And my good friend Tom has submitted a short work of literature in order to win my bloggiversary contest. Read and enjoy, and don't let its overpowering amazingness discourage you from submitting as well- I may give out more than one prize!

Now Edgar’s Gone…
By Tom Aechtner

The man in the tuxedo stumbled twice. The first trip caused by his drunken state, which seemingly increased the grip on his artificially lustrous rental shoes. The second induced by an embarrassed jerky reaction to the first. In an attempt to regain lost face, he looked back and scowled at an imaginary squirrel that must have darted in front of him, causing him to lose balance.
“Goddamn squirrels!” he seethed, inwardly contented that all of the other wedding guests must have bought the whole squirrel story. Smiling he turned and continued on his way. The man in the tuxedo stumbled for a third time.
He awkwardly opened the exit door from the gymnasium and stepped out into the night. The strange aqua green colours of the reception decorations seemed to have acted as a visual diuretic, catalyzing the effects of the champagne. After finding the men’s washroom teeming with an excess of less-than-accurate sharp shooters, he had made the decision to step outside. Epileptically he wrestled with his fly, sure that a squirrel had sewn it shut before he had put the pants on this morning. He lurched towards the ‘Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic High School’ sign, and in an anticlimactic miscalculation his urine ricocheted off of the ‘A’ in Mary, dousing the all too perfect shoes.
“Idiot,” Berg whispered to himself. Though he wasn’t Catholic he knew better than to attempt such an odious desecration of something sacrosanct, regardless of the faith. Berg chuckled as he thought of his own religion: ‘The Immaculate Goodness of Eating Penguin Hearts.’ He fought the temptation to lick his massive polar bear chops as he hid in the bushes, watching the man in the tuxedo.
Berg was much like any other polar bear. He enjoyed swimming, and winking his double lidded eyes. But unlike other polar bears, he also enjoyed eating penguins. This, of course, is impossible for other polar bears as penguins live at the opposite pole. Berg, however, had never seen his frigid northern home, and knew only as much about polar bears as he could glean from the 30x30cm information signs that were located around his zoo pen. And these he had read in haste. One can only read in haste when one is a polar bear escaping from the Auckland zoo.
The Auckland Zoo has never had an official polar bear pen, and as a result of Berg, they probably never will. Berg was born outside of New Zealand and raised by humans after his mother died. The zoo of his birth and childhood fell into hard times and his human keepers were forced to seek help from other more reputable animal sanctuaries. It so happened that the main investor/operator/Big Kahuna of the Auckland Zoo (who would often be seen sporting a much too tight tie depicting a cartoon polar bear in a top hat) had been planning on adding a polar bear exhibit. And so, Berg found himself in a tiny chilled New Zealand pen, growing older as the zoo completed their state-of-the-art ‘Auck-Artica’ display. Finally, after months of confinement, the tight-tie Kahuna had Berg moved into the exhibit in anticipation of its surprise opening to the public. Though the Kahuna was near coronary failure in his excitement of the unveiling, Berg quickly surveyed his new quarters in distaste. Actually, it wasn’t the exhibit that displeased him (for he didn’t actually know what a true polar bear habitat should look like) but the thought of the zoo visitors. Mainly it was the snot that Berg couldn’t stand. The sticky algae coloured ooze that dripped from the smallest of the visitors. Dripping and dripping and dripping, being smeared by freshly coated hands onto the pen windows and railings. Unknown to most humans Polar bears despise the scent of human snot. It smells to them like, well, like the inside of a human nose – which is quite abhorrent to much of the animal kingdom. Incidentally it was snot that led his escape.
After spending a number of hours in his new sanctuary the Kahuna dropped by to visit Berg. With evident, almost nauseating pride, he gawked at Berg and sang the praises of the exhibit. In sweat filled glee he circled around to the zoo keepers’ entrance, and tossed a number of fish over the top of the metallic gate. They smacked the ground in front of Berg, who was always eager to squelch his monumental appetite. As the fish disappeared in the grand slaps of his saliva foamed mouth, Berg noticed the Kahuna hanging his arms over the gate, cleaning off the scaly fish slime from his hands with a well used handkerchief. Berg twitched his nostrils, and stopped crunching the fish head that rolled tastefully along his tongue. In horror he watched as the handkerchief, previously filled with the Kahuna’s defiling snot, was accidentally dropped inside his pen. The Kahuna looked over the gate at his dropped rag, then at Berg, back to the rag, before shrugging his shoulders and walking out for the night. Berg could not move, barely able to swallow the last gill as he thought about the abomination that now lay inside his new home.
Later in the evening the zookeeper made a visit for a last feeding, not aware of the paralyzing disgust that had consumed Berg’s nervous system. In his left hand he held a bucket of fish, swaying as an expended pendulum. Grinning thoughtlessly, like the slightly evolved primate that he was, the zookeeper toddled up to the entrance gate. He scratched his armpit, smelled his hand, and then proceeded to open the door to the pen. It was at this moment, the point in which the zookeeper took his first step inside, that Berg’s impression of human snot was to change in an explosive way. The zookeeper’s foot landed on the snot soiled handkerchief before skidding forward, and then launching into the air like an illegal firework. In a chi-like kung-fu counter balance of a drunken master, the zookeeper’s head rocked backwards, landing on the cement as an impotent comet. At first Berg’s paralysis continued; not in fear for the zookeeper’s safety, but by the thought that now the snot might have been flung deeper into his domain. And then, in a moment of clarity usually reached in bears only after breaking the final bonds of hibernation stupor, he realized that the gate was open. Berg jumped over the unconscious zookeeper, and fled for his freedom. ‘Alas’, Berg had thought in paradoxical laughter, ‘Though human snot was my bane, it is also my liberator!’
And so began the fugitive story of a bear far from home. He was instinctively superior at losing his pursuers through the tangled forests that coat New Zealand; finding himself in pure, though hot, freedom. After a number of months his wanderings led him into much personal meditation, and he began to chase the shadow of what it meant to be a true polar bear. Finally, as he struggled relentlessly to understand his own xenotypic foundations, his claws gripped a discarded newspaper. It was inside this newspaper, in the slightly stained comic section, that Berg discovered an apparent revelation. A cartoon drawing called “The Farside,” which depicted a polar bear cleverly disguised as a penguin, sitting on an iceberg amongst many more of the flightless birds. One of the dumbfounded penguins was quoted as saying in a less than sherlockian manner, “Now Edgar’s gone… Something’s going on around here.” For the second time in his life a blubber dissipating epiphany quaked Berg’s mind: Polar Bears are supposed to eat penguins!
Unfortunately Berg never realized that it would be difficult to find such penguins at his particular coordinate. After weeks of unsuccessful reconnaissance operations in nearby towns, however, he came across the biggest group of penguins that he had ever seen. The Smith-Tory wedding was like an iceberg buffet, with giant penguins strolling about with no evidence of any instinctual fear of predators. They looked like the emperor penguins he had read about in a discarded National Geographic, although much bigger. Their size, Berg reasoned, must have been due to their lavish kingly diets, bought by the extra-high taxes that such monarchial emperor birds would impose on other lesser avians. In marxian logic Berg deduced that eating one or two of these penguins would not only fulfill his polar bear dietary calling, but allow him to become an ursine Che Guevara for the animal kingdom!
And so Berg watched from the bushes as the man in the tuxedo whispered curses into the night. The man took out a handkerchief and began to blow his snot sodden nostrils. It gently fell to the ground from his limp hand as yet another penguin was dragged into the New Zealand night.