Why the Wizard?

A whimsical tale as told by Miss Jen Randall, 
the talking hamster from the mud puddle

“Now,” said the hamster, clearing her throat with surprising theatrical authority, “the image of a wizard might look random, childish, or slightly deranged at first glance. But in this story, it makes perfect sense.”

According to Miss Jen, the tale concerned a man who had endured a bewildering storm of setbacks over several years. He had tried to explain everything reasonably. He had tried to stay calm. He had tried, with heroic optimism, to place each strange event in the mental drawer marked “probably nothing.”

For most of his life, he had not been especially supernatural in his thinking. He trusted science, evidence, and common sense. He preferred clear explanations to spooky theatre. He had even explored unusual theories and strange ideas in an old magazine he once published. Curious readers can still find those remnants at iLearn.tw/magazine.

But life, the hamster explained, sometimes becomes strange enough that even a rational person begins noticing patterns he would rather not notice.

In the story, people near the wizard’s circle seemed to suffer misfortune with unsettling regularity. One accident here. One sudden illness there. One tragedy after another. Each event, taken alone, could be explained. None of it proved anything. Miss Jen was quite firm about that. Coincidence is not evidence. Bad things happen. Life is fragile. The world does not need a wizard in order to be cruel.

And yet the pattern lingered.

Then came the hatred. Not ordinary irritation. Not harmless gossip. Not the private grumbling people do when life has rubbed them raw. This was described as something darker: theatrical, disproportionate, needling, and difficult to forget.

The man tried to steer conversations away from that darkness. He tried to remain reasonable. But eventually, as Miss Jen put it, the drawer marked “probably nothing” stopped closing.

Later, the tale moved to a cursed living space. That was Miss Jen’s phrase, not a legal conclusion, not a factual accusation, and certainly not a property inspection. A cursed living space. The sort of place where the air feels heavy and ordinary objects seem to know too much.

In that place, according to the tale, a friend from the jungles of the Philippines tried to ward off bad spirits with a jar of water and rock salt. The water, said to have turned purple, was crystal clear the next day. Coincidence? Maybe. Chemistry? Possibly. A dramatic flourish added by a talking hamster? Also possible. The story leaves the matter where it belongs: floating somewhere between memory, symbolism, and mud-puddle folklore.

Not long after, the man realized that the wizard had turned against him too. In the tale, this realization arrived just after the bad energy of the space had supposedly been cleared. A plant, once given as a gift, was suddenly viewed with suspicion. Business dried up. Bad luck arrived with muddy boots. None of this proved a curse, of course, but it gave Miss Jen plenty to squeak about.

What made the realization heavier was that the man had seen the wizard turn on others before. Betrayal is rarely surprising in hindsight. The surprise comes only when a person finally accepts what the signs have been trying to say.

The hamster warned that the wizard seemed to gloat over the ruin of others. One prison sentence in particular, involving a man with whom the wizard had merely disagreed, appeared to bring him visible delight. It felt less like concern for justice and more like a private victory. That detail stayed with the man, not because it proved anything, but because cruelty has a sound. Once heard clearly, it is difficult to unhear.

Even the punishment faced by the man in the tale seemed wildly out of proportion to the alleged offense. Something as mundane as an old rental contract somehow became years of upheaval and the shadow of a six-month jail sentence. Whether one reads that as absurdity, tragedy, satire, or nightmare logic, Miss Jen insisted it explained why the wizard became such a useful symbol.

The tale also included a curious memory at a red light. By coincidence, just after a friend named Sir Had had pulled up beside him, the wizard leaned over and said, “You better stop doing this, Sir Had.” The words did not cause thunder. No goblins emerged from the glove compartment. Yet the line remained in the story like a splinter under the skin.

Adding to the mystique, the wizard was surrounded by occult-looking imagery: pyramids, energy stones, tarot cards, books of spells, strange texts, symbols, and objects that seemed to be trying very hard to mean something. The man wanted nothing to do with that world. He did not want a beginner’s guide. He did not want a subscription. He did not want a loyalty card.

He simply wanted distance.

So the wizard became a warning sign. Not a biography. Not a verdict. Not a statement of fact. A warning sign. Like a crooked fence around a bog, or a badly drawn skull on a jar. Something like a talking hamster in a mud puddle saying, “I would not go that way if I were you.”

The story also mentioned nasty, taunting comments that appeared online: little digital darts thrown from the bushes. Miss Jen was careful again. No one in the tale could prove who was behind them. A fictional hamster, unlike certain fictional villains, apparently respects the limits of evidence.

Still, the tone felt familiar: mocking, gleeful, needling, oddly personal, and pleased with suffering in a way ordinary decent creatures rarely are.

Could it all have been random? Certainly. Could the wizard have been a symbol onto which fear, grief, frustration, and exhaustion were projected? Absolutely. Could a hamster in a mud puddle be an unreliable narrator? Almost certainly.

But fiction is not always about proving things. Sometimes fiction places a candle inside an absurd image and lets people see the shape of a feeling.

Miss Jen was firm on one point: the story was not about revenge. Revenge belongs to villains, melodramas, and people who have watched too many castle scenes. In this fictional tale, the man was not asking anyone to hate anyone. He was not asking anyone to believe in spells, stones, rituals, cards, symbols, curses, mud-puddle rodents, or the dramatic interior life of wizards.

He was simply saying, through the hamster, through the puddle, through the ridiculousness of the whole thing: fear no longer gets the final word.

That distinction matters. Revenge tries to destroy. A story tries to release. Revenge demands blood. A story demands meaning. Revenge keeps the villain at the center. A story pushes the villain offstage, hands the hamster a lantern, and lets the reader decide what kind of nonsense they have just witnessed.

The hamster also wished to make one theological point, because apparently even talking hamsters sometimes become unexpectedly devotional. She said the man from the Land of Nod did not place his trust in spells, stones, rituals, cards, symbols, or whatever else the wizard’s cupboard might contain. His faith belonged elsewhere. His protection belonged elsewhere. His hope belonged elsewhere.

In Miss Jen’s words: “Let the wizard keep the props. The Lord Jesus Christ is enough.”

Whether one reads that as faith, metaphor, testimony, defiance, or simply the moral center of a very strange fictional tale, the meaning is clear enough.

With a cheeky grin, as much as a hamster can manage, Miss Jen Randall finished her tale.

“It’s all fiction, of course,” she said. “But what a story it is.”

That is the message.

Loud and clear.

Note: If the wizard image seems random, this fanciful tale explains the symbolism behind it. It is purely fictional, symbolic, and satirical — and not about naming names. It is a strange little reaction to absurdity, intimidation, and the human effort to make sense of the senseless. I, for one, can only fathom that if anyone were to disagree, it would likely be the wizard himself and maybe his accomplices. The strangest idea of foreplay I’ve ever seen — and quite the grand coming out of the proverbial closet it would be indeed.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and satire. If you want to argue fantasy, you most certainly can argue that too. All characters, events, names, symbols, conversations, hamsters, wizards, creepy old men, mud puddles, lands, comments, and narrative details are fictionalized and are not intended to depict or accuse any real person, living or dead. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, or circumstances is purely coincidental. This story is symbolic expression, not a statement of fact.