Thank you for reading Novella with Michelle Richmond, featuring original short stories, audio stories, notes on writing, and serial fiction. If you enjoy this post, you might enjoy reading or listening to my serial novella, By the Time You Read This. To read the story notes for this flash fiction, scroll to the bottom of the post. Paid subscribers can listen to this story here.
It never really occurred to us that we might have a squirrel, until that night with the Wagrams.
What happened was, our neighbors the Wagrams came over for dinner with their chubby toddler and their skinny dog. Ten minutes into the meal, there was some bumping and scratching in the ceiling over the dining table. The dog leapt onto one of the dining chairs and started barking at the ceiling. The toddler began throwing her carrots at the dog. I am not a stickler for manners, I adore toddlers, perhaps because I can read their minds and understand that everything they do is simply a rational response to the refusal of the world to allow them to make their own decisions. The carrot-throwing would have been fine except the carrots were mashed and swimming in butter.
The father said, “Down, baby.”
The mother said, “Don’t talk to her that way.”
Our teenager pushed his chair back from the table and said, “I’m done.” These were the first two words he had spoken in seven days. He picked up his plate and his water glass, carried them to the kitchen, scraped the scraps from his plate into the garbage can, placed the plate and the glass in the dishwasher. He had a way of turning everyday tasks into a total indictment of us.
The toddler watched with amazement, momentarily distracted from the dog. The toddler, who sometimes used the doggie door in the fence to pass from her yard into ours, was thinking but not saying, “What agency! He is a child, but not! He gets up from the table whenever he pleases, engages in the routines of domesticity with a quiet disdain! He is of this house, but apart! He is establishing his independence.”
More scratching and bumping up above. The dog leapt onto the table. The toddler said, “Down, dog.” The mother said to the father, “See what you made her do.”
It was unclear if the mother was talking about the toddler or the dog.
The sounds in the ceiling shifted location, this way and that. The dog kept barking at the ceiling, wandering delicately among the platters on the table, following the sound. The dog exhibited an impressive degree of spatial awareness, not to mention an ability to prioritize the imminent threat over the desire for self-gratification.
There were some mashed potatoes left, three empty wine bottles, a tray of asparagus we all ignored, the meat platter picked clean: it had been chicken drumsticks coated with Cajun seasoning, zapped in the air fryer. Entertaining is not my thing.
My husband stood up, reached over the mashed potatoes and wine bottles, and lifted the dog by its midsection, a practical removal of the canine from the dinner spread.
Another bump overhead. A scratching noise.
The father looked at the ceiling and said, “I think you have a pest.”
I said, “It isn’t a pest. It’s just the wind.”
I wasn’t deflecting. I wasn’t ashamed. At the time, dear reader, I still had in my mind the romantic notion that all the sounds in our ceiling were the sound of the wind.
We heard a door slam downstairs. The adult Wagrams gave each other a look, as if to say, “Our child will never…”
The youngest Wagram, no longer content to hold her tongue, turned to her mother and father and said, “Just you wait.”
Several days passed. The scratching intensified for a while, then grew faint. I hated the squirrel, whose existence I had now accepted as fact, but was not without empathy. I said to my husband, “Why don’t you go up there and take a look?”
“Just a minute,” he said. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t want to go up to the attic either.
He had to go to Helsinki for work. He had to take our son to the Golden State Warriors game. He had to buy toxic chemicals to drain the sinks, all of which backed up at the same time. By the time he got around to visiting the attic, it was far too late for the squirrel.
It was not too late for my husband and me, a kind of reconciliation by way of non-traumatic but proximate death. (We had been married for eighteen years. Many reconciliations were in order.)
Our son, on the other hand, did not want to forgive us. He had no compassion for the people he lived with, but a deep (if retroactive) compassion for the squirrel we could not (did not) save.
Two months after the Wagrams came over for dinner, I discovered that my former fiancé had died. I found out on Facebook. I rarely go on Facebook, so I’m always late to learn of births, deaths, graduations, cheerleading championships, and other major life events.
