Hunting the feral pizza!

Friend, fellow author and blogger Alma Boykin has written a very funny short story on her blog about hunting feral pizza.

Gina found the spot and set the box down. She shifted it until the shadow dapples broke up the straight lines of the trap’s edges. The brown blended into the soil, so she didn’t bother with the camouflage drape. Gina opened the fresh tub of bait, a fragrant blend of ranch dressing and bits of crust, and set it in the back of the box by the hinge. Then she triple checked the tranquilizer tips on the stabilizer mounted to the trap’s lid. When it dropped, the four darts hit the pizza in a soft area, injecting the calming blend into the tomato stream, while the stabilizer held the pizza down so it couldn’t flap up and hurt itself against the lid. No one paid decent money for lid-bruised pizzas, and it they’d shed some of their toppings? Gina sighed a little, remembering the month they’d run out of stabilizers. She’d almost starved.

Last of all Gina set the trap. She reeled a tiny wire, fine as a hair, out from the trigger and spool. A thin strip of clear plastic back by the hinge held the trap open, and she ran the end of the wire through a hole in the strip, then attached the break-away. When she pulled the trigger, the pressure on the break-away made it fail just after the hold-open slid out of its dents, letting her pull the wire out as the lid dropped. Gina found her watch spot, took up most of the slack in the wire, and sat down to wait.

Anyone could hunt pizzas, but trapping required patience most people lacked. Gina’s brothers still hunted for themselves, but she’d decided she preferred selling pizzas for breeding stock. She’d apprenticed with Lui and started from the bottom, folding traps and cleaning up the grease catchers, then worked her way up to assistant trapper. She watched, listening.

A breadstick slithered past, sniffing at the trap before moving on. Gina relaxed. Breadsticks in this area tended to avoid ranch bait, but marinara? She hid a shiver as she remembered finding Toni’s remains. He’d been using marinara, trying to catch an extra-large carnivore’s delight, when a big calzone showed up instead. He’d beaten it off, but the marinara spill brought what must have been hundreds of breadsticks out of hiding. Toni’d set his trap over an underground nest, poor bastard. Gina’d had nightmares for a week, and still didn’t like working with marinara unless she had backup. The harpoon gun she carried wouldn’t help in a breadstick swarm.

There's more at the link.

The story is wonderfully thought out, and wickedly amusing.  Go read the whole thing.  Just be warned . . . it might leave you hungry for more - pizza, that is!

Peter