The Alpaca Reading Club

Clarence had a forehead wrinkle. This was not because he was old, he was merely “distinguished,” as he often reminded the others, but because he was burdened. With what, you might ask?

With culture.

Also with the responsibility of leading an elite society of alpacas who had, over the years, evolved from idle grass-chewers into literary sophisticates. Secret literary sophisticates.

Every Tuesday night, while the humans assumed their livestock were simply being livestock, lounging in the barn, dozing in hay, chewing cud in that blank, contemplative way of ruminants, Clarence led a very different gathering: The Alpaca Reading Club. Thanks to a lovely selection of books from the “little free library” the human family had made last year, Clarence took it upon himself to culture the herd.

And he took it very seriously.

Clarence stood at the entrance of the old wooden barn, wearing his usual air of cultivated gravitas and the remnants of a plastic flower crown he had found last spring during a Pinterest inspired wedding held on the farm. He claimed it was “symbolic of the transcendence of art.” It was mostly just chewed at the edges now, but he wore it like a crown of laurels.

He cleared his throat in the deep, sonorous way of someone preparing to say something important, even though no one else was listening yet.

“Order!” he declared into the barn, where the others were still milling about.

Inside, Daisy lay dramatically across a pile of fresh hay like a Victorian heroine recovering from a scandal. Blanche was staring disapprovingly at a half-eaten paperback tucked into the wall slats. Rufus was pretending not to be rearranging a neat pile of Nancy Drews behind a feed bin.

Clarence marched in with all the pomp of an emperor arriving at the Senate. He stepped over a beetroot someone had apparently tried to use as a bookmark. He wrinkled his nose. “Not again,” he muttered.

“All right, herd,” he said, puffing out his chest. “Let us commence. We shall now begin our dissection of—”

“Wuthering Heights!” Daisy interrupted with a swoony neigh. She had one front leg stretched over her forehead in the universal posture of tragic longing. “It’s so romantic. Heathcliff is like… if a thunderstorm had feelings.”

“Thunderstorms don’t have feelings,” Blanche snapped. “And if they did, they’d have the good sense to see a therapist.”

Clarence coughed. Loudly. “As I was saying, tonight’s book—”

“Was incredibly frustrating,” Rufus chimed in, his head still buried behind the feed bin. “Why couldn’t they just talk to each other? Like, ‘Hello, I love you, stop haunting my house.’ Is that so hard?”

Clarence raised a hoof dramatically. “Fellow grazers! We must remember, literature reflects the emotional landscape of its time. To judge it by today’s standards is to miss the point entirely.”

“I’m judging it by the standards of basic ghost etiquette,” Rufus grumbled.

Daisy heaved another sigh that blew straw several feet into the air. “It’s not about logic. It’s about doomed love. Passion. Poetry. Pain!”

Blanche squinted at her. “It’s about codependency and bad weather. It’s just so very… human.”

“I agree with Blanche,” Clarence said, ignoring Daisy’s gasp of betrayal. “And that is why, tonight, I propose something different. Something bold.”

Four sets of fluffy ears perked up. Even Rufus emerged from his paperback hidey-hole.

Clarence drew himself up. “We’ve read the greats. We’ve debated Austen and Tolstoy. We’ve mourned Dobby and argued over whether ‘The Great Gatsby’ would’ve been improved with a talking raccoon.”

“It would have,” Rufus whispered.

Clarence stomped once for emphasis. “Now is the time to rise above the passive consumption of literature. We must create our own. We must write.”

Silence.

A beet juice-stained stick dropped somewhere in the back of the barn.

Daisy blinked. “Write? With what?”

“Hooves,” Clarence said, reverently. “And vision.”

***

At first, the others hesitated.

“We’re alpacas,” Blanche said bluntly. “Our greatest achievement until now has been not spitting on the mailman.”

Rufus nodded slowly. “What if… what if we’re just consumers?” His voice trembled with existential fear. “What if we’re just… grazers of ideas?”

Clarence stepped forward, dramatically bathed in moonlight through the barn window. “No,” he whispered. “We are creators. With hooves.”

It was Daisy who cracked first.

She rose from her hay bed with theatrical flair. “I’m in. But only if there’s a love triangle. With at least one brooding character and a tragic backstory involving a windmill.”

Rufus shifted. “Can it be a mystery? Like, a noir detective thing? But… twisty?”

