Somewhere They Can't Find Me

You swerve to avoid a squirrel. Unknown to you, the squirrel pledges a life debt to you. In your darkest hour, the squirrel arrives.

Wednesday was my last night alive. These were my last few minutes here. This was my last chance to get out.

I looked at Emily as she lay sleeping, and I hoped dreaming of me. Her hair pooled out across the pillow, its honey color a hazy shade in the winter’s moonlight. I stroked that hair one last time, as she stirred gently in her sleep and tried to curl up to me. It was hard to believe this was happening. It was hard to believe that it was time to go.

In this deep and dark December, darker for my having to flee, I looked at the small writing desk set beneath the window. Outside was a freshly fallen shroud of snow. I thought on how that should help make my escape easier, but it didn’t help. I even thought of revealing my crime to her, surreal as it now seemed to me. A letter like that would only hurt her, make it worse, and I wouldn’t do that. Ever.

It made me more uptight and on edge, to have to go like this. It wasn’t right to leave her. I’d been fingered, though, and there was no getting out of that. The bobbies wouldn’t stop looking for me, and if they did, Robinson sure wasn’t. His drinking habit was no secret, and neither was his temper well hidden.

Where she and I lived, it was practically two steps away from the county line. A totally different jurisdiction, and a chance to evade them for long enough to maybe cross the ocean. I l would make like the others, all gone to look for America.

I loved her, and it ate at me. Instead of disturbing her, I just kissed that honey hair, as my tears fell quietly into it, grateful for what she had given to me for as long as I’d had her.

My bag packed, I crept out the alleyway, and heard cathedral bells tripping on right behind me, calling the time, telling me morning was a few hours away. The car started quietly enough, but its sound filled the alleyway, and I took off as silently as I could on that winter night, flying down the highway, to my freedom.

I did make it across the county line, speeding down silent and moonlit roads, into lake country. It was beautiful, and sad, in the isolation that the night gave to the white landscape. Across one of the lakes, as I drove by, I swear that I saw a girl, made of the silver moonlight, sailing a small boat. The was captivating as that silver girl sailed on by.

When my attention made it to the road once more, I was startled by something crossing the lane. I turned the wheels, and swerved to avoid hitting it, but I was going too fast and the brakes locked as I went into a skid. The car left the road and slammed into a copse of trees along the lakeshore. I wasn’t as lucky to stop moving as the car. I was launched through the windshield and into the sub-zero lake water.

My next moments of consciousness are fragmented ones. I remember being leaned against a rock, seeing my car mangled in the trees on the other shore, blood covering the hood and windshield from where I’d been ejected into the lake.

There was a small squirrel. It was silver, bedecked in its winter camouflage. The creature crawled up on my lap, looking at me. I stared back at it, too numb and cold to move. My watch face was broken, reading 3 a.m. as the squirrel moved to my hand and bit me. Hard. I know it was hard, because I still felt the pressure, even through my freezing limbs, before the even more chilling sensation of the blood leaving my body.

The squirrel pushed at my hand, clasping it in its tiny claws, dragging it to small trenches it had dug in the snow and soil next to my broken and bleeding hand. They weren’t trenches it had dug, but old druidic symbols. I had no idea what they meant, but I vaguely recognized them from long ago. Maybe some class I took, before I decided to throw in with the mob. Before the mob forced me to hold up and rob liquor stores.

My hand wasn’t the only place I’d been losing blood. It was everywhere. The squirrel chittered, madly dragging at my hand, as I felt colder and slower. Eventually I stopped feeling my hand. I stopped seeing my hand. Those were the last moments of human consciousness I ever had. I had become cold as the rock I was laying against, on that small island on the lake, across from my car, and the evidence of how I committed a crime, broke the law.

Suddenly, my consciousness exploded into every direction and new sensations flooded me. Dormancy, cold, patience, water wearing away at me grain by grain. I felt the cold sky and wind blowing through gnarled fingers, and the silver squirrel’s weight bounce from one to the other, chittering with excitement and relief. I hadn’t become as cold as that rock. I was the rock. In fact, I’d somehow become the whole island.

The next day, the police found my car. I watched them across the water, and heard everything they said, carried on the winter wind to me, that stirred the small and bare forest on my island back. They dredged the lake, but no body was ever recovered, of course. Then they left.

I still watch the street from the across my lake. I miss people, sometimes. Emily even came to the shores of the lake once, as if looking for me. The streetlamp she parked under, by the junipers, showed her flushed cheeks, as she looked out across the water. The only thing she saw was an island with a small forest, many rocks, and a little squirrel.

Do I wish I could have been closer to her? Do I wish I could have been the road and not this island, so I could have felt her touch again, even if it was just the soles of her feet? Of course. But I’ve come to enjoy what I am. And even if it meant never touching her again, I think I’m okay with that now. Yes, I would rather be this forest, than that street.

I’m not going anywhere though. If she can ever forgive me, I’m here for Emily, whenever she may find me.


(With many, many apologies to Paul Simon.)

Author's Note

Originally submitted to a flash fiction contest (defined as 500 - 1,500 words) back in April 2015 with the prompt, "You swerve to avoid a squirrel. Unknown to you, the squirrel pledges a life debt to you. In your darkest hour, the squirrel arrives."

The prompt used for the contest was originally found on Reddit. Original link: https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/2z5ly5/wp_you_swerve_to_avoid_a_squirrel_unknown_to_you/

Word count is 1,104.

The entry was submitted under one of my pseudonyms, Adam Locke.