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Squirrels wandered into the walls of my house & kept me up at night -- gnawing & chomping
on alley trash & the acorns that fall onto the sidewalks & dent my car; they rummaged amongst
the rafters, making nests for their future generations; I complained to my landlord & he went
into the attic & threw poison down into the walls; so the house smells like rotting squirrels;
when I was young, my kitten wandered through a hole in the upper floor of my house and fell
down an entire story into the walls of my dad’s home office—the walls of the office mewed for
help; my dad complained a dead cat would smell & ripped the wall open; seeing the kitten
emerge from the wall was like witnessing a live birth, like the moment when the doctor told
me, You can touch her head, & I felt my daughter’s head between my legs; I shuddered, as I
did when I was young & outside the old house; I had heard a noise & looked down my legs & a
snake was twisting between my feet in an S-shape; I screamed & ran inside for my father, who
got the shovel, severed the snake with it, & presented the snake to me on the shovel; A
copperhead, he said; Never touch a snake like this one; writhing on the shovel, the severed
snake resembled the cartoon by Benjamin Franklin; using the shovel, Dad catapulted the snake
in the air to the woods behind our house; the snake silhouetted against that blue summer sky
and hung in mid-air before descending & that cartoon by Benjamin Franklin always stuck with
me; at the time of the cartoon’s creation, there was a superstition that a snake that had been
chopped apart would return to life if connected before sunset & tomorrow the landlord
is bringing kitty litter to spread over the rotting corpses of dead squirrels.