“He loves me not,” declared Teresa as she tossed the last petal aside and pole-vaulted the stem at the hedgehog who had been watching her. That creepy, spiny mammal had made no pretense about listening in on her love life.

Teresa sighed as she brushed bits of grass and dirt from her skirt. At least the new serial peripheral interface bus, with which she was tinkering, would refrain from glaring at her through its processor. Teresa wondered why management had insisted on master/slave communicators.

The hyperopic Erinaceinae watched the two-legged giant gambol. Like the rest of them, after it had quilled a plant or two, it returned to the power generation campus.

Ever since the partial core meltdown of Unit Two, those creatures had seemed edgy.

Few lingered in Shippingport anymore. None stopped just to visit. No hibernaculum had been disturbed in a very long time.

The wee-snouted creature anointed itself with the discarded stem. The scented froth, produced by that particular plant, lingered in a pleasant fashion in both of its mouths.

Nodding one of its heads at the other, the hedgie bowed to pick up its book, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Thereafter, it, too, trotted away.