The air was cold around Templeton’s snout as he pushed it out through a gap in the floorboards. Much colder than it was outside. He peeked his head out and tried to get a look around, but the room was dark, and much of his view was blocked by boxes. There was no sound except the constant hum of an air conditioner and the patter of the rain on the roof. There were no sounds of humans though, and although he couldn’t place a finger on what exactly, he knew he smelled some kind of food.
The gap in floorboards was large, and would have more than allowed him to pass through just a day before, but now he wasn’t so sure. It certainly wouldn’t be easy. He put his front paws at the openings of the hole on either side of himself and began to push down into his paws to lift himself through.
His enormous width almost immediately filled the gap. He pushed and strained, forcing more and more of his belly up over the lip of the floorboard. But before even his widest point could clear the hole, he could push himself no further.
His feet kicked helplessly at the air in the gap between the building and the ground outside, but found nothing to push off of. Deciding to give up and turn back, he tried to force his front paws back through the gap to try to pull himself back down, but could find no space that hadn’t already been filled by his bulk. He could shove his fingers between his body and the wood, but not far enough to get a grip on anything. He was stuck right where he was.
Templeton began to panic. This was bad. Desperately, he reached out for a nearby box that had earlier blocked his vision, hoping to find something inside to help. His claw caught a corner of the box, shearing it off. He tried to toss the scrap away, but it stuck to his paw. He looked at his paw and saw that the inside of the scrap was a glob of a yellowish creamy substance, mostly solid in the frigid air but melting around his fingers.
He sniffed it. It couldn’t be. Could it? He shoved his paw into his mouth and devoured the substance, scrap and all.
It was! Butter!
Templeton looked at the box and saw that where his claw had torn open the box it had exposed a huge slab of butter. He lurched forward, swiping his claws at it, getting them covered in the stuff, making them incredibly slippery, then began massaging the space where his belly met the floorboard, smearing it with the butter.
He then put his paws at either side of the gap and pushed once again. And slowly, but surely, more of him slid through.
“Oh, ho! This is incredible!” he laughed. He repeated the process over the next few minutes, grabbing chunks of butter, spreading them over his belly, and sliding out a fraction of an inch at a time. More and more of the rat spilled out over the floor around the hole, like a too-large muffin baking in a tiny tin. His gray coat was dripping with butter.
As he got further, he was able to reach more butter from the box, popping large chunks of it into his own mouth between rubbing it over his fur. “One good turn deserves another,” he laughed as he sucked a hunk of butter half the size of his head off his paw. “I helped myself, so now I just have to help myself.”
After a long struggle, prolonged by his snacking, he finally popped free after one final push, sliding across the floor on his butter-slick gut.
But when he stopped sliding, his face froze into a look of terror. There, looming before him was a human.
Or was it? It was shaped exactly like a human, but was standing perfectly motionless. And its skin, it’s hair, it’s clothes, it’s shoes were all the same creamy beige color. Templeton’s fear melted away into curiosity: it couldn’t be, could it?
He rocked backwards, planted his feet and hefted his belly off the ground. Its slippery surface popped off the floor with a wet “thock!” He rocked back on his hips and waddled around to the front of the figure. He burst into a wide grin when we realized what he was looking at.
“What will you humans think of next?”
It was a statue of a farmer, carved entirely out of butter. Standing beside it that was a sculpture of a dairy cow, also made of butter. There were other objects in the room, glass milk bottles, tin pails, a short three-legged stool, all arranged in a nearly-finished tableau facing a floor-to-ceiling glass panel that split the room in half so that spectators could see. On the opposite wall, behind the statue, was a large slab of butter with the words, “Thank You, Dairy Farmers” carved into it.
On the floor among the bottles were sculptors’ tools and dozens and dozens of boxes of butter just like the one Templeton had torn into.
Little drips slid between his fingers as Templeton rubbed his paws together and looked around the room.
“Let’s see, which of you should I eat first?”
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