The Velveteen Surprise
Keeping Tabs Weekly, Summer 2021
If you say in the first act that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third act it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there. —Anton Chekhov
Nicolas Tyler, affectionately known as “Soup Sandwich” around Getty Gulch, Minnesota, was considered an oddity by his neighbors, a harmless crackpot. That all changed after the sixth graders’ theatrical production at Nero Teresa Elementary School last spring.
“Oh, we liked him well enough,” Esther Olson, a paraprofessional at Nero Teresa, told Keeping Tabs Weekly. “But he was peculiar, you betcha. Always had a book with him, but he was never reading it, no sir.”
Mr. Tyler had been observed talking to himself on numerous occasions, but the folks of Getty Gulch found him eager and generous when participating in local celebrations, so his eccentricities were overlooked. In hindsight, however, few residents could say they’d been inside the bachelor’s cabin or ever heard him mention any relatives.
“You guys wouldn’t have thought a thing about Soup Sandwich, either,” Chief William Gustafsen of the Getty Gulch Police Department said after the incident. “He came to Getty Gulch about a decade ago, and he was one of us, dontcha know.”
Mr. Tyler gave liberally to this year’s meat raffle at the VFW, the chief confirmed. He donated wild rabbits that he caught locally, so none of the chaperons saw anything out of the ordinary when he donated a trio of tame bunnies as props for the sixth-grade play based on the book Watership Down, the story of a small group of brave rabbits trying to find a new home when theirs is destroyed.
Just before the curtain closed on the second act, the three rabbits apparently exploded.
No children were injured, but parents in the first two rows in the school’s gymnasium were overcome by flying fur and what Miss Olson described as “underprepared hasenpfeffer.”
“All I can figure is, those rabbits had fireworks in ’em,” Chief Gustafsen said. “One summer, they accidentally set off all the fireworks at the same time over the lake. The show was over in about two minutes, but it was a glorious two minutes. Uff-da, but it was just like the Fluff of July in the gym.”
Mr. Tyler has since gone missing from Getty Gulch, though there are no charges pending against him.
“Oh, yeah, I saw him right after those bunnies blew up,” Miss Olson said. “I was like, ‘oh, geez Louise, what happened?’ and he was standing right next to me looking like he’d seen a ghost. He had his book with him, too, you betcha, and he closed it right then and there. He turned ’round and walked right under the home team basket and out of the gym.”
Chief Gustafsen confirmed her encounter. “Esther Olson was the last person to see Soup Sandwich before he disappeared. Nobody’s seen him since.”
“I heard him talking to himself, just before he left,” Miss Olson said. “It sounded to me like he said, ‘I coulda sworn they was defused.’”