He died of a stroke in April. I didn’t find out until July. I wanted to reach out to his mother, but discovered she had unfriended me.
I sat down to write her a letter instead. “I am so sorry for your loss” sounded canned, like a Hallmark card or a tweet. “He was an amazing person” sounded like a lie. “I loved him” sounded self-congratulatory, even though there had been a time in my life, many years before, when my love for him felt like the truest thing in the world.
In the end I settled for, “I am thinking about you.” A true statement one can spin in any way one pleases. I wasthinking about her. The thoughts I was having about her were kind and sympathetic. How, I often wondered, had a woman like her raised a son like him?
By the time my former fiancé died, the attic-cleaning man had taken away the dead squirrel. Our teenager had taken up boxing, coming home four afternoons a week sweaty and starving, too worn out to try to destroy us. We had extricated the Wagrams from our lives but left the doggie door open for the toddler, who after all was wise beyond her years. This felt like progress on many fronts. We were dealing with death and not letting it define us. We were neighborly but reserved. We were a family of average means and practical intent, pushing forward through all those disastrous days. What we lacked in skill we made up for with the stubborn persistence of our love, and that is a fact.
This is Novella, Michelle Richmond’s author newsletter. You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up at some time in the near or distant past on my author website or the Random House website, or more recently on Substack. Thank you for reading. If you like this novella, you might enjoy my story collection Hum, or my most recent novel, The Wonder Test.
Story notes: I wrote this story in the first half of 2022. At the time, my son was a junior in high school and was reading White Noise by Don Delillo for his AP English class. He loved the book and suggested that I read it.
I did read it and, as I look back on this story, I can see that the book very much influenced the tone of the story. I can see that influence in certain sentences, particularly, “It was not too late for my husband and me, a kind of reconciliation by way of non-traumatic but proximate death.”
I don’t use the word proximate, ever. Except this once, in this story. I know I must have read that word in White Noise.
It is a fact that whatever I’m reading at any given time seeps into my writing. That’s why the essays I write while reading Deborah Levy sound different than the essays I write while reading Joan Didion. And the stories I write while reading Grace Paley (whose work was in steady rotation when I wrote my first book, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress) have a different sound than, say, No One You Know, during the writing of which I was reading Graham Greene and Maj Sjowall.
When I love the work of a certain writer, his/her/their voice gets in my head. I don’t find this problematic. I love that one can absorb all these disparate voices and that these voices become a part of the amalgam that is one’s own voice. Everything goes through a sieve and eventually comes out your own.
Your experience gets thrown into the mix as well. At the time I wrote this, for example, my son was going through a rather typical teenager phase, a life experience which surely left its mark on this story. (He has since come out on the other side as a delightful, engaged person—as other parents assured us would happen—much to our happiness and relief).
I once had a writing friend visit a graduate creative writing class I was teaching. Of his newest book, I asked, “Were you by any chance reading Nabokov when you wrote this?” He confirmed that he was. He has since won the Pulitzer Prize for a book that sounded nothing like the book that drew inspiration from Nabokov. I love every single book this person has written. I like the fact that he has a recognizable voice that is all his own, but with subtle shifts and gradations across books.
I always tell my writing students to “read widely and well,” to read across genres, and to read all the time. None of this “I can’t read while I’m writing” stuff! Always be reading. What you write will reflect those influences to varying degrees. Your voice will change and develop over time, and in any given story, you may surprise yourself.
I love this story. I laughed out loud!
Perfect. John Cheever would have loved this story because it is a little like one of his best short stories but in your own unique voice. All the characters are perfect. I realize it is flash fiction but I am old school. I hope a lot of people read this. And I hope it gets referenced by other writers as an excellent example of flash fiction. Maybe it would have to be longer to be an actual short story. But It is awesome. If you have more like this I would buy the collection when you publish it.