Strange Yarns

The Other Floxes

The Other Floxes

 

It started like most fads- on Instagram. Uber-celebutard Kammy Kaladain, famous for a big ass, big money, and not much else began posting snaps of her new pet. A new breed of overbred animal to join the ranks of pot-belly pig and pom-pug. The once sly, mischievous, regal, puckish red fox had been bred and bred and bred some more until all that was left is a puff of adorable that’s shoved into expensive designer purses and paraded through social media. Meet the flox.

The science of breeding hijacked evolution and now the flox reigns undisputed champion of cutest and therefor most useless creature in the long history of what we call life. High fructose corn syrup is to sweet as the flox is to cute. Hypercutifcation. #Adorbs #Icanteven.  

The flox has big black eyes, an effect of breeding out the iris. Owners would soon learn floxes are prone to going blind if you took them for walks on sunny days. Not that they could walk very far. Their legs broke easily and without much cause. Their noses are tiny and often sneeze little tiny sneezes that melt even the coldest heart. This tiny nose results in severe respiratory problems due to nasal passages that a fine hair could eclipse. Their floppy tongues hang out the side of their mouths giving them the appearance of always waiting for a cookie or a big fat kiss. Most floxes die from choking on their massive tongues. Their tails are big and bushy and fire orange with a white tip. When you look at a flox you feel like crying and giggling all at once. One man tweeted he never felt the urge to breast feed until he laid eyes on a flox #confused.

A flox’s DNA is designed to build a creature that makes you feel like you’re wrapped in a blanket on Christmas morning, warming by a fire that’s roasting chestnuts. That’s how we feel. I can’t imagine how a flox feels. They have arthritis, their bones are brittle kindling, they can’t breath, and they’re constantly gagging on their own tongues. They live lives of horrendous torture by just being themselves and they are the hottest pet on the market.

I first heard of the flox at Christmas dinner at my older sister’s. She’s the one with the house, husband, and kid. I’m the one with a budding journalism career… seven years and still germinating.  My niece, Madison wanted a flox so badly she tore at her hair and convulsed in spasms of I want one. Get me one! In the calms of the spoiled storm she showed me Google images of the flox on her ipad. Madison had begged her parents for one for the past month, but unless you’re Kammy Kaladain or someone else of her unimaginable Klout score you ain’t getting one. 

When Madison opened her presents and discovered she wasn’t getting a flox… well, it may as well have been a scene out of the exorcist. She kicked her first present, a designer animal hoodie into the fireplace and then stomped her foot through the second gift, a new ipad mini. Ahh, kids these days.

Most everything Madison holds as an interest I find to be the antithesis of anything of value. She spent most of Christmas glued to her ipad looking at pictures of that expensive train wreck of human being, Kammy Kaladain. Just a six year old spending her time with a surgically enlarged ass implant dressed in a diamond encrusted thong. I don’t remember Madison always being this awful. I guess unlimited unsupervised social media has evolved her into this. Maybe I’m just old for 30.

We did have one interest in common. I couldn’t help but find the flox fascinating. I had recently watched the TV series Cosmos and recalled a segment where Neil Degrasse Tyson discussed how dogs evolved from wolves because some of the tamer wolves started hanging out near human campsites looking for scraps. Soon an interspecies friendship was born and our selection for less bitey animals affected their evolution. Tens of thousands of years later and those wolves became labradoodles.