“And everyone’s a ghost,” Clarence added, now visibly buzzing. “What if everyone’s a ghost and they don’t know it until chapter fourteen?”

“I want at least one suspicious goat,” Blanche said, chewing a stalk of hay ominously. “You can always trust a goat to make things messy.”

Clarence beamed. “Brilliant! It shall be a sweeping, cross-genre masterpiece. A tale of love, betrayal, mystery, livestock espionage. We’ll call it—”

“The Mystery of Muffled Hooves,” Daisy breathed.

Silence. Then Blanche grunted. “Fine. That doesn’t make me want to burn the barn down.”

“High praise,” Clarence said. “Let us begin.”

The first few attempts at writing were, as Blanche put it, “a barn fire in slow motion.”

They tried using beet juice and sticks, scrawling lines on bark paper.

“’She trotted into the city with dreams in her woolly heart,’” Rufus read, squinting at Daisy’s latest contribution. “What does that even mean?”

“It means she believes in something, Rufus,” Daisy snapped.

“I added this scene where the main alpaca realizes the city is secretly run by goats,” Blanche muttered, scribbling furiously. “Very noir.”

Eventually, one of the younger alpacas, Finnley, who mostly kept to himself and had once been caught watching YouTube over a child’s shoulder, showed them how to type using the humans’ old laptop.

The laptop had been left unattended by Maisie, the farmer’s youngest, who was known for dreaming about unicorns and choosing terrible password choices (Clarence had correctly guessed “alpaca123”).

Now they could type, awkwardly and slowly, one key at a time, standing on stacked bales for reach.

They took shifts. They argued constantly.

“Why is the detective alpaca named Churro?” Blanche asked, squinting at the screen. “That’s not a name, that’s a snack.”

“He’s sweet but with a complex inner world!” Daisy said, eyes shining.

“Page twelve says he’s lactose intolerant and lives above a cheese shop,” Rufus added. “That’s just cruel.”

Clarence, pacing like a novelist in crisis, mumbled, “But it’s symbolic. He craves what he cannot have.”

The novel began to take shape: Churro, a young alpaca from the countryside, moves to the Big City to solve the mystery of a missing duck (later changed to a missing inheritance, then back to a duck, then a duck-shaped inheritance).

There were car chases (by hay cart), steamy love interests (a charming alpaca named Valencia with memory loss), dramatic monologues (“Who am I if not an alpaca chasing shadows?”), and plot twists galore.

***

The humans began to notice something was off.

“Why are they all staring at the barn door?” Maisie asked one morning.

“They’re probably waiting for food,” her brother muttered.

“They have food right there,” she said, pointing to the full trough.

Maisie narrowed her eyes at Rufus, who was perched next to the laptop, seemingly innocent. But she could have sworn she saw him deleting a sentence with his teeth.

“Suspicious,” she whispered.

Still, no one believed her. Not even when she found a page from “The Mystery of Muffled Hooves” the alpacas had accidentally printed sitting in the tray of the printer in the house.

“I’m telling you, the alpacas are writing.”

“Maisie,” her mother said patiently, “alpacas don’t even know how to flush a toilet.”

“Exactly,” Maisie hissed. “It’s the perfect cover.”

Back in the barn, panic erupted one rainy Thursday when Blanche, trying to save the laptop from a particularly intrusive pigeon, tripped and slammed a hoof onto the keyboard.

And accidentally submitted the entire manuscript to the local library’s Young Author Contest.

Clarence screamed.

Rufus fainted.

Daisy cried, “Is it too late to add a romantic monologue in chapter ten?!”

Blanche just stared at the “Submission Successful” screen with dead eyes.

“We’re doomed.”

***

Two weeks later, a very official envelope arrived in the barn.

The alpacas gathered around like cultists before an oracle. Clarence unsealed it with trembling lips.

“Honorable Mention,” he read aloud.

They all gasped.

“Selected for a dramatic public reading at the county summer fair,” he continued.

Daisy shrieked.

Rufus began hyperventilating into a trough.

“We’re going to be exposed,” Blanche muttered. “Arrested. Or worse, interviewed by NPR.”

Clarence, however, was still staring at the letter, eyes glittering.

“We did it,” he whispered. “We’re published.”

