. It will hurt my teeth for days. It's like eating plastic or a shard of glass. Have you ever bitten into a popsicle?"

"No."

"Well, it sucks. I don't recommend it."

"I'm not microwaving your ice cream, moose."

"Just do it, come on. It'll take you like a second. It's not like you're doing anything."

"Not doing anything? I should have been at work 15 minutes ago! I'm already late as it is!"

"And the longer we argue about microwaving my ice cream the more late you are going to be.…"

"Jesus Christ! What a baby! Fine! Alright! I'll microwave your goddamn ice cream!"

So I went back in the house to get the moose some ice cream. There were two kinds in the freezer: pistachio and chocolate. I couldn't find the ice cream scoop anywhere. I searched every drawer in the kitchen. Nothing. It drove me crazy. Eventually I found it in the sink, of course. One of my asshole roommates, who gets home from work ridiculously late at night, eats ice cream at like four in the morning and leaves the ice cream scoop, with sticky melted ice cream still stuck to it, hanging out in the sink. So I rinsed the scoop off, grabbed a bowl, dumped three blobs of chocolate ice cream in there, and brought it out to the moose.

"Jeez." Said the moose. "Took you long enough."

"Sorry, I couldn't find the ice cream scoop."

The moose peered skeptically at the bowl of ice cream I was holding.

"What is that?"

"It's your ice cream."

"That? It's like three scoops!"

"Uh, yeah, and?"

"I'm a moose, okay. A moose eats way more than three scoops."

"Fuck, man. How the hell am I supposed to know?"

"Use your brain! Have you seen how huge I am? I'm a moose. Do I look like a three scoops moose to you?"

I eyeballed the moose. It was pretty fat even for a moose.

"I guess not," I said.

"How about tossing another ten or 11 scoops into that bowl. Actually, maybe you should use a bigger bowl. Do you have a real big bowl, like the kind people serve salads in?"

I thought for a minute. "Nah, we're not really salad bowl kinda people in this house."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing. I mean, we just don't eat salad that much, or… not enough to necessitate a bowl to serve it in anyway."

"Well, do you have some other sort of large bowl?"

"I've got a mop bucket."

"A mop bucket?"

"Yeah."

"Would you eat ice cream out of a mop bucket?"

"No, but I'm not a moose."

"Dude! What the fuck! So is that what you think I am, some scumbag animal that eats out of filthy mop buckets? Fuck you!"

"Okay, okay. I could clean the mop bucket."

"No way! I don't trust you. You're gross."

"I'm not gross!"

"Dude, trust me. You're gross. Don't you have anything else you could put the ice cream in?"

"What if I just used like four or five normal-sized bowls?"

The moose thought about this.

"Do you even have four or five bowls?"

"Sure."

"Are they clean?"

"Sure."

This was a total lie of course. At least three of the bowls were in the sink and had been there for a couple of days.

"Okay, well, I guess we have no choice."

So I started back towards my house, but the moose cut me off just as I was headed inside.

"Wait! Hold up! You wouldn't happen to have any sprinkles would you?"

"Huh?"

"Sprinkles. Like, chocolate sprinkles for the ice cream. Or maybe some whipped cream and a cherry. Or some chocolate sauce. Or maybe some blueberries or something. That would be fucking sweet. Regular old ice cream is kind of boring."

"Dude, I don't have any of that shit. I've got like half a bag of barbecue potato chips. Want that?"

"On the ice cream?!"

"Sure."

"That's disgusting!"

"No way! Come on! I crush barbecue chips into my blueberry yogurt all the time. It's great! Sometimes I crush them over pizza too. They're good in everything."

"You are a strange dude."

"Fuck you, moose! You want the chips or not?"

"No – plain chocolate ice cream will be fine, thanks."

So I went in the house and rinsed out four more bowls. They were pretty dirty, but not that bad. One of them had dried-up old spaghetti crusted to it that I had a hell of a time getting off. I filled the bowls with chocolate ice cream, and, as it turned out, there was some whipped cream and chocolate syrup in the fridge, so I piled some of that junk on top of all the ice cream.

