Paradise Squirrel'd

This one time

at Squirrel CAMP

(they call it Squirrel CAMP -

it's really more of a rehab center for highly disturbed squirrels -

The Squirrel Center for Advanced Matters of Perversity -

Squirrel CAMP sounds better, though),

Suicidal Squirrel

♫(insert theme music)♫

was having a bad day.

He just wanted to die.

His macaroni art kept coming unglued.

(His pictures pretty much looked like squished squirrels even before they came unglued.

The ungluing was really more of a blessing for everyone else in Macaroni Art 101.)

The CAMP people got mad at him on

"What Do You Want to Be"

day when he rolled himself in flour

and squirted ketchup on himself

and said he wanted to be the ghost

of a squirrel who had been pecked to death by a troop of killer hummingbirds.

…

Either that or a Mrs. Paul’s Breaded Squirrel Stick.

…

..

.

Ew.

The other squirrels in "group" kept looking at him all funny like

every time it was his turn to talk.

His branch-mate snored.

Loudly.

He was pretty sure that he was breaking out with poison ivy

in a very unpleasant place to break out with poison ivy.

(An unpleasant place even for a squirrel.)

And then to top it all off,

Dr. Squirrel N. Freud kept asking him,

"And how does that make you fe-eeel?"

And no matter what he answered,

the doctor would just tap his pencil against his teeth and say,

"Hmmm. Ver-ry ink-teresting."

It was enough to make our SLF want to run screaming right off the end of his branch.

(Never mind that wanting to run screaming right off the end of his branch is why he was there in the first place.)

All of the other squirrels from his tree had pooled their acorns to get him some help

or at least to get him away from them.

(Can you blame them?)

And Squirrel CAMP was cheaper than a real hospital and there was a lot less paperwork for them to have to fill out.

(Squirrels don't do so well with paperwork - not even normal non-suicidal squirrels).

The main reason Squirrel CAMP was cheaper was the location.

It was next to an airport.

For most squirrels, this would have been merely an annoyance,

but for our SLF, this was opportunity –

great big shiny opportunity.

Disturbing creative thoughts rolled about in his mind

(well, tried to anyway - squirrels have very small brains,

so there's not much rolling room there).

He finally settled on a leap of derring-do.

As the plane taxied toward him on the runway,

gaining speed with every second,

he would jump,

Matrix-like,

into the air and propel his body to red vaporous death via jet engine.

It was a good plan.

Very dramatic by squirrel standards.

Shame it didn't work out that way.

He plotted,

and planned,

and schemed,

and drew more diagrams.

And then,

in the night,

he escaped from Squirrel CAMP.

(it wasn't like they locked him in or cared or anything - it just sounded more dramatic that way.)

Oh, and he sent out invitations,

because after all,

there’s just no point in having a dramatic death without an audience to say

“Oooooohhh”

or

“Eeeewww”

as the case may be.

So,

there was our SLF,

standing up on his back feet in the middle of a runway,

eyes closed,

arms spread wide,

Suicidal Squirrel Zen.

The plane was moving faster than he had expected it to.

He was all ready to jump, when...

OUCH!

The plane tire ran over his tail.

Flat as a pancake.

Again.

But that wasn't the worst of it.

Oh no.

Not by a long shot.

You see,

his flat tail kinda got caught in the tire tread.

Then there was this kind of flipping round and round thing

and

sky

pavement

sky

pavement

sky

pavement

sky

pavement

sky

and then the pavement was going away.

And this really didn't seem like such a good idea anymore.

And then the landing gear went up,

taking our SLF with it.

It was dark,

but at least he had time to pick his tail out of the tire tread.

He had a lot of time.

Most especially by squirrel standards.

Squirrel time is different.

He got bored.

He got lonely.

He got hungry.

Death by starvation just didn't seem right for his idiom.

Then the doors opened,

and he fell out on a different runway and the plane kept going.

It was very bright.

And hot.

Very

hot

pavement.

OUCH!

Squirrels don't like road rash any more than people do.

When he got on the grass,

he looked around.

And there it was.

The epitome of all his suicidal little squirrel dreams.

.....

....

...

..

.

A volcano.

It was a long way away.

But our SLF had squirrelly determination.

Death awaited him.

Hot lava death.

And all he had to do to reach it was to walk there

across the beach

under the swaying palm trees

and striped beach umbrellas

and past cool tropical drinks in coconuts.

And that's when he saw her.

At the edge of the beach.

The tropical she-squirrel of his dreams.

And she winked at him.

And gave him what was a come-hither look if he had ever seen one

(he actually never had, so he really hoped that's what that was).

Anyway,

she took him by the hand when he walked over to her and started talking to him in some weird tropical squirrel chatter.

He just smiled and nodded.

She was a lot smaller than him.

And she wore some weird white jewelry.

Kinda looked like bones.

Must be those coconut thingies.

He followed her.

She was going toward the volcano anyway.

So at least he’d be that much closer to melty squirrel death when she left him and the brood of squirrel-lings in later years for Dexter,

the pool-squirrel.

Very tragic.

Poor squirrel-lings.

Turns out,

there was a whole tropical squirrel village.

And they were all little squirrels.

With high pitched little squirrel voices.

And they kept looking at him all funny like.

Kinda hungry funny like.

They gave him a massage with coconut butter and sprinkled some nice exfoliating sea salt all over him and kept pinching his fat places and smiling really big and rubbing their stomachs.

It was kinda weird.

But they led him up the volcano.

He was so excited.

Witnesses for his incredible immolation.

They were almost to the top.

It was pretty warm up there,

but not as bad as he had expected.

Not nearly as bad as he had thought it should be.

And shouldn't there be smoke or something?

