Tiny Beasts

Global warming was fucking up the squirrels. It was of course fucking everything up — the new and improved Boston Seaport would be underwater in twenty years, and the mosquitos were leaving particularly nasty welts. But special attention was on the squirrels. Higher-than-usual temperatures were fermenting the berries they ate off the trees and getting them so drunk they lost their sense of balance. They dented the roofs of cars on Rte. 9 as they plummeted from the branches, and the Boston Common was littered with their chubby, lethargic bodies. I am telling you this, A, because you would have loved them. You would have called them your messy bitch children and left them bottle caps of Gatorade for their tiny hangovers and sat down to draw them, sketching each individual tuft of fur: brown then silver then gold then chestnut until one could believe that these were actually the most majestic creatures that had ever lived. You hated Boston. But I like to think you would have come to visit this particular summer because I was there and because of the novelty of squirrels getting even drunker than we could on the contents of the dozens of stolen nips bulging from our overall pockets. I am going to tell you about the summer of the drunk squirrels because I wish you could have been there. I miss you and want you to explain what it means that I am now in my Saturn return.

As you might expect, I was not in a good place this summer. You had been gone for two years. I was in my second year as an editorial assistant at a small nonprofit publishing house. I thought it would be a dream job — editing books, or at least assisting in editing books about social justice issues I cared about was, on paper, exactly what I wanted to be doing with my life. But in practice I spent most of my time slouched in the recliner set up in the nursing room playing Candy Crush until each subsequent panic attack about cover mechs with unmarked typos or mis-stapled proposal packets subsided. I knew that eventually I would either quit or be fired and it was only a matter of how stubborn I was, or how long it took them to realize that any time I was asked to secure permissions for the images that were to accompany a Y.A. history book about indigenous genocide, I would simply lie and say the image could not be traced. The idea of sending another email to an artist begging them to let us use their labor for free ~bEcAuSe wE’rE jUsT a nOnPrOfiT~ made me want to die. I was allegedly making contingency plans to leave. I was applying to things at a manic rate: graduate school to be a high school teacher or administrator, a Fulbright in India to learn Urdu for the CIA, used bookstores, hemp farms in New Hampshire.

I started therapy because I hated my job as much as it hated me, but kept going with the hope that one day I would be brave enough to tell Susan, the nice, heavyset middle-aged woman who took notes on her Google Chromebook and drank an entire Dunkin’ XL iced coffee over the course of our lunch hour sessions, that the night after you were killed by a drunk driver while you crossed the highway that bisected campus to get more cigarettes, our friend Martin raped me at the memorial service held by our college. At times I got close. I spent the first 50 to 54 minutes of my appointment railing against the capitalist system where my survival depended on me continuing to destroy my mental health by working at a company that was enjoying what the board members called, with less awareness of the irony than they thought they had, a “Trump bump” in sales for books about the emoluments clause and why immigrants are actually good. In the last 45 seconds I would maybe say something like “and I’m probably so mad about this because of how grief and sex and loss and agency and death are now inextricably intertwined in my psyche. See you next week!” as I headed out the door and back to my desk for a long afternoon of forging invoices and making less than $15 an hour.

You know that I am terrible at picking out people to sleep with; I do not read red flags any better than I read the dimensions of things I buy online. That’s why I wind up with puny, ten-inch-tall cat scratching posts that looked bigger on Instagram and men who think that being described as “sensitive” by one fifth-grade teacher excused them from developing a single additional cell of emotional intelligence. I would have loved to tell you about how this particular man, a postdoc at MIT ten years my senior, tried to test my nurturing instincts by coming to my shitty shared attic apartment with a beta fish in the same bag as the three limes, condoms (ribbed for no one’s pleasure), and one-percent milk.

He did not provide water purification tablets or food or a bowl or the pretty marbles for the bottom of the bowl or any warning, but somehow the fish was now my problem. It seemed my ability to figure it out or develop an attachment to this twitchy aquatic handkerchief would decide for him whether I was worth the effort or the cost of a second towel for when I spent the night at his place. The next morning I accidentally dumped the fish down the garbage disposal when, while trying to pack a hurried lunch, I grabbed the first tupperware I saw. You would have shrieked, A, at how I looked this man dead in the face when I flipped the switch. (...)

