Imogen, Hector, & the Squirrel by Zelda Knapp

Oh. The leaves were teeth. Imogen stopped walking, the squeak of her sneakers against asphalt suddenly quiet. It must have rained the night before because the squirrel’s face, a rictus of death and pain, was soaked. Brown and jutting out of the open mouth, the teeth looked longer and crueler than she would have expected. Hec called them tree rats.

But then, Hec gave a shout of alarm and ran half a block in a blink when he realized the thing his little sister was coolly examining wasn’t a rotted palm frond but a dead animal.

It was stretched out, like it had been caught mid-bound. Longer than they usually seemed. Maybe it was the tail, flared straight back and stiff with dirty water, not fluffed and raised to test the flavor of the air. Nothing like the cartoons and barely like the ones who haunted the park. She’d thought it was a palm frond at first, too—there were plenty of them on the pavement this morning, the same greyed-out yellow and brown—until she saw the teeth.

“Do you think it got electrocuted?”

Hec didn’t know, didn’t care. Time to leave. Let someone else call animal control.

“Aren’t they for live animals?”

Trash disposal then. Someone paid in tax dollars. Someone not-them. And someone not-them would call. Time to go.

Imogen remembered once seeing the scraped remains of a mouse after a car had flattened it. The little red bits that looked like uncooked hamburger.

But the squirrel was whole and full, sturdy, preserved almost, like what Hec had to dissect in Bio. If it weren’t soaked and filthy, its mouth an open void.

“I don’t think it got hit by a car.”

Hec rolled his eyes. Of course not, it’s on the sidewalk, stupid.

“Or a bike then.”

She’d seen a kid step on a bird once. Never told Hec that. Never told anyone. She could never be sure if he’d done it on purpose. A baby bird, wing broken and chirping like mad for its mama to bring it back to the nest. And a boy no more than three, barely not a baby anymore himself, stepped on it. It didn’t flatten like the mouse. It—almost sprang back into shape.

Birds had the fragilest bones, Hec had told her once. Hollow so they were weightless enough to fly. She thought about that whenever they flew out to Tía Sofía’s, how weightless the airplane wasn’t, how hollow she wasn’t. How when she was especially young she tried to eat nothing, to be more hollow.

Birds came from dinosaurs.

“Hec, did dinosaurs have hollow bones?”

Sometimes Hec pretended he didn’t hear her.

Hollow bones just made you easier to break.

“What about flying squirrels?”

Hec knew that one. They don’t fly, they, like, glide. And that one was just an ordinary tree rat. And stop talking about it.

Imogen wondered about that mama bird sometimes. About where the nest was. If birds mourn like elephants do. Elephant bones were probably solid and strong. They didn’t need to fly. She thought that movie was silly and Hec said it was racist, too.

“Should we tell someone though?”

Someone will find it.

“Someone we tell?”

It just happens sometimes, Imogen. Animals die. It’s random and ugly.

Imogen knew that. Knew that better than Hec maybe, Hec who shouted and ran when he saw death. Hec who dissected clean, formaldehyded things.

Imogen knew what dying was. Dying was violent and painful and terrible. Was getting flattened or zapped or stepped on. But death was just quietly there. The thing you stare at that can’t stare back. Death looked like a palm frond if you weren’t looking closely.

Imogen sped to catch up to Hec, two strides to his one. Slipped her hand into his, in case he needed her. Felt the unhollowness of him.

“It’s okay, Hec. Someone will come.”

---

ZELDA KNAPP — Zelda is a New York-based writer of short fiction, plays, poetry, theater reviews, television revisits, and academic scholarship. Her pieces have been published in Judith Magazine, Standard Culture, and The Biscuit, along with her collection, This Is What They Made It Out Of: tales from the end of the world. She’s had four plays produced in NYC, and her articles on musical theater have been published by Routledge and in various journals.

Art by crawwlspace — Chicago native crawwlspace is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist, creating stunning pieces that are equal parts spooky, unusual, and beautiful. After graduating in 2016 from Emerson College, crawwlspace quickly discovered her passion in various art styles such as acrylic painting, and collage art, as well as pen, charcoal, and watercolor pieces. To this day, crawwlspace continues to find beauty in the macabre and expand her talents within her art. Many of her notable pieces have been shown at galleries across Chicago since 2022.