I brought five bowls of ice cream out to the moose. It was pretty stoked that I found whipped cream and chocolate syrup. The moose wolfed down two bowls of ice cream real fast and got a headache from the cold, so it took a break and whined for a while.

"You said you would microwave the ice cream!" said the moose.

"I did!" I lied.

"No you didn't! I'm not an asshole! I can tell whether ice cream has been microwaved or not, okay!"

"Look, okay, you're right, I didn't microwave it. But there was no malicious intent! I just forgot. It was a totally innocent mistake."

"Easy for you to say, you don't have to suffer through this headache!"

The moose kept going on, but I got sick of hearing it. I went inside and made some coffee. I also ate an English muffin with strawberry jelly. When I came back outside the moose was no longer lying down. It was sort of sitting up on its rear end and holding a bowl of ice cream up to its snout with its forelegs. Empty bowls of ice cream were lying all around it – they were licked clean, to a polish. The moose, with its snout in the bowl, gobbled the ice cream up and licked the bowl clean. The noise was pretty sloppy and hilarious, and it got a lot of chocolate ice cream stuck to the fur around its snout.

When the moose finished the last bowl of ice cream, I said, "Okay, now get the fuck out of my driveway. A deal is a deal."

"Okay," said the moose. "Have fun at work."

When it finally got up and skulked away, I got in my car and took off. I was already pretty late, so I made a pit stop to grab a really tasty burrito with chicken, rice, black beans, and corn. I arrived at work just after 12. The rest of the day was pretty boring. I remember eating a cookie.

When I woke up the next day, the moose was lying in my driveway again.

"Dude!" I said. "Come on, moose! I can't be late to work two days in a row! What is your fucking problem?"

The moose woke up slowly. It lifted its sleepy head off the ground and squinted at me. Then it coughed a couple times. "Hey man," said the moose. "What's up?"

"Nothing is up. You're blocking my driveway again, dude. I need to get my car out so I can go to work. Can you please move?"

"I'm blocking your driveway?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, sorry."

"It's no big deal. Just get out of the way. You're blocking my car."

The moose didn't move. It just stretched its neck out in a sleepy way and yawned deeply. The moose sighed and looked around as if it was lost.

"Hey," said the moose. "You got any of that ice cream left?"

"No," I said. "You ate all the chocolate ice cream. All I got left is pistachio."

"Well, I can't eat pistachio, man. That's a nut. I'm allergic to nuts."

"I know you're allergic to nuts, but pistachio is all I have. You want some cereal? Some cold pizza?"

The moose thought for a minute.

"What kind of pizza?"

"Goddamn it, I don't know. I think it was chicken and bacon."

"Oh. Well, I don't like bacon on pizza. It's too… bacony."

"That's really a fucking shame. Listen. I have to get to work, and I don't have any fucking ice cream. So could you please get the fuck out of my driveway like lickety-split so I can go to fucking work already? I don't want to be late for work again!"

The moose thought about it for a minute.

"What about those barbecue chips you mentioned yesterday? Got any of those?"

"No. I finished them yesterday."

"Oh."

The moose thought for a minute.

"FINE," I said. "I'll buy you some goddamn ice cream on my way home from work. Just get out of the way!"

The moose eyed me skeptically.

"You promise?" it said.

I sighed, exasperated. "Yes, I promise, I'll buy a whole big bucket of ice cream just for you. Just please, PLEASE get out of the driveway!"

"With whipped cream and cherries?..."

"Are you serious?"

The moose took a deep breath and acted like it was going to go back to sleep.

"FINE," I said. "YES, WITH WHIPPED CREAM AND CHERRIES! Just GET OUT OF THE WAY."

The moose heaved a deep sigh, as if it was doing me an incredibly huge favor, and it got up and slowly skulked off into the woods behind my house.

Since then, I've found the moose lying in my driveway pretty much every morning. Except holidays. The moose usually goes home to visit its family on holidays. I explained my situation to the dude at the grocery store, and he sort of took pity on me and sells me the ice cream pretty cheap. It's no big deal, I guess. I mean, at first I was kind of irritated, but nowadays the moose is sort of like a pet. Like this big, mutant, ice cream-eating dog, you know? Whatever.

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LYNCH 2009