Squirrels

A new matchbox story based on your ideas | Fiction | Fresh Soup

To Danna & Omri

The Matchbox Story challenge was especially difficult this month, and not because the ideas you sent in weren’t good. A few of them were simply excellent, but I didn’t quite know how to make them my own. The story “Squirrels” was ultimately inspired by two submissions: Omri Horesh’s suggestion to write a story about reincarnation, and a picture by Danna Feintuch, which shows someone jumping into the water. I was very struck by this image. It particularly resonated in this year during which I’ve moved with my family to Berlin, because it conveys a complex attitude towards change: jumping into the water is scary, and so the girl contracts and huddles into a ball in preparation for the impact, but it is also exciting, because it promises something new. While writing, I tried to combine this attraction/resistance to change with the idea of reincarnation, and here is the result. This weekend I’ll open up a new Matchbox thread for paid subscribers. If you have an idea or an image that you think deserves a story, don’t forget to share it! 

Drawing by Danna Feintuch

When Tom’s grandfather realized he wasn’t going to survive his smoker’s cancer, he convened the whole family and informed them that as soon as he died, he was planning to be reincarnated in another body and come back to Grandma. “I love you all,” he told the relatives gathered around his bed, “but to tell you the truth, one incarnation with you is plenty. I’m ready to say goodbye and move on. But you…” – he cupped the wrinkled hand of Tom’s grandmother, who was sitting at his bedside – “you are my eternal beloved and we will always be together.”

Tom’s grandfather believed in reincarnation. He had a strange theory, which held that when the soul departs the body it forgets almost everything, and that’s why, when you get near death, you have to train the soul to remember two things: one person and one place it wants to return to. When it came to the person, Tom’s grandfather didn’t have to do any training: he thought about his wife all the time anyway. As for the place, he told anyone who would listen, over and over again, that when he came back in the next life, he would wait for Tom’s grandmother on the red bench outside the radiology clinic at the hospital. That was the bench where they used to sit together, chain-smoking, while they waited for his radiation treatment. If a doctor walked past and dared to throw out a comment about how he shouldn’t be smoking in his state, Tom’s grandfather would wink at Grandma and say, “And if I do keep smoking, Doctor? What’s the worst that could happen? I’ll get even more cancer?”

Photo by Shira Geffen

When Tom’s grandfather died, Tom’s grandmother visited the red bench at the hospital every week, and sat there waiting for Tom’s grandfather to arrive in his new body. But he never did. After a few months, she stopped going, and a couple of years later she moved into a retirement home. There, she met a widower named Norman, and an affair of sorts blossomed. Norman, who was almost eighty, wanted to get married. Tom’s grandmother wasn’t enthusiastic, but Norman was very persistent and eventually she agreed, on condition that they held the ceremony next to the red bench, in homage to Tom’s grandfather.

There were fewer than a dozen people at the wedding, including the pastor, and Tom, who had just graduated high school but hadn’t left for college yet. It was a traditional ceremony, a little boring even, until the moment when the pastor asked Norman if he took Tom’s grandmother as his wife. Before he could answer, a giant squirrel appeared out of nowhere and bit Norman’s hand. The startled Norman shrieked in pain, and the pastor tried to kick the elusive squirrel, lost his balance, and fell on his back. Within seconds, the wedding had descended into chaos. It took almost an hour to treat Norman and the pastor and calm them down. As soon as the bruised pastor resumed the ceremony, the squirrel dropped from a treetop and tried to attack poor Norman again. This time he wasn’t able to hurt anyone, but Tom’s grandmother had had enough. She announced that the wedding was off and she was leaving Norman.

She lived in the retirement home until the day she died. Twice a week, Tom picked her up in his parents’ car and drove her to the red bench at the hospital, where she waited for the giant squirrel. The squirrel didn’t always turn up, but when he did, he jumped on her lap and curled up like a baby, and they would sit there for hours, without saying a word.

Tom told this story to Naomi on their first date. They were at a mediocre Italian restaurant in Urbana, Illinois, and Naomi, who hadn’t been all that excited in the first place about going on a blind date with her co-worker’s brother who wrote a blog about global warming, asked herself what it said about Tom if the first thing he told her on a date was that his grandfather was a violent, jealous squirrel. When Tom took her home, she told him he was cute but she had trouble imagining the two of them together. Tom laughed and said, “You don’t have to imagine it.” He pointed at their reflection in the rearview mirror: “There we are. Together. And if you go out with me tomorrow, we’ll be together again, without you having to strain your imagination muscles.” “No,” said Naomi, “I meant that I can’t imagine us… you know… as a couple.” After an awkward silence, Tom said, “Okay. Then let’s not try to imagine ourselves as a couple and make do with something more modest: you and me in my apartment, eating bibimpap that I cooked from my Korean roommate’s grandmother’s secret recipe.” And the next day, he really did make her the best meal she’d ever had, and he showed her his crazy collection of old greeting cards, which he’d kept since he was a child, and they sat talking until three a.m., and within a month they’d moved in together. 

