I should preface this by saying that I just finished Allie Brosh's book, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened. It's based on her blog.
So that pretty much explains this whole situation right here. If you're
unfamiliar then let me prepare you. There will be run-on sentences, and
also brief declarative statements, and exaggeration of minor details, and a lot of
grammatical license taken. There might be swearing. There will most
definitely be some crazy. Brosh has a way of inspiring me to embrace the
twisted ways of life and just write it out, and that is what I'm here
to do.
I will also preface this by saying that while Brosh and my other biggest source of inspiration (the Bloggess - a.k.a. Jenny Lawson)
both write autobiographical stories that are a brilliant combo of fantastical, funny, and
poignant, I'm just trying to document how mundane my life really is so I
can look back someday and say to myself, "see? See how there was
nothing to be anxious about?"
Let me finally preface this by saying thank you to Inkscape
for offering a free and supremely awesome illustration program that I
could spend hours and hours learning to (poorly) use in order to tell
stories that actually probably don't warrant having that much time spent
on them.
......................
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| Trees are nice. But this one is under investigation. |
We had lived in our South Minneapolis house for a year and a half when the bodies started appearing. My three-year-old son and our five-year-old neighbor were playing together adorably. The neighbor boy ever so gently tossing a ball into my son's arms. My son dropping it, pointing at it, and saying, "GET IT!" Like a good parent, I was on my phone.
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| We were playing in the backyard; what was once a summer sanctuary of lush greenery and where the only animal waste came from the wild bunnies and my dog whenever she was too lazy to eat her own crap. |
So the kids were playing and talking and I don't know what because, again, I was on my phone. Until the neighbor came over to me was all, "hey! There's a chipmunk that can't climb up the tree!" like it was a super silly chipmunk. And I just thought, look - I know you're five, but that doesn't make any sense. ALL chipmunks can climb trees. He beckoned me over to the tree and I was right! He didn't know what he was talking about! It was a squirrel laying strangely at the base of the trunk, not a chipmunk!
Before I could stop him, the neighbor reached right out and touched that squirrel. He poked it. He poked it just as I was realizing that that squirrel was not dead. I wondered which was worse, touching a dead squirrel or touching a squirrel that looked pretty normal except for a smallish tail wound and for the fact that it was laying on its side, on the ground, with people approaching it and flies hovering around it? It was ... really cute. It's little face made me want to be its friend. But the flies made me realize I was going to have to kill that squirrel.
Thankfully, the immediacy of getting the neighbor's hands thoroughly washed allowed me to put off that task. I'd never killed an animal bigger than a centipede, and I feel BAD when I kill centipedes. I only kill them if they've touched me. I don't kill spiders. I'll kill a mosquito or a tick, though. Thems some bad mamma-jammas.
How was I going to kill my squirrel friend? A shovel? What if I ... didn't quite do it the first time? Would it make a mess? Would my dog be forever drawn to the spot where I spilled the blood of an innocent creature?
Well, I needn't have worried. I got the neighbor to his house to wash up and met his grandma, who engaged me in a very pleasant conversation while my son slid down their slide 30 more times than I told him he could, and by the time we got back into our yard to face the dark deed, the squirrel had disappeared. Great! I thought. Now it's gone and hid itself amongst the 87 hostas the old owner planted all over the place and either it'll jump out at me while I'm looking for it and give me rabies or I won't find it at all and it'll die and fester until my dog finds it and brings entrails into the house on her snout. I didn't find it and was glad. I chose to believe that its squirrel friends came along and gave it a respectful procession and then set aside my remaining fears by reminding myself that my dog's instincts were so non-existent you could put a rack of pork ribs two feet from her face and she wouldn't notice. Case closed. I thought.
The next day we had a gruesome discovery across the street.
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| Could this be the same squirrel who vanished from the back yard? |
There were pieces of what was definitely once a squirrel staining the sidewalk outside the elementary school. I began to think it was more than natural selection at work here. I began to wonder if maybe victim A and victim B had gotten on the bad side of a squirrel mob boss, or maybe a bunny king. Or more likely a hungry fox that roamed over from the woodsy areas around the lake a few blocks away.
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| The suspects. |
Or maybe victim A was victim B? I came to think of it as victim ? because we'll really never know. A day or so later, victim ? was gone. A memory, just like victim A. Scraped off the sidewalk by some brave city worker.
And then there were three.
The remains of victim C were found a week later, scattered between our house and the neighbor's, in such a state of ruin that we had trouble deciphering if it had been a squirrel or a rabbit. Either way, if I'd learned anything from watching Dexter, it was that we had a textbook serial killer at work. Somewhere up in the canopy of the trees, I imagined, some psychopath was amassing a collection of little kill trophies - teeth or ears or a bit of fur from each crime.
And the saga wore on.
At the base of the same tree where victim A appeared - and then disappeared - the dog actually sniffed out victim D. I was amazed. She's really a terrible dog. And thank god for that, because instead of sniffing it out and eating it or hauling it over to me so proud of her find, like a regular dog would, she just stood a foot away from it until I finally was like what is that crazy bitch doing? Oh, of course, there's another dead squirrel.
It really is nice to have those moments where you just know someone, somewhere in the cosmos, is looking out for you. I had this kind of supernatural experience one time when I had my first (unrequited) love at the age of twelve. I was so lost in the intensity of my emotions that I sat crumpled on the floor of my bedroom, sobbing and rocking myself and wondering how a person could possibly live through this. I felt like I was the only one, and I felt that way for a long time. It probably wasn't until about ten years later that I really understood the universality of "the total agony of being in love." But that day in my room, I had this odd sense that someone was holding on to me and comforting me. Like someone was trying to tell me, "it's ok. You can handle this."
Point is, victim D was dead. I didn't have to do the killing. AND victim D was in one piece and pretty fresh, I guess. I don't know how long it takes for decomposition to start. But this guy was like, 100% normal looking and not smelly at all, so I knew the angels had my back by not giving me some gag-worthy, rotted corpse to dispose of. Was it kind of hard to feel the weight of that little body on the shovel? Yes. But I could handle it.
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| Four dead animals, one suspicious tree. |
Ok. Two squirrels at the bottom of a tree - whole or nearly whole, and two squirrels massacred within twenty yards of said tree. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? The nanny next door threw out the "poison" idea, but poison doesn't disembowel. Conversely,* an evil killer surely wouldn't be satisfied by throwing its victims out of a tree. Would it? I just could not get a handle on the killer's M.O. And with a twelve-pound dog with little to no common sense ... well, survival of the fittest, indeed.
As if to prove how prolific the killer could be, victim E showed up not more than a month after victim A spoiled the neighbor's innocent finger, throwing another scenario at me. This one was a chipmunk. Whole. Appearing all the way across the yard from the tree of doom. Again, who knows how long it had been there or how many times it had gone unnoticed by the urinating dog. We only found it because my child nearly stepped on it. Rigor mortis had begun, but it was still a cute little thing. Once more, I felt the sad weight of the animal in my shovel as I wondered how long this would go on.
But that was the last. It's been half of a summer with no more bodies, although there's still a little fur stuck to the path in front of the neighbor's house. I wonder now if it was all just coincidence - if this type of mayhem happens all the time and I just happened to notice this one small string of it. Or was it really something sinister? If so, why did it stop? Maybe it didn't ... maybe my house just isn't the epicenter anymore. The people on my street are real friendly and I'm sure I could find out, but I'm still relatively new here and I don't want to be that crazy lady who introduces herself and then chats about squirrel murder.
* I can not use the word "conversely" without thinking of my high school trigonometry teacher, Ms. Hayden. Kudos, Ms. Hayden; you were great.
