The ACORN

Writer's Cramp Entry for Feb 2, 2025 prompt

472 WORDS

Sedgewick eschews all the conventional devices: chicken entrails, tarot cards, trick knees, checking shadows, licking their paw and sticking it into the wind. They have a special ritual that works every time: the tail-flick.

The secret is the timing. Arbitrary days on a calendar that can't even mark the precise location of the orbit around the Sun and needs an extra day every four years, except every hundred years (but including the odd millennia insert), and bits of seconds inserted at random, is like rolling dice. And not even shaved dice! One can always say, Spring will come in six weeks! and then declare victory if you even get close. That's not prognostication; that's throwing spaghetti against the wall and interpreting the stain over the mantle as some manifestation of divinity, maternity, or velvety crooning.

After P. Phil set his alarm clock last fall and went into hibernation, Sedgewick had scampered down the old oak tree from their knothole residence, snuck into Phil's abode and reset his clock with a quick flick of their bushy tail to late March.

All winter, as Sedge scurried across the frozen landscape, harvesting acorns the other squirrels missed, they kept a sharp eye on P. P.'s status, tracking his somnambulant movements: how many times does Philly toss and turn; does he snore, and how loudly; which way is that snout of his pointing when the sun reaches its daily apex. This is the only rationale for checking shadows - when the shade of the old oak tree is at its minimum, the Sun is at its apex. If it is cloudy and no shadows are present, Sedge will rely on poorly maintained mechanical contraptions to tell time. But only then! Sedge then stores all that data in their acorn storage, and when Philly's internal clock wakes him up (a far better indication of the coming of Spring - never ignore Mother Nature!), Sedgie plugs all the data into the ACORN computer.

And today is the day!

Sedge flicks the ACORN's dial from INPUT to PROCESS. It churns and spits and sputters and bits of acorn shell shavings fly about, until one shelled acorn finally plops from the 3D printer and ACORN goes silent. Sedgewick sniffs the shelled acorn, checks the color and shape, licks it, and then takes a big chomp out of it with their bucktoothed teeth. They assess the taste, the texture, the hardness, and then Sedgewick pulls down Uncle Ben's Almanac, cross-referencing the data they have amassed.

Evidence-based results in hand, er, paw, Sedgewick marches out the knothole, out across the limbed porch, and clears their throat to announce the result.

Unfortunately, Punxsutawney Phil has already made his entrance, apologized for his tardiness, and his doey-eyed fans are now partying after receiving Phil's pronouncement.

"Need to upgrade that ACORN with a faster nut", Sedgewick laments.