Poem: "Snappy Action"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This poem is spillover from the June 3, 2014 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from rosieknight. It also fills the "first person narration" square in my 6-1-14 card for the genprompt_bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by Anthony & Shirley Barrette. It belongs to the Polychrome Heroics series.

By the way, this was my mother's favorite poem of the last batch I sent them; she said it made her laugh. We have some family stories about snapping turtles. My grandmother got chased by one. Honestly, I probably would have skedaddled too.


"Snappy Action"


At first it was funny when
we found the snapping turtle
in the little employee park
behind our factory.

It got strange when she
started climbing up
the chain-link fence
to get back to the pond
where the wastewater collected.

We all laughed
when she fell off the fence.

Duke just had to go over
and poke her with a stick.
She hissed at him
and bit the stick in half.

It was a two-inch-thick stick.

Then she started chewing
on the chain-link fence.

Tink.
Plink.

She was cutting through the metal
as if her jaws were wire snips.

"Okay," I said, as I
backed slowly away
from the super-turtle.
"It's time to call SPOON."

* * *

Notes:

Ironsides -- She is a Common Snapping Turtle, about 20 inches from nose to tail tip. Rescued from a factory pond, she is now the mascot for the SPOON base in Easy City. She lives in their rain garden full of brightly colored plants.
Super-Durability means she is tougher than most things around her, so she can bite through wires, and she has survived having a truck backed over her. Super-Intellect for a reptile with a small brain means she's about as smart as an ordinary dog, so she can figure out simple puzzles and is difficult to contain. Super-Strength is not as much as a human's, but she can dig through concrete or lift fallen logs. She is smart and strong enough to climb or chew through most fences. Also she once bit the forefinger off a supervillain who teased her. Yeah, that's on YouTube.
Origin: Hatched in a polluted pond full of runoff from a Louisiana factory.
Qualities: Master (+6) Snapping Turtle, Good (+2) Agility
Powers: Average (0) Super-Durability, Average (0) Super-Intellect, Average (0) Super-Strength

* * *

Ironsides is a common snapping turtle, one of Louisiana's native reptiles. If you're surprised by the smooth shell, you're thinking of alligator snappers, a distantly related species.



Factory pollution is a serious problem with many negative effects. In Terramagne, mysterious chemicals form one of the commoner causes of superpowers. There are ways to prevent pollution and things you can do to fight it.

Animals can be quite smart and many excel at solving puzzles. Chimpanzees, like humans, may solve puzzles just for the fun of it. Some reptiles show complex and flexible behavior too.

Comments

Definitely call SPOON!

[dialecticdreamer]

I love it! I needed a good chuckle, and it's more at the situation than at the turtle herself.

But I wonder... what will her offspring be like?

[chanter1944]

Ooh yeeks, snapping turtles rather scare me! I was once bitten by one of those; a teacher of mine rescued it from the middle of the road, warned me to be careful of the claws but allowed me to touch its shell. I unwittingly petted said shell a little too near one edge and snap!city. I got hurried home to run my finger (the middle one, if you can believe it) under a faucet and get bandaged up. Turtle got released at the local quarry.

Easy City is growing on me like mad. :) I have biases in that direction anyway, I admit.

[mdlbear]

Fun! There were rumored to be alligator snappers in the river near our house in Connecticut. Snappers are pretty scary even without being super.

[lynnoconnacht]

I can see why this one made your mum laugh. It made me laugh too. ^_^ I'm sad it ends there, though. I would've liked to see how SPOON handled the situation. ^_^

[stardreamer]

We once found a common snapper in a dangerous location on the side of the road near the entrance to the UPS shipping facility (we were dropping off a box there). We relocated it -- carefully! -- to a nearby ditch that had some water in it.

I have a pretty good idea how much pressure a normal snapper of that size can exert with its jaws. It doesn't surprise me at all that a super-powered one effectively has heavy-duty dykes that blast right thru fencing wire.

Snapping Turtle

[(Anonymous)]

The turtles can go through quite a large stick. I live near Lake Placid NY, and we once caught a rough shelled snapping turtle that was as big as the bottom of an average outdoor garbage bin. It's shell was over two feet long, head to tail. It was really far away from any water, so my dad relocated it, using the garbage bin, to a nearby swamp. He did let all us kids in the neighbor hood look at it first.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

We used to get box turtles all the time in Tennessee.. just as glad not to run across a snapper, though. Ouch! :)

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

whoa... you mean Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles could exist in Terramagne?! Radical!

Seriously though, I like the way you're considering the fallout of pollution in a world where you can gain super-powers by exposure to 'mysterious chemicals'. I bet the Terramagne version of the EPA has a bite worse than Ironsides!

[gingicat]

This is one awesome turtle. At some point I'd love to see something about Granny Whammy visiting it.

One of my few superhero fanfics bounces off of a canon story about pollution:
http://archiveofourown.org/works/2814566