After less than a year they got married, and a few months later Naomi was pregnant. They hadn’t even been thinking about kids, and when it happened they felt as if someone had given them an enormous, wonderful gift. The kind that takes nine months to unwrap.

Naomi started buying all the things they were going to need for the baby hiding in her belly, and Tom, who was good with his hands, took his toolbox out of the shed and began building an oak cradle which they planned to paint sky-blue. One evening, when she got home from work, Naomi found Tom lying next to the cradle, unconscious. When he recovered, they went to the hospital, where, after a series of tests, Tom was diagnosed with an advanced brain tumor. The kind that if they’d only found a few months earlier, could have been treated.

Naomi cried all night, while Tom, who was strangely calm, tried to comfort her and said she was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and that even though he would like to live with her for another eighty years, he wasn’t greedy and he was grateful for all the happiness he’d shared with her these past eighteen months. “But I am greedy,” Naomi wept, “and I’m not willing to give you up, do you hear me? I won’t let you die and leave me on my own.”

The doctors said Tom had three months to live, at most. He would die before their child was born and there was nothing in the world they could do about it. But Naomi had an idea. She dragged the almost-finished cradle into their bedroom and told Tom that from now until he left this world, she wanted him to look at that cradle and remember it. He had to memorize the cradle and her. Just like his grandfather had remembered that bench outside the hospital and Tom’s grandmother. “You’ll remember, and after you die you’ll come back,” she said in a trembling voice, “just like him. You’ll come back and we’ll be together forever.” Tom nodded, and when she leaned in to hug him, she could see that his eyes were sad. It was the only time Naomi saw him sad.

Tom, Jr., was born two weeks after his father died. He had Naomi’s green almond-shaped eyes, but his smile was definitely his father’s. And when he smiled, Naomi couldn’t help feeling that Tom had never let, that he was simply there with her. But then things started getting weird. Because every time she nursed Tom, Jr., he would look up at her, not the way a baby looks at its mother but the way a man looks at a woman’s bared breast. His gaze and the touch of his lips aroused her, and it all felt very troubling and confusing and made Naomi hate herself and feel guilty. It’s perverse to be the mother of a baby who is sometimes a child and sometimes the love of your life. 

When she told all this to Tom’s sister, she gave Naomi a bemused look. “All this to-do,” she said, “all this craziness, just because of that stupid story about Grandad and the squirrel?” Tom’s sister said she knew the story and that she’d been there when the squirrel had bit Norman, but it wasn’t her grandfather, just a fat, angry squirrel. She said the only reason the wedding was called off was because her grandmother hadn’t really loved Norman. Everything else was just folklore and excuses. “You have to let it go,” she told Naomi.

That same day, Naomi bought Tom, Jr., a cheap plastic cradle at Walmart. She locked the wooden one in the shed. And that helped. Very slowly, she let go of all those ludicrous ideas about Tom’s soul being reincarnated in Tom, Jr., and in return she gained a loveable, sweet boy. After a few months she even downloaded Tinder. She never used it, but the fact that it was there on her phone promised the possibility that she might find love in the future.

The first guy Naomi went out with after Tom died was named Dima. He hit on her at the grocery store, and even though he was covered with tattoos and didn’t look like her type, she gave him her phone number. Because he was funny, and also because she remembered thinking that Tom wasn’t her type either, the first time they’d met. She and Dima took things slowly. He was a tattoo artist who worked crazy hours all week, and they mostly saw each other on weekends. He taught Tom, Jr., how to draw, and they would spend hours sitting in the kitchen together sketching robots and dragons. When Naomi’s birthday was coming up, Dima offered to ink her a tattoo as a gift. At first she refused. She said that anything she decided she liked and wanted now, she would inevitably regret in a year. But Dima wouldn’t give up, and Tom, Jr., said, “Think about it, Mom. There must be something Dima could tattoo that you’d always love: ice-cream, a skateboard, a hot-dog with lots of mustard.” “The kid’s right,” Dima said with a grin, “and when it comes to tattooing hot-dogs, I’m probably the best in the land.” 

Naomi laughed. No matter how much Tom, Jr., liked eating them or how well Dima could ink them, she was not going to walk around with a hot-dog tattooed on her arm for the rest of her life. A giant squirrel, on the other hand? That would be nice.

Translated by Jessica Cohen

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Housekeeping Note:

When I started the tradition of naming problematic minor characters in my stories after the founding members of Alphabet Soup, I knew this moment would come. Yes, it’s true, Tom has been immortalized as a central character in this story, which goes against all the rules. On the other hand, the fact that he dies a tragic death at a young age helped me bend the rules this time without feeling that I was pandering to my subscribers. Hey, Taka, you’re up next!