The squirrel thought, When did things become so beautiful? And if it has been this way all along, how is it that I never noticed before?
“Listen to me,” the girl said. “My name is Flora. Your name is Ulysses.”
Okay, thought the squirrel.
She put her hand on him. She picked him up. She cradled him in her left arm.
He felt nothing but happiness. Why had he always been so terrified of humans? He couldn’t imagine.
Actually, he could imagine.
There had been that time with the boy and the BB gun.
There had, truthfully, been a lot of incidents with humans (some involving BB guns, some not), and all of them had been violent, terrifying, and soul-destroying.
But this was a new life! And he was a changed squirrel.
He felt spectacular. Strong, smart, capable — and also: hungry.
He was very, very hungry.
Flora’s mother was in the kitchen. She was typing. She wrote on an old typewriter, and when she pounded the keys, the kitchen table shook and the plates on the shelves rattled and the silverware in the drawers cried out in a metallic kind of alarm.
Flora had decided that this was part of the reason her parents had divorced. Not the noise of the writing, but the writing itself. Specifically, the writing of romance.
Flora’s father had said, “I think that your mother is so in love with her books about love that she doesn’t love me anymore.”
And her mother had said, “Ha! Your father is so far off in left field that he wouldn’t recognize love if it stood up in his soup and sang.”
Flora had a hard time imagining what love would be doing standing in a bowl of soup and singing, but these were the kind of idiotic words her parents spoke. And they said the words to each other, even though they were pretending that they were talking to Flora.
It was all very annoying.
“What are you doing?” her mother said to Flora. She was sucking on a Pitzer Pop. It made her words sound rocky and sharp-edged. Her mother used to smoke and then she stopped, but she still had to have something in her mouth when she typed, so she consumed a lot of Pitzer Pops. This one was orange flavored. Flora could smell it.
“Oh, nothing,” said Flora. She glanced at the squirrel in her arms.
“Good,” said her mother. She whacked the carriage return on the typewriter without looking up. She kept typing. “Are you still standing there?” her mother said. She typed some more words. She hit the carriage return again. “I’m on a deadline here. It’s hard to concentrate with you standing over me breathing like that.”
“I could stop breathing,” said Flora.
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” said her mother. “Go upstairs and wash your hands. We’re going to eat soon.”
“Okay,” said Flora. She walked past her mother and into the living room, still carrying Ulysses in the crook of her arm. It didn’t seem possible, but it was true. She had smuggled a squirrel into the house. And she had done it right under her mother’s nose. Or behind her back. Or something.
In the living room, at the base of the stairs, the little shepherdess lamp was waiting, a pink-cheeked smirk plastered on her face.
Flora hated the little shepherdess.
Her mother had bought the lamp with her first royalty check from her first book, On Feathered Wings of Joy, which was the stupidest title for a book that Flora had ever heard in her life.
Her mother had sent away to London for the lamp. When it arrived, she unpacked it and plugged it in, and then she clapped her hands and said, “Oh, she’s so beautiful. Isn’t she beautiful? I love her with all my heart.”
Flora’s mother never called Flora beautiful. She never said that she loved her with all her heart. Luckily, Flora was a cynic and didn’t care whether her mother loved her or not.
“I think that I will call her Mary Ann,” her mother had said.
“Mary Ann?” said Flora. “You’re going to name a lamp?”
“Mary Ann, shepherdess to the lost,” said her mother.
“Who’s lost, exactly?” said Flora.
But her mother hadn’t bothered to answer that question.
“This,” Flora said to the squirrel, “is the little shepherdess. Her name is Mary Ann. Unfortunately, she lives here, too.”
The squirrel considered Mary Ann.
Flora narrowed her eyes and stared at the lamp.
She knew that it was ridiculous, but sometimes she felt as if Mary Ann knew something that she didn’t know, that the little shepherdess was keeping some dark and terrible secret.
“You stupid lamp,” said Flora. “Mind your own business. Mind your sheep.”
Actually, there was just one sheep, a tiny lamb curled up at Mary Ann’s pink-slippered feet. Flora always wanted to say to the little shepherdess, “If you’re such a great shepherdess, where are the rest of your sheep, huh?”
“We can just ignore her,” said Flora to Ulysses.
She turned away from the smug and glowing Mary Ann and climbed the stairs to her room, holding Ulysses gently, carefully in her arms.
He didn’t glow, but he was surprisingly warm for someone so small.
She put Ulysses down on her bed, and he looked even smaller sitting there in the bright overhead light.
He also looked pretty bald.
“Good grief,” said Flora.
The squirrel certainly didn’t look very heroic. But then, neither did the nearsighted, unassuming janitor Alfred T. Slipper.
Ulysses looked up at Flora, and then he looked down at his tail. He seemed relieved to see it. He lowered his nose and sniffed along the length of it.
“I’m hoping that you can understand me,” said Flora.
The squirrel raised his head. He stared at her.
“Wow,” said Flora. “Great, okay. I can’t understand you. And that’s a small problem. But we’ll figure out a way to communicate, okay? Nod at me if you understand what I’m saying. Like this.”
Flora nodded.
And Ulysses nodded back.
Flora’s heart leaped up high in her chest.
“I’m going to try and explain what happened to you, okay?”
Ulysses nodded his head very fast.
And again, Flora’s heart leaped up high inside of her in a hopeful and extremely uncynical kind of way. She closed her eyes. Don’t hope, she told her heart. Do not hope; instead, observe.
“Do not hope; instead, observe” was a piece of advice that appeared often in TERRIBLE THINGS CAN HAPPEN TO YOU! According to TERRIBLE THINGS!, hope sometimes got in the way of action. For instance, if you looked at your elderly aunt Edith choking on a piece of steak from the all-you-can-eat buffet and you told yourself, Man, I sure hope she’s not choking, you would waste several valuable lifesaving, Heimlich maneuver–performing seconds.
“Do not hope; instead, observe” were words that Flora, as a cynic, had found useful in the extreme. She repeated them to herself a lot.
“Okay,” said Flora. She opened her eyes. She looked at the squirrel. “What happened is that you got vacuumed. And because you got vacuumed, you might have, um, powers.”
Ulysses gave her a questioning look.
“Do you know what a superhero is?”
The squirrel continued to stare at her.
“Right,” said Flora. “Of course you don’t. A superhero is someone with special powers, and he uses those powers to fight the forces of darkness and evil. Like Alfred T. Slipper, who is also Incandesto.”