May I present to you the essential, purest, shortest storyline behind every (heterosexual) romance novel, from crappy to Shakespeare.

Translated into pictogram format, and hand-painted onto... juvenile squirrels.



Boy And Girl Fall In Love.

Or, in pictograms: Male + Female = Love.

Before you accuse me of animal abuse, a quick explanation. I work at a wildlife rehab center, and we get a great deal of orphaned baby squirrels. Because individual feeding programs or treatments vary, we identify the squirrels by marking their heads with tiny splotches of harmless, technically edible paint.

However, the point of this rehab is to actually release the squirrels once they're large enough to survive unaided, and so we are incredibly careful to avoid too much human contact; which risks habituating the squirrels. We don't ever touch them unnecessarily, and we certainly don't ponce about painting abstract symbols onto their heads.

But these guys needed a repaint anyway. Or there might have been terrifying, destructive, ultimately world-ending confusion among the ranks as squirrels were mistaken for other squirrels.

Win?