The Little Dude
It’s Fall, the time of year when squirrels fight. I like to sit in the yard, enjoying the last warm days of the year, and watch them go at it in the gingko tree, chittering and snapping their tails, chasing one another from branch to branch. So that’s what I do.
I think I’m making things worse, because the squirrels have to keep an eye out for me. Where I’m sitting, and a large chunk of space around me, are now off limits for both sides. They have to modify their plans of attack. What would be a normal thing to do when getting chased off the tree, which is run up the side of the house, no longer is possible, which must make them even angrier, more frustrated.
I go inside, not wishing to make their lives any harder than they had to be, but when I go back outside, there the squirrels are, one on each branch, not fighting, not even looking at each other, just waiting. And once they see me they go back at it, chittering twice as loud, running up and down branches, facing off and waving their tails at one another.
Should I feel guilty? Or is it like how some people never fight unless they have an audience? I yell upstairs for Mary to join me, and bring down some beer.
“What is it?” she says, and I explain the squirrel situation to her. They now seem especially agitated with the both of us in the yard. The rules have changed, the difficulty level has risen now that there’s two human beings in the way, and in that moment they no longer know what to do.
“Level up, you little fuckers,” Mary tells them. “Which one of you wants this yard?”
She pops the cap off two bottles and hands me one. “Everyone always says pick the biggest squirrel in a fight,” she says. “But my money’s on the little dude: he looks like he just wants to bite somebody’s finger off.”
Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s writing can be found in X-Ray, The Pinch, Roi Fainéant, Heavy Feather Review and The Offing. His short story "Taylor Swift" won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast, and his story "Goodwill" was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press. He teaches writing and literature at California College of the Arts.
You can see more of Hugh's work in 11.4 and 11.4 and 5.2 and 5.2 and 2.4 and 1.1