Barry The Fat Badger And The Poisonous Pork Pie

A children’s story, possibly

Barry the Fat Badger waddled through the meadow, his low hanging belly barging past the dandelion heads like a once a year drinker at the bar on New Year’s Eve. He kept his snout close the ground, sniffing out delicious dormice and mouth-watering moles. Baby birds were his favourite. The downy feathers got stuck in his teeth sometimes but the wings were such a tasty treat he couldn’t help himself.

As he approached the wood, the sun peaked out from behind the few clouds in the sky and bathed his surroundings in a glorious spotlight. A breeze lightly tickled his whiskers, carrying with it a meaty, delicately seasoned scent.

He inhaled eagerly, curiously, hungerly. It wasn’t fresh but it wasn’t rancid either. Salty, savoury, peppery. Wrapped in water crust pastry. The meat of a thousand anonymous dead pigs swept up off the butcher’s floor, minced together, and covered in delicious jellified horse carcass.

He crept forward, tentatively yet determinedly. At the edge of the woods the trees were hunched over. The brambles wrapped around them like serpents in The Garden of Eden and created a long dark tunnel, opening up into a clearing in which sat a single tree stump.

Barry edged slowly through the passage, like a stubborn turd on Boxing Day morning, and poked his nose out into the clearing.

The scent consumed him.

Sat on top of the tree stump, glorious and golden, sat the biggest and most beautiful pork pie he had ever seen in his life. Sliced in half to reveal its moist, pink insides, the pie flirted with him. The flaky pastry teased him and the jelly flashed him a metaphorical tit. Its scent no longer danced on the breeze; it hit him like a sledgehammer square between the eyes and left him lovestruck.

He waddled over, no longer trepidatious, now consumed with meaty lust and stood just a couple of steps across from the tree stump.

He looked at the pork pie. The pork pie looked at him. He lunged. It gave itself, willingly.

Barry opened his jaws wide, tilted his head to an impossible angle, bit and swallowed the pie in one single, flowing motion. He stood up on his hind legs and his dinner visibly travelled down his gullet, like a heron gulping down a fax machine.

It was beautiful. It was glorious. It was everything a fat badger could dream of.

‘Aha! I’ve got you, you bastard!’

A faceless voice came from the undergrowth. The weeds parted and gingerly out stepped Nigel the Resentful Weasel.

His voice was creaky and full of animosity, like a haunted toilet seat, and his body was the shape of a frying pan with legs. Low to the ground and completely flat and round, he defied logic and reason. He shouldn’t be able to walk, his organs shouldn’t be able to function. And yet here he was, the flattest weasel in all the world standing next to the remnants of a magnificent pork pie, seemingly gloating.

‘I knew you’d do it.’ He squeaked. ‘I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist.’ He slowly paced around Barry, like a Bond villain on legs four inches long.

‘You never could resist a lump of meat-like substance wrapped in pastry, you fat shit’, he spat. ‘So I left you a little present, only this might be the last present you ever receive’.

Nigel stepped back and pulled a tiny vial of luminous green liquid from deep within his unkempt fur. He held it up and the sunlight bathed it, illuminating the tiny label on which was scrawled ‘poison’.

‘So now you’ll get what’s coming to you, Barry, ’ his voice was almost tearful now, ‘Now you’ll know pain like I do. But only for a short few minutes, because when this poison is done with you it will-’

Barry dragged his stomach along the ground, took 3 rapid steps forward and clamped Nigel between his jaws. He swung his head upwards and flung him into the air, catching him, the vial and the poison in mouth as they fell.

Then, in one gulp, Barry swallowed them all, because he was a very fat badger indeed, and he couldn’t give a shit.

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