Tom Busillo
Squirrel on My Back
You live long enough, you learn to carry what you can't explain. Even if it shifts with every breath. Even if it never leaves. Even if it never asks your permission to stay.
It showed up sometime after Linda left. Maybe a week, maybe two. I wasn’t keeping track.
I was sitting out back, not doing much. On my third oil can-sized Foster’s, watching the neighbor’s kid kick a soccer ball into the same section of fence over and over. Just thump, thump, thump.
At first, I thought it was a bird landing on the chair. Then the weight moved. And stayed. Little claws kneading through the flannel of my shirt. Didn’t hurt exactly. But didn’t not.
Normally I would’ve jumped up. Swatted at it, cursed, made a scene. But by then I was in that stage of things where you let the world give you what it’s going to give. You don’t fight it. You nod, accept, and keep going. That kind of acceptance makes it easier to move on. Or at least not make things worse.
I figured it would leave. They all do.
Instead, it made a home. At night it curled under my collar, right where Linda used to press her chin when I still had a place to be.
It didn’t ask to stay – just settled in, quiet and insistent, like Linda did in the beginning.
I knew that no matter how comfortable it felt, I should try to get it to leave. I tried everything. Bent low under branches. Sprayed myself with vinegar. Called Animal Control.
Eventually, I just let it be. It wasn’t noisy. Didn’t tear anything up. Sometimes it twitched in its sleep. I got used to the feeling.
At the bar, they stopped asking where Linda was. Now they just nod when I walk in and scoot the peanuts down my way. One guy always asks, “How’s your friend?” I tell him to ask him himself.
Some nights I talk to it. Tell it what I should’ve said to her. What I’d do differently. Sometimes I forget it’s there until I feel it breathe against my neck.
It doesn’t answer. But it doesn’t leave either.
And that’s something.
Daughter
All my life, I could feel it building. Right in the center of my forehead. No visible bumps. Nothing to give anything away. Just a pressure that grew worse over time. Doctors said it was migraines. Stress.
It happened on a Tuesday. I’d had four cups of coffee, plus four more made from spent K-cups – light roast by way of sad beige water. Not that I noticed. COVID had taken my taste.
The headache hit hard and suddenly. Most people would blame the caffeine, but I had a feeling this was the day things would finally come to a boil and spill over. The blinding pain had me sinking to my knees.
Then my skull split open.
She dropped out fully formed, landing on the linoleum, sneering.
She looked like a young goth Joan Jett: fishnet stockings, Doc Martens, a Fields of the Nephilim T-shirt, black leather miniskirt, silver skull-and-serpent rings, and eyes like smudged eyeliner had given up.
I’ll never forget her first words:
“I need twenty bucks.”
I just stared.
“Are you slow on the uptake or something?” she snapped. “I said I need twenty bucks.”
I opened my wallet and gave it to her. She didn’t thank me. Just folded it once and stuck it in her boot.
“And your car keys.”
I handed them over. Stunned.
“I hope you won’t be needing it anytime soon,” she muttered, and turned for the door.
“I always hoped I’d have a daughter,” I blurted out, stupidly.
She paused. Rolled her eyes.
“God, you’re so weird,” she said.
Then she slammed the door behind her.
That was the last I ever saw of her. Or the car.
I still leave the porch light on, just in case.
Tom Busillo's (he/his) writing has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney's, trampset, The Disappointed Housewife, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. He is a Best Short Fictions nominee and the author of the unpublishable 2,646-word conceptual poem "Lists Poem," composed of 11,111 nested 10-item lists. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.
