He Posted a PCA Ad for “Shenanigans”

Bumbly’s apartment smelled like citrus soap and clean laundry—the kind of tidy scent that tried to pretend everything was easy.

It wasn’t.

His power wheelchair gave a soft, familiar hum as he lined up the last details: floor clear, charging cable tucked, “grab zone” within reach, and the straw-glass placed where it wouldn’t topple if nerves made his paw twitch. He wasn’t staging perfection. He was building safety. There was a difference.

The decision to do this at all had come from Lyra.

Not from pep-talk energy—Lyra didn’t do vague. She did routes, backups, reliability. In one long conversation that felt like sitting inside a city map, she’d helped him see the pattern: Bumbly kept trying to live on “hope and improvisation,” and then blaming himself when his body couldn’t keep up.

“If you want to live,” she’d said, steady as a departure board, “you have to take control of the parts you can control. Support isn’t a favor. It’s infrastructure.”

It landed like a click in a seatbelt.

So Bumbly posted the ad: PCA needed. Clear tasks. Clear schedule. Clear boundaries. And because he refused to turn his life into a sterile checklist just to deserve help, he added one line that felt like a dare to the universe:

Open mind to shenanigans appreciated.

The responses taught him fast.

Some applicants arrived coated in pity, speaking softly like he might shatter. Others brought chaos disguised as confidence. A few were so rigid they treated care like a factory procedure—no room for pain fluctuations, no room for humanity, no room for laughter.

Mismatch after mismatch, the old drift tried to tug him back into smaller living.

But Lyra’s route-logic kept replaying: Bad routes exist. You reroute. You don’t stop traveling.

Then Steve messaged.

The message didn’t perform. It didn’t sell. It just… showed up.

He had experience. He asked practical questions. And he mentioned something that made Bumbly’s stomach flip:

“I did holiday work at the special-needs junior school you went to,” Steve wrote. “I’m younger than you, so I won’t pretend I’d remember specific students. But I remember the environment. The rhythms. The accommodations that matter.”

Bumbly stared at the screen longer than he meant to.

Because he remembered.

Not perfectly—years blurred—but he remembered an otter with a lazy grin and fidgety paws who could turn a tense corridor into something calmer without making a production out of it. Someone who didn’t treat access like a burden, just like… Tuesday.

They agreed on a home interview. Bumbly wanted real context. Not café-politeness. Not neutral-territory pretending. Home meant truth: door widths, turning radius, reach zones, and the little routines that kept his day from falling apart.

Now the doorbell buzzed.

Hope fluttered in his chest like it always did right before he tried something brave.

He opened the door.

Steve stood there with a clipboard and sunglasses pushed up, whiskers twitching as he took in the entryway like someone who automatically noticed obstacles and exits. He didn’t step too close. He didn’t fill the space. He respected it.

“Hi,” Steve said. “Thanks for doing this at home. It tells me what the job actually is.”

Bumbly felt his shoulders drop a fraction. “Exactly.”

Steve wiped his feet on the mat, and as he shifted his clipboard to free a paw for a greeting he didn’t force, the corner of the paper brushed the doorframe. A tiny smudge transferred onto the page—an accidental pawprint from the inked design on Bumbly’s mat.

A pawprint on the paperwork.

Bumbly almost laughed. Of course that would happen today. Of course the universe would be corny.

They talked in the living room.

Not like a rescue mission. Not like an audition. Like two adults building a protocol.

Steve asked about routines without treating them as precious. He asked about pain days without assuming they were rare. He asked what “good help” looked like for Bumbly: what increased control, what reduced stress, what made the day smoother instead of heavier. He listened like listening was the job.

Bumbly answered plainly—no apology, no minimizing. That surprised him most.

They rolled through the apartment together: hallway turns, kitchen reach zones, the charging corner, the “please don’t move this” items that made life function. Steve asked before touching anything. He made notes. He didn’t take over.

Then Steve flipped his clipboard to a page titled:

FIRST WEEK: SAFETY, COMFORT, AND OPTIONAL MILD CHAOS

Bumbly stared. “You really brought… a plan.”

Steve’s grin went easy. “I brought a plan because that’s the job. The chaos is strictly opt-in.”

Something in Bumbly loosened at that—an old fear that support would mean losing himself. This didn’t feel like being managed. It felt like being backed up.

When Steve left, the apartment wasn’t magically fixed. Bumbly’s body was still his body. Pain still existed. Logistics still existed.

But the air felt more possible.

The pawprint smudge on the clipboard—tiny, accidental—felt like a signature on a new route.

Bumbly rolled back inside, past the quiet order he’d built with his own hands, and realized the truth Lyra had been trying to hand him all along:

Taking control didn’t mean doing everything alone.

It meant choosing the right team on purpose.