As they stood on the edge,

looking down into the crater where he planned to seal his doom,

there was a little bit of steam coming from a very small hole,

a smaller-than-squirrel hole.

There was some smoke, though.

Just not volcano smoke.

Bonfire smoke.

And there was a big pot.

And the little tropical squirrels seemed really excited.

One of them pulled out a blue pen and started writing on our SLF.

Only not words.

More like lines.

Like sections.

And our SLF suddenly had a horrifying realization.

That white jewelry was squirrel bones.

That massage was squirrel seasoning.

They were going to eat him!

That's not suicide.

That's cannibalism.

Cannibalistic tropical pygmy squirrels.

Oh yeah.

That wasn't cool.

Not cool at all.

Our greasy SLF

(from the coconut oil)

managed to ooze away from his erstwhile captors and ran shrieking back to the beach.

He crawled up into one of the striped beach umbrellas and stayed there chattering his teeth and cursing the non-volcanoness of that volcano until sunrise.

The whole night,

he was certain he was about to feel sharp pointy little squirrel teeth gnawing at his ankles.

But he didn’t.

(The tropical pygmy squirrels had a great luau,

boiled coconuts and all,

but they never could figure out why their guest of honor ran away,

after they had been so nice to him and given him tribal tattoos and complimented his girth and massaged him and planned his wedding and everything.

TiFi, the tropical she-squirrel, was broken-hearted.

Luckily, Dexter the pool-squirrel was able to console her.

They married later and had a large brood of tropical squirrel-lings and were very happy.

Until she left him for a vacationing accountant squirrel from Detroit named Harvey.)

Then he began to plot his escape from the island.

The Island of the

Cannibalistic Tropical Pygmy Squirrels.

That's just fun to say.

.....

....

...

..

.

TO BE CONTINUED

.

..

...

....

.....

Will our SLF escape?

Or will he become a canape?

Will he make a normal escape via plane?

Or will his idiom demand a more dramatic exit?

Will he ever just get it over with and die???

....

...

..

.

I'm just getting started you know.

And these really do disturb me as much as they disturb you.

Maybe more.

After all, I carry them in my head until they get out.

Not such a pleasant place to be.

It would be better if there were poppies.

Or daisies.

Daisies are cute.

And butterflies.

I like butterflies.

But no spiders.

Spiders are icky.

.

..

...

Part IV: The Birdsquirrel of Alcatraz

Once upon a time

Suicidal Squirrel

♫(insert theme music)♫

was writing a treatise on the implausibility of life as a squirrel

and the difficulties of assuring a truly meaningful life

by accomplishing a truly unusual death,

when a bird flew over
and pooped
on his head.

As he looked up,

cursing the fact that birds can do that and that

there's really absolutely nothing that a squirrel can do about it,

he noticed another bird sitting on a power line.

And the little squirrel

light bulb kinda sorta

flashed inside his brain.

So he climbed the pole

(an easy feat for

our squirrelly little friend)

and struck up a conversation with the bird about

the safety of power lines.

The bird pretty much ignored him.

When he started getting all loud and crazy squirrelly-like,

the little bird just kind of hummed a tune about finding

a happy place and

going to a happy place and being

in a happy place.

And then, in a fit of pique,

our SLF let forth a shrill squirrelly shriek

of fatuous frustration

and leapt from the power line to

splat himself against the cold, hard, unyielding earth.

Unfortunately for him,

squirrels are very lightweight creatures,

and physics just wouldn't let him die so easily.

It still didn't feel very good, though.

OUCH!

His difficulties, however, were espied by a more helpful

(I guess you could call it helpful)

creature.

The owl hooted down at him and hocked up something really nasty

and grey and furry looking and said,

"I say, might I be of service, old chap?"

(It was an English owl, of course.)

Even

suicidal squirrels

♫(theme music)♫

have some instincts,

so our SLF froze exactly where he was

and wet himself.

Owls are scary.

"Oh, come now, sir, I've already had my elevenses today

(as you see there - don't step in that),

and you don't look to be particularly appetizing anyway,

especially not after that little display.

I do, however, have a thought which might be of

some interest to you."

So our SLF clambered back up and listened raptly

as the owl whuffled into his ear.

(Don't ask how he got his ears back after the Winnebago fiasco. That's a truly disturbing tale.)

Then the owl flew away,

and

Suicidal Squirrel

♫(theme music)♫

bent over

took a deep breath

crossed his squirrelly little fingers

opened his squirrelly little mouth

and bit down hard on the power line.

That more than tingled.

Eww

.

Frying squirrel smells nasty.

Frying squirrel doesn't feel so great either.

Frying sqirrel quickly becomes flying frying squirrel.

And for a very

very

very

brief moment,

our little squirrelly pal had sanity.

Electroshock therapy will do that for you.

Then he hit the ground again.

OUCH!

He was very fuzzy now.

And he walked funny.

And there was the smoke.

And that smell.

And the other squirrels looked at him all funny like.

Electroshock therapy will do that for you.

And then he realized that the smoke was from the fire

that was consuming his tail.

AAAIIIIEEEE!!!!

So he ran

(lurched fast really - electroshock therapy will do that for you, too)

to the nearest water source and put himself out.

The birds were very disturbed by this.

So, once he was

out of their birdbath,

they pooped on his head

again.

And the other squirrels looked at him all funny like.

And he muttered

and fumed

(in a really stinky gross sort of way)

and plotted

and schemed

and drew some pretty disturbing diagrams

(imagine Rube Goldberg as a squirrel with a death wish)

....

.....

......

TO BE CONTINUED

......

.....

....

Will our hapless hero achieve his goal?

Will death become our SLF?

Only the Shadow knows

...

....

...

Oh yeah.

You're really sorry you ever said you liked these stories.

This is what comes of humoring people.