“We’re discovered!” Daisy wailed. “Maisie’s going to sell our story to Netflix!”

Rufus flopped onto his back. “I can’t do press. I have anxiety.”

But Clarence had already tied a feed sack around his head like a beret. “From now on,” he declared, “you may call me… The Author.”

“Oh dear grass,” Blanche muttered. “He’s spiraling.”

***

Clarence was unbearable.

Which was impressive, really, because the bar had already been quite high.

He now demanded to be addressed only as “The Author” (with an audible capital T and A), wore his makeshift feed sack beret at a jaunty, self-important angle, and occasionally spoke in faux-French.

“Je suis artiste,” he declared, sniffing dramatically as he gazed at the barn’s rafters. “You wouldn’t understand. You’ve never suffered for your craft.”

“You got hay in your eye once,” Blanche muttered.

“It stung,” Clarence snapped. “And it was metaphorical.”

Meanwhile, Daisy was drafting the first three chapters of a spin-off starring Valencia, the memory-challenged alpaca love interest from their novel. The new book was titled Alpaca Interrupted, and included at least two ballrooms, one stormy night, and a mysterious scar that may or may not have been from a fencing accident. She was also trying to figure out a way to work in an identical twin, but so far couldn’t manage it. 

“It’s a sweeping romance about rediscovery,” she explained to Rufus, who had begun critiquing their own novel with disturbing precision.

“Honestly?” Rufus said, squinting at the manuscript. “It’s derivative. The structure’s uneven. But emotionally sincere. Churro’s arc really got me.”

“You wrote Churro,” Blanche said.

Rufus blinked slowly. “Exactly.”

Despite the chaos, there was one constant: the humans still had no idea.

The farmer assumed the sudden tidiness in the barn was due to a cleaner hired by his wife. (It was actually Blanche, who insisted “no good prose comes from a dirty workspace.”)

The farm’s youngest, Maisie, however, remained suspicious.

“They’re planning something,” she whispered to her brother as they passed the barn.

“They’re chewing grass,” he replied.

“No. They’re scheming. The grey one’s wearing a hat now.”

He rolled his eyes. “It’s a feed sack, Maisie.”

“It’s a statement piece.”

***

The week before the Summer Fair, the barn was tense.

Clarence had taken to pacing in tight circles, muttering phrases like, “Will they see the layers?” and “Should we have added more goats?”

Rufus was editing a new edition of the manuscript, highlighting entire paragraphs with his teeth. “We should’ve cut chapter six. It drags.”

Daisy had finished her alpaca spin-off and was halfway through the sequel, Llamas Don’t Forget (Even If They Think They Did).

Then, one afternoon, Blanche burst through the barn door with fury in her eyes and a crumpled sheet of paper in her mouth.

“I FOUND THIS.”

Rufus dropped the beet-ink pen he was using.

Daisy gasped. “Is that…?”

Blanche spit it dramatically onto the barn floor. “Fanfiction. About our story. Written by SHEEP.”

Clarence trotted over. “Let me see that.”

He squinted. “‘Churro and the Haunted Hayloft’… wait. What?!” He read further, scandalized. “‘The mysterious duck was actually a prince, and they kissed under the full moon—’”

“Blatant plagiarism,” Blanche hissed. “And interspecies romance. Unrealistic.”

“I thought it was rather sweet,” Daisy said.

“Sweet?! They turned Churro into a vampire!”

Rufus glanced at the page. “Well, it is surprisingly well-paced.”

“Traitors!” Clarence wailed. “Literary theft!”

From that moment forward, Blanche made it her mission to find the rogue sheep who had dared steal their story. She began sneaking out at night, interrogating cows and ducks.

“I have contacts,” she said ominously. No one asked questions.

***

As the Summer Fair crept closer, the alpacas grew increasingly frantic.

Clarence spent hours rehearsing his acceptance speech, despite being reminded that they hadn’t technically won.

“It’s an honorable mention,” Daisy said.

“Great artists are often unrecognized in their time,” he replied.

Daisy was busy stitching together a beret for her spin-off character using fallen feathers and lost buttons.

Rufus was rewriting the final chapter to include “more ghost ambiguity.”

And Blanche had uncovered a potential literary spy, a sheep named Geraldine who’d once been seen near a bookmobile.

“She smells like ink,” Blanche declared. “I know she’s behind it.”

