2020 Freshwater Literary Journal

Theric Jepson The Squirrel that Sits Atop Our Bookshelf Ten or twenty years ago, someone picked up this ceramic squirrel at a hardware store and took it home, painted it lightly with gray fur and pink tongue, and placed it in a kiln to make it shine.

Perhaps they were dissatisfied with its drugged eyes.

Or perhaps they died.

I don’t know.

But somehow it ended up at a thrift store where it was picked up for a buck and brought to this brookside Berkeley park where my boys and I wait to join forces and toss sticks as per alleged Viking custom.

Our goal: stand, oh, about twenty feet away and knock down more blocks more quickly than those who dare challenge us.

We do not falter.

Our sticks fly as missiles, tumbling blocks like enemy idols.

Our path home is lit by triumph.

Our trophies: grass-stained jeans, bellies filled with cold cuts, a gray ceramic squirrel watching us with its black and blurry eyes.

Tomorrow, the jeans will get washed and lunch will need to be served again, but perhaps this gray ceramic squirrel will live to gaze down upon their grandchildren who won’t know its story and will find its eyes a bit hollow and creepy so they’ll move it to the garden or just throw it away.

In a thousand years may it be found again, unearthed by grad students searching with trowels for trinkets to support their thesis that in the early twenty-first century spirituality was infected with burgeoning animism.

A decade or two later, they will bring their own children to the university museum to show them— 81