Dead Baby Squirrels

photo by: Mark Cummings

It’s my junior year of college and I live in an old house by a river. Last week, while I was away, my roommate called and said, “Rachel, I just fished a dead baby squirrel out of the toilet.”  This terrified me. I have an unexplainable fear of dead things.

Today, I woke up early with an incredible urge to use the loo. So badly did I need to unleash my pee that I ran to the toilet without putting on my glasses. And as soon as my fingers wrapped the bathroom’s door handle, I was struck with this knowledge, this foresight, that there would be a dead baby squirrel in the toilet bowl this morning. Bending at the hip now with a pressing hand as my levee to my nearly breaking bladder, I kick up the toilet seat. I was right. How I knew, I’ll never know. There in the water, a small blurry body with a long wet tail floats. Gross. A dead baby squirrel. What a scary adventure that must have been, crawling through our rusted pipes to find his destination, his death, in a shallow, lidded pool. I push down the handle to flush. The corpse swirls and swirls. Refusing to pull him out, in fear water will drip from his fur to the floor, I go outside to the yard to retrieve a stick and once the toilet stops tissing, I flush again. This time, as the toilet water circles down, I guide the small soggy body down through the hole he entered in the middle of the night. This, I imagine, will tell his friends that this pipe is not an exit.