Meanwhile, Maisie had drawn up a chart in her notebook. It featured all the alpacas, their suspicious behaviors, and several very incriminating doodles of Rufus typing on a laptop with his front teeth.

“No one believes me,” she muttered to the family cat, Mister Sprinkles. “But I know.”

***

The day of the Summer Fair arrived. Colorful bunting flapped from every fencepost. Booths lined the field. The smell of fried dough and lemonade drifted through the air.

And in the center of it all: a small outdoor stage, with a banner that read:

“YOUNG AUTHORS OF TOMORROW PRESENT: Dramatic Readings from Emerging Voices!”

Clarence, Daisy, Rufus, and Blanche watched from inside the barn, pressed against a gap in the wood slats. Their hearts pounded in unison.

“She’s starting,” Rufus whispered. “It’s the librarian.”

A very serious woman in a floral blouse and large glasses stepped up to the mic. She held a printed copy of The Mystery of Muffled Hooves in her hands.

“I will now read an excerpt from a promising young author,” she said. “We do not know their full name. They submitted under the initials ‘A.L. Paca.’”

Clarence choked on a clump of hay.

Daisy squealed.

Rufus screamed into a sack.

Blanche just muttered, “Should’ve gone with something less obvious.”

The reading began.

“She trotted through the rain-slick alley, her hooves muffled by the fog of regret…”

The crowd laughed. But not at the story. With it.

Then they leaned in.

Some gasped.

Someone clapped after Churro’s third monologue.

Maisie stood in the front row, staring at the pages with wide eyes. She turned slowly toward the barn.

“I told you it was the alpacas,” she whispered to her brother.

He gawked. “You’re insane.”

“No,” Maisie said solemnly. “I’m right.”

***

That night, the alpacas gathered beneath the stars, their hearts full.

“We did it,” Daisy whispered.

“We got read,” Rufus added. “Like, really read. With emotion. And pacing.”

“No one booed,” Blanche admitted. “They laughed in the correct places.”

“They understood the symbolism,” Clarence said, still wearing the feed sack beret. “The duck wasn’t just a duck.”

There was a long pause.

Then Clarence stood up and looked out over the hills.

“Friends,” he said, “we cannot stop now. The world needs more stories.”

“More Churro?” Rufus asked.

“More Valencia?” Daisy said hopefully.

“More goats being exposed for the backstabbing traitors they are?” Blanche muttered.

“Yes,” Clarence said grandly. “More of everything. Under a new name… a pen name. Something dignified. Mysterious. Iconic.”

A breeze passed through the barn.

Then, from the shadows, Finnley the young alpaca stepped forward. “What about… Al Packington?”

Silence.

Then Daisy gasped. “It’s perfect.”

“Authoritative,” Rufus agreed.

“Sounds like someone with a study full of leather chairs,” Blanche added.

Clarence nodded. “Al Packington. It is decided.”

***

Over the next few weeks, the alpacas launched into their next great endeavor: a serialized saga titled The Grazing Chronicles, written exclusively under the name Al Packington.

Each story blended romance, mystery, betrayal, and at least one ghost.

Daisy completed her alpaca ballet troupe fanfiction. It involved a forbidden waltz, a love triangle with a narcoleptic alpaca, and a dramatic pirouette in the rain.

Rufus cried when he read it. “It’s haunting,” he whispered.

Blanche reluctantly allowed a subplot about an undercover pig agent. (“But no singing.”)

Maisie continued gathering evidence, compiling a folder labeled Operation Alpaca Noir. But every time she brought it up, her family just patted her head and offered her funnel cake.

And Clarence? Clarence spent his mornings gazing into the hills like a tragic poet, waiting for inspiration. He had begun wearing two berets.

Because great authors, he insisted, wore layers.

One warm evening, the alpacas lay together in the grass outside the barn, books and bark-paper drafts scattered around them.

The stars shimmered above.

Clarence whispered, “What do you think Tolstoy would have said about this?”

Blanche snorted. “He’d probably say, ‘Why is there a vampire alpaca in chapter three?’”

Rufus smiled. “He’d get it. Deep down.”

Daisy reached for a notebook. “Do you think we could do a time travel story? With musical numbers?”

Clarence closed his eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s begin tomorrow.”

And under the night sky, the greatest alpaca writers the world had never known… dreamed up their next tale.