I don't think it's worth reading honestly. At this point I just needed to get something down on paper so it's just words and not making sense as I've gone the past few days. Week's been brutal. Head may asplode.
The park. The climb down the tree was casual enough, but the moment the first paws hit the ground we were in a hot zone. I followed close behind Rai, bringing up the rear. Snot took point, the first paws to set foot on the lush field of grass. Home looked like an anomaly, sticking up alone amidst a triangle of pavement in this thing the humans called park. But on the ground it was different. As soon as those first paws hit the ground the red alert went off. It was deceptively dangerous, so fresh and green and natural. The sky shone overhead, clear and empty. Already the early humans were beginning to flood the walks. Most stayed like ants to these strange hard lines that gashed across the earth. Me, I prefer the good, solid soil. I could kiss it. The killing fields. A man pounds by, his colored hooves going clomp-clomp on the walk. Humans themselves aren’t particularly apt at being dangerous. So slow-moving. Most had to spend years pretending to be harmless just to get one of us to pretend to be docile enough to let one of them pass by close enough. It was a tense relationship, those beady balls eyeing us from those sockets way up there. Even standing on two legs they towered over us, their smug arrogance looking like they didn’t give a fuck. But aside from the one-in-a-million lucky shot of flying debris that knocked Jerry-squirrel on the head, they couldn’t catch us. Far greater risk was the occasional hellhound loosened out of nowhere or the two-wheeled death machines, yet one had to always be on guard because humans are all the same. Nonetheless nothing about the outside world is safe.
Our quest - to cross the bereft plains of the Parking Lot, to scale the walls of Mount Trashcan, and to retrieve the blessed Ring of Freedom from the refuse. That big squirrel in the sky is watching over us. We set out like the legends before us, George Buckington who overthrew the Chip-munk overlords in 1776 AD, Burt the Lionhearted who gave his life in the Great Crusade into the human lands in 1179, and Lanceanut who pulled the sword from the stone in 000 and established the golden age of squirreldom. (civil war?) All went before us with swords outstretched, mere legends, and now we may join them.
The humans didn’t seem to notice as we crept down the side of the tree and hit the ground, sneaking through the grass. Bees buzzed by our heads, stingers like the bullets of divebombing dogfighters. Two ants locked in a death struggle, red and black. Snot’s scuttling foot drops down like a bomb, guts exploding. We’re hiking towards the cover of the thick vegetation of the woods, looking behind one last time at the tree erect out of the ground the singular outpost marking safety amidst the human refuse of bike paths and tin cans. Rapidly-shrinking world. In the time of Lanceanut there must have been a jungle of such outposts providing constant cover. Squirreldom running rampant. Where did our brethren go? The red bastards to the north, the gray to the south. Did we lose the war after all?
Kenney nearly gets blindsided by a two-wheeled death machine, the cuff of his fatigues ripping apart like the bullets pumping into digitized Nazis inside his mind. Snot’s metal slanted off to the side like a gangster’s hat, and I think he’ll make a great reality tv star. All fun and games, the biker doesn’t look back. But we’ve crossed the path safely and now we’re crossing the boundary line. The foliage untouched by man blots out the sun like a jungle canopy, yet we’re safe under cover. I stand on two legs, ready to bolt up the nearest tree at the first sign of danger. I am the demi-god. Devil god. We lay our guns on the earth and set up camp.
This is so fun, Kenney says, everything I’ve ever dreamed of. Pow pow! He shoots me with his finger machine gun. I’ll kill more than all of you.
We set out the next day the same way that we began, the sun bright up in the blue sky like any other day. We left the wooded area behind and entered a nondescript plain of grass. No one saw the danger ahead on those plains when the sparrows dropped out of the sky like artillery shells, heavy weights dragged down by gravity like Kenney’s body when a pair of crows raked his eyes out. The birds flapping above us
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I don't think it's just words on a paper. I think it's really interesting and I was glad this was finally from a different point of view other than a person. I get so sick of people sometimes.
ReplyDeleteI think the only critique I really have is maybe that the squirrel is actually too human? Perhaps he could be caught up in more squirrel like activities or at least distracted by an acorn a few feet away from him. He seems smart, but they still have animal instincts. It might be an easy way to add some comedy into this too if you're into that. But I suppose this squirrel isn't into doing the squirrel thing. I don't know.
I do know that this is a cool exercise that plays with power in relation to size and species. It's something that we rarely see, and probably rarely think about. Are the squirrels somehow going to have power over the humans? What's going to happen? Where do you see this going?
What I'm seeing in your posts and really liking is the concept of Something in power, having dominion over another, and yet being completely oblivious or indifferent to that power. Humans (well, most humans) have no quarrel with the squirrels, and don't really care what they do, as long as they don't invade their own personal space or destroy something valuable to them. However, our squirrel protagonist projects alot of his own perception onto human kind. He sees indifference as arrogance, finds pride (and his own arrogance) in his confidence that humans cannot catch them), and assigns names of death-machine to bicycles and cars.
ReplyDeleteMost everything he says is true; mankind has encroached upon the wilderness, and built large machines that (inadvertantly) murder his kind. I'd like to see an exploration and maybe a growing awareness that humans don't recognize squirrels as anything other than a minor pest, and are (ironically) as cold and indifferent to the lives of squirrels as mother nature is to the lives of man. (there are dozens of stories using the man-vs-nature motif that might be worthwhile to look into and model/parallel.