But again I digress. The morning most important to this story was a Sunday morning and I was, as always, late to my second job working as a babysitter at an Episcopalian church in Beacon Hill. I had woken too early with too much energy after downing a bottle of rosé the night before. I suddenly had big ambitions. I dug the single pair of workout shorts I owned from the back of my pajama drawer. I drank water straight from the tap and ate a fistful of granola. I intended to get off the train three stops early and run the rest of the way to the church before breezing in, pressed green juice in hand, with a few minutes to spare for stretching before the first kids were dropped off for an enriching morning of the same three alphabet puzzles and two books about Noah’s ark and absolutely no lessons about Jesus. (...)

This particular morning I kept to the edges of the park. There were too many other runners, so many that it looked like everyone but me knew they were being chased. Maybe if I had taken my usual tear through the dead center of the garden, swinging my legs over the fenced-off rose plots like a giant to shave seconds off my tardiness, I would not have found myself in the landing zone for this squirrel at the moment he tumbled from one of the gnarled oaks that grew along the fence.

What I did not expect is that a squirrel would have such heft. Perhaps I should have assumed — aside from this newfound drinking problem, the squirrels of the Public Garden and the Common had been putting on weight. Despite signage from the Boston Parks Department pleading with us to not feed the wildlife, tourists could not seem to resist giving them the remnants of $27 Faneuil Hall lobster rolls. The squirrels ambled about with the butts of soft hotdog buns drenched in butter and hand sweat wedged into their cheeks.

This squirrel hit my shoulder like a well-meaning dad clapping me on the shoulder before realizing that despite my short hair and boyish figure, I was not, in fact, one of his nephews or sons or a player on one of their junior league soccer teams. It was solid and full and sent me off balance enough that I had to take a knee. On the ground next to me was the squirrel, who for purposes of clarity and what you would have called a garishly white impulse to give everything a name, I will call Bruce.

“I’ve been hit!” I sent not-boyfriend a photo of Bruce, sprawled into a belly flop. Because not-boyfriend is an earth sign and therefore a psychological terrorist, I saw the message go from delivered to read where it remained like an unreturned high five. I waited forty-five seconds, two minutes, without the immediate-gratification ellipses. There were no squirrel emojis to follow up with, so I sat on the ground with Bruce. I guessed he was young, although I am far from an expert on the aging patterns of North American city fauna. He seemed impossibly relaxed, and were it not for the breath twitching around his tiny black nostrils, I would have assumed he had died on impact. With the hand that was not clenching my phone as though to choke a response out of it, I stroked the fur between his ears. It was spongy, like new grass or duckling feathers. Squirrels did not typically present opportunities for us to notice their feral beauty. This squirrel, you would have said, went to private school — his overbite wasn’t even that noticeable. I think I was with you when I learned that something like 80 percent of the trees we enjoy today are the result of squirrels burying acorns and then forgetting where they’d left them. Despite or because of their chaotic natures, we now have parks and forests and 200-year-old oaks, and we get to live on an earth with oxygen and shade even though we kill off trees at twice the rate we plant them. But now, here Bruce was, relieved of this immense responsibility, at absolute ease.

I wanted what Bruce had, so I took Bruce. He was supple and loose and barely stirred when I picked him up; his head tipped backwards, arms thrown back as though opening himself up to the universe or to embrace the early morning sun or simply because he had torn his tiny rotator cuffs and there was no way for them to remain in their sockets. He was too girthy for the fanny pack where I kept my keys and wallet so like most other Sundays, I found myself snarfing down my idiot confection breakfast as I power walked toward the church, not only because I didn’t want to saunter in late holding evidence of my disregard for timeliness and how much I truly needed their $17/hr, but because the wax paper now served as Bruce’s sleeping bag.

by Ayla Zuraw-Friedland, The Drift |  Read more:

Image: Brooke Bourgeois