Stanley looked . . . strange. I dimly realized that his stomach was huge and distended, bowing out like an enormous beer belly. “Juanita will have her work cut out for her,” I thought to myself. And then I realized that Stanley’s tiny back feet were swinging awfully listlessly, and that my father’s hand was STUCK UP INSIDE THE BODY OF THE SQUIRREL.
“Holy fuck, you psychopath!” is what I would have said if I hadn’t been eight years old. Fresh blood was drying on my father’s sleeve, and my mind struggled to piece together what was happening. For a brief moment I thought that Stanley the Magical Squirrel had been alive up until only seconds before, when my father had chosen to give him some sort of bizarre colorectal exam gone horribly wrong. Then I realized that this was, more likely, a squirrel my father had found dead on the road, and that he had sliced it open and decided to use it as some sort of grotesque hand puppet culled from the very bowels of hell.
Lisa giggled and stuck her hand up the ass of the dead squirrel. The strain had been too much for her fragile little mind. At the age of only six, she had snapped. As she shoved the fresh carcass up to her elbow, I made a mental note to start checking out the backs of milk cartons, certain that my real parents, who had most likely misplaced me at a movie theater, must be very worried about me by now. I assured myself that they were probably at a PETA meeting, making large donations in the name of their long-lost daughter. “Oh, she would have loved this,” my real mother would say consolingly to my father (the count) as they worked diligently to spread their successful prairie dog rescue mission to neighboring counties.
Many years later, my sister had a daughter named Gabi. My father (apparently misinterpreting my need to bring up the dead-squirrel story every Christmas for the rest of my life as homage to happier times, rather than the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder) decided he should bless his four-year-old granddaughter with the never-ending therapy that resulted from the talking-magic-carcass-in-a-box. He’d tanned a raccoon body, placed the stiffened corpse in a large cereal box, and had hidden it under the guest bed (apparently waiting for the perfect moment to scar Gabi for life), and then he forgot all about it. Weeks later, Gabi found the mutilated raccoon carcass under the bed and (thinking it to be a very stiff puppet) wandered around the house playing with her new friend and freaking the shit out of the cat. She crept into my father’s room, where he was taking a nap, and quietly laid the dead raccoon on my father’s pillow, like a message from the Godfather. The dead raccoon’s shriveled paw gently grazed my father’s sleeping face as Gabi moved the raccoon closer so it could give her grandfather an Eskimo kiss. “Papaw,” she whispered sweetly, “wake up and say hewwo.”
This is the point when my dad screamed like a little girl, and then Gabi screamed at his screaming, and she threw her hands up, and the dead raccoon went flying across the room into the kitchen and landed on my sister’s foot. A normal person would have passed out or at least yelled, “What the fuck?!” but at that point in her life, flying dead raccoons and screaming people in the house were pretty much normal, so Lisa shrugged and went back to making her Pop-Tart.
Lisa called me to share the story later, and I promised to buy Gabi a pony for avenging us, but then later I felt a little sorry for my dad, because waking up to find a dead raccoon staring at you through eyeless sockets as it caresses your cheek is not something anyone with his high blood pressure should have to go through. Then again, giving me a mutilated magical squirrel in a cracker box is kinda fucked up, too, so I guess we’re about even.
As an aside, I could not find a photo of Stanley the mutilated squirrel (probably because no one ever thinks to take pictures of squirrel carcasses until it’s too late), but I do have a picture of my dad bottle-feeding a baby porcupine in a spare tire, and that seems somehow fitting and slightly redeeming. I did, however, just notice that my dad is holding the porcupine up with a paint stick and there are paint drops all over the tire. So it’s entirely possible he’s feeding the porcupine house paint. Unlikely, but stranger things have happened.
Don’t Tell Your Parents