Operation Juicy Fruit
Part I: The Enemy Emerges
There are quiet moments in a marriage when the universe decides to test you. Not with finances or parenting or communication, but with something far stranger. Ours arrived in the form of a raised seam in the backyard. A smooth ridge of disturbed earth, curving across the grass like a signature left by someone who believed the place already belonged to him.
Bruce was the one who found it. I heard him through the window first, the sharp inhale he only makes when something structural has gone profoundly wrong. When I stepped outside, he was already bent over the ground, studying the soil like it had insulted his profession.
He looked up at me with a tight jaw and said the name with the same seething energy Jerry Seinfeld uses when he says “Newman.”
“Mordechai.”
He said it again, lower. A warning. A prophecy. A mole with a biblical name and a talent for destruction had chosen our yard as his kingdom.
I should’ve stayed neutral. I’m a psychologist after all, an expert on boundaries and conflict negotiation. But I have been on a romantasy kick as of late, and here was a villain threatening my mate. I watched with crossed arms, vindication swirling. As a Pisces, I hate conflict until it is personal. Then a part of me wakes up and stretches like a cat in a sunbeam.
Finally, someone worth opposing.
At first, I simply observed the war. Bruce ordered traps from Amazon with the grim determination of a man preparing to take back territory. He walked the yard in measured strides, tapping the ground and murmuring about tunnels as if he were reading seismic data. The traps arrived in boxes that looked suspiciously cheerful for their intended purpose.
We planted a vibration stake in the ground, supposedly designed to rattle Mordechai’s tiny nervous system. It was sleek, metallic, industrious. A symbol of our side’s technological advantage.
Mordechai dug around it for show. It was not an accident, not done in passing. He curved his tunnel in a perfect ring around the device, like he was drawing a circle of mockery.
That was the turning point. He upped the ante, and I had to respond in kind.
Then a darker realization settled in, a quiet horror that struck deep in my soul.
Moles are blind.
This creature cannot even see me, and yet here I am, a grown woman with degrees and a license, being outmaneuvered by an animal shaped like a small potato. I can diagnose trauma and build treatment plans, and Bruce can calculate the overturning moment of a tilt-up panel in his sleep, but this mole is running psychological operations against us.
Mordechai had not just invaded our yard. He had outsmarted us on our own soil!
Bruce escalated. He stopped speaking in full sentences, studying the tunnels at dawn and dusk. He muttered to himself like a man preparing for a dissertation defense in mole warfare. His hair was mussed, his mind fixed on the target of our affliction.
I sought other sources of information. My friend Mackenzie offered her battlefield intelligence with the confidence of a seasoned general. She insisted that if we placed a pole in a tunnel, Mordechai would eventually run into it because he could not see.
On the surface it sounded feasible. Then again, on the surface a lot of things sound feasible until you remember we are dealing with a creature who mocks Amazon devices and has carved a transit system under our lawn.
It was becoming clear. This was not simple pest control. This was mythic conflict, a feud, a battle cry.
And somewhere between the vibration stake and the fresh tunnel that appeared overnight, I felt the shift. Part click, part spark, vengeance whispering and blooming.
I am always better with a nemesis.
This was no longer my husband’s war.
It was mine too.
Operation Juicy Fruit had begun.
Follow along for part 2…..