Priscilla Proefrock watched the commotion. She’d been hosting “The Toonight Show” for years now, but there was still something about the desperate hubbub and bustle of “five minutes to air” that made her palms sweat and her stomach snap around like a bed sheet on a laundry line. Off-stage, she practiced her deep-breathing exercises, then sipped her coffee twice before deciding to add another packet of sugar.

The set director called, “You’re on.”

Proefrock walked onto the stage and settled herself into her seat as the red camera light flickered to life and the audience applauded.

After a few minutes of chit-chat with the crew and giggles from the studio audience, Proefrock summoned her first guests from the wings and invited them to sit.

“Welcome,” she said. “Welcome to both of you.”

“A pleasure, Mrs. Proefrock,” said the coyote with a wry smile, “I’ve watched your show for years.”

“Beep! Beep!” said the roadrunner.

“Coyote,” Proefrock began. “You’ve been called a ‘stalker.’ You’ve been maligned for years, but you’ve never come forward to defend yourself. Even your rare public statements are made through your attorney or posted on small signs that you flash to the media. So why now? What made you decide to make your story public?”

“Well,” said the coyote in a drawn-out slur as he twisted the gray hairs on his chin, “I feel a need to set the record straight. I’m profoundly disturbed by recent trends in children’s television. Moral absolutes of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ threaten to dilute our culture. Our very identity as fallible creatures is in jeopardy.”

“Interesting. Explain.”

“You see, we’ve gotten so caught up in teaching these absolutes to our children that we completely neglect the middle of the pack, so to speak.”

“You mean the ‘gray areas’...”

“Precisely. The ethical edges, the areas where we aren’t so high and mighty, where we make mistakes or even deliberately challenge societal boundaries. These are the things that make us real, that separate us from machines.”

The coyote turned toward the camera and leaned forward, shaking his gnarled finger, as if to admonish a small child. “We’re going back to the deadly dichotomous days of the white-hatted so-called hero and the black-hatted bad guy.”

“Are you suggesting,” Proefrock asked as the coyote leaned back in his seat, “that we should deliberately behave in ways that society has deemed harmful or unethical?”

“My dear, it’s absolutely mandatory!” The coyote chuckled and coughed into his fist. “John Dewey said, ‘Every great thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril.’”

“And you consider yourself a ...?”

“Great thinker? Why, my dear, I’m a certified super genius!” He put a furry paw on the edge of Proefrock’s desk. “Do you have any idea what goes into my average day? The planning, the calculations, angles of trajectory? When was the last time you strapped on a pair of Acme Jet Skates? We’re talking about speeds in the neighborhood of seventy to eighty miles per hour while you’re zipping along some remote desert mountain precipice.” The coyote scratched his toes and twitched the tip of one long ear. “You’ve got your acceleration coefficients, weight ratios, variables in terrain and temperature, surface friction, wind resistance ... It can be, well...”

“Overwhelming?”

“In a word.”

“So hard work and intelligence justify cruelty?”

“No more than innocence justifies ignorance.” The coyote cast a disdainful look at the road runner and turned up his shiny black nose like a child refusing his vegetables.

“But is intelligence what we’re looking for when we turn on the TV every Saturday morning? Aren’t you supposed to help us to take a break from all of that? You cite Dewey, but Shel Silverstein said, ‘Put something silly in the world that ain’t been there before.’ And most kids I know will take Yertle the Turtle over Dewey’s Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology any day.”

Coyote cut off a snicker from the audience. “That’s because kids are idiots,” he snapped. He sighed and stared out into the hot white studio lights. Then he reached back to scratch a spot in the middle of his back. “Mrs. Proefrock, there is a basic equation here you’re not getting.” He spoke slowly and deliberately, his brow furrowed. “I hardly consider my condition silly, and I certainly don’t appreciate having my life used as some grand catharsis for the ills and iniquities of the world. In a single morning, I might swallow a grenade, have my foot crushed by an anvil, or fall four hundred feet into the bottom of a gorge.”

Proefrock sipped her coffee and choked a little.

“Yes and of course it’s all very funny to you, but do you know how much an anvil weighs?” The coyote leaned forward to massage his furry foot. “It’s a wonder I can still walk.”

“Well, you do have to admit...”

“Nothing! I admit nothing. My pursuit of this bird here is a natural act, derived neither out of malice nor cruelty. Yet I suffer for it. I suffer and starve. You laugh and I’m the villain? Yours is the laughter of the uninstructed. The laughter of a fool watching a cat lick itself clean or a monkey defecate in a tree. These are acts of nature which you so wantonly and ignorantly trivialize.”

A nervous chuckle ran through the audience.

Coyote stood up suddenly and unclipped the small black microphone from his chest fur. Proefrock leaned back in her chair, startled. The audience gasped. Road Runner licked his lips and said, “Beep! Beep!”

“See! That’s what I mean,” Coyote hissed. “Everyone roots for the monosyllabic underdog. This simple, stupid, vapid underdog. Why shouldn’t Goliath get to kill David once in a while?” He turned to the audience and gave them a sweeping look. “Darwin was wrong, my friends! The meek are inheriting the Earth. The unfittest have survived.”

Coyote stomped from the set and disappeared through the emergency exit door, which he slammed shut behind him.

A week later, an intern named Crystal discovered Coyote passed out against a dumpster at the back of the studio lot. He’d gorged himself to death on ground squirrels and garbage.

“He looked happy,” she told reporters. “Happier than I’ve ever seen him.”

Malcolm Matthews described himself as a flamenco guitar player who is able to bench press 250 pounds and writes to quell the voices.