Requiem for a Squirrel

Well, for those of you who were following the Saga of the Wayward Squirrel, the mystery of What Happened to the Squirrel has been solved.

Last night I finally managed to sort of patch up the ceiling where Exterminator #1 -- the crappy one who came out, tossed bags of Contrac all over the place and charged me three hundred dollars -- had tried to nab the squirrel with a net and then decided that since he didn't want to leave a havahart trap and then have to pick it up, that our problem was a rat. We're going to have to pull down that entire section of ceiling and put up new tiles, but that's for later on.

So tonight I decided it was OK to let the cats back downstairs. After all, it is now three weeks since the sounds of frantic squirrel stopped and there was no smell at all, so I figured however the little fucker got in, he must have found a way out.

Twenty minutes later I decided to check on how Maggie the Idiot Cat was doing downstairs and make sure she hadn't noticed the duct tape holding up the ceiling tiles, and there she was, crouched next to one of the bar stools with what looked like a largish grey dustball in front of her.

It wasn't a grey dustball.

Feeling in danger of having a technicolor yawn of chicken and carrots come up, I managed to get upstairs, bolt the door to the basement, and freak out. I had barely managed to compose myself when Mr. Brilliant walked in the door after yet another 14-hour day door to door, looking exhausted. Now, how can you ask someone to dispose of a dead squirrel after they put in a 14-hour day and commute home from New York City, the rat capital of the world?

You can't.

By this point, I was starting to feel like Marc Maron's experience with Possum Christ, only for some reason when it's happening to me and I tell it, it's not nearly as funny. So after spending about a half-hour trying to get my shit together enough to do this, I headed downstairs to do battle with a dead squirrel.

The poor thing looked so pitiful, and I ended up walking aimlessly around the laundry room, sobbing and looking for a box to tip the thing into and a stick to nudge it with, because Maggie hadn't quite dragged it all out from under the bar. Finally I got a paint roller extender and a cardboard carton and went to work. And wouldn't you know it -- the damn thing had dug its claws or something into the carpet and it wouldn't move. So I started freaking out again and went back into the basement, muttering dire things and wondering how anyone actually works as a funeral director. I found a dustpan and resorted to the pancake-flip to get the poor creature into a box, thence to a bag and out to the trash, where of course it now has to wait till Friday because our trash pickup was this morning.

So the only question is whether the thing starved to death or if it ate any of the rodenticide, and if the latter, whether Maggie ingested any of it. I didn't see so much as teeth marks on the corpse (not that I looked very hard), so it's highly unlikely, but I'm going to call the vet in the morning, just in case.

And now I have to watch something stupid on TV to get the image out of my head or I'm going to have squirrel nightmares all night -- something like, oh, say, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, which seems always to be on.

But that's where my Squirrel Story ends, because I am sure as hell not going to check the trash tomorrow to see if it came back to life -- the Jesus of Squirrels -- to lead all the animals killed by their own stupidity into the light.