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Fuquay’s A-Lister Alpaca
Lil’ Pumpkin Written by Fuquay-Varina Memes | Photographed by Jonathan Fredin
FUQUAY-VARINA MEMES (also known as FVM) is a freelance writer, meme guru and an anonymous resident of Fuquay-Varina. She is the creator and manager of the FuquayVarina Memes Facebook page and has a talent for making people laugh and always taking the joke too far. Check out her blog at fvmwrites.com. fuquaymemes thefvmemes
60 April/MAY 2022
As Fuquay Memes, I receive quite a lot of random things in my inbox — from pictures of missing teeth in the Jimmy John’s parking lot to pearl-clutching vanity license plates — but I was not fully prepared for what I showed up in my inbox on February 10. An alpaca. On a leash. In Mason Jar. We couldn’t immediately ID the owner, but the minute I posted it on Facebook my comment section lit up like Blockbuster on a Friday night in 1995 (RIP, Blockbuster). Over 2,000 “likes” later, people were demanding to know more. Who was this small brown alpaca strolling the town in a red bandana like he owned the place? Did he have his own Facebook page? The world around us was burning down faster than a dog turd getting reported in Holly Springs, so an adorable alpacalypse was just what the doctor ordered. Everyone wanted to know where he’d show up next, but we all know that the Chuck Norris of Alpacas never reveals his next move. I reached
out to the owner, only to find out that his name is Pumpkin — not Alpacino, like I had hoped. Regardless, he was already a local celebrity and within a matter of hours had already “booked” his first public appearance and created a fan page on Facebook. The always-quirky Town of Fuquay-Varina (shout out to my girl, Susan Weis) never looks a gift horse in the mouth — an official meet-andgreet with Pumpkin the alpaca and Mayor Blake Massengill was scheduled for Feb. 17 at Fleming Loop Park. Shameless. I went, of course. So did half of the town, by the looks of it. Residents were practically selling their souls for a chance to throw their kids in front of a fluffy local celebrity for the ’gram. I asked Mayor Massengill, who lives right around the corner from Pumpkin, what a public meetand-greet with a farm animal says about his leadership style. “I think it says that I have a fun, approach-
