*
Sophie Kitchens was folding clothes on her bed when she happened to look out the window. Her mind had been pretty set on the job at hand (she’d always been meticulous, careful in every aspect of her life to the plus or minus that she’d never married either), and at first, staring away from the neat pile of clothes through the spotless window, she was not sure what had warped her attention. But then it came. Right behind the house was the huge water oak, almost seventy feet high and as big around as a tractor tire, and it was pitching violently. Strange, because Sophie, whose ears were just as meticulously pitched as every other thing about her, had heard nothing. Usually when the wind kicked up outside, the roof vents whistled along like a chain gang. Now, nothing. But nonetheless the tree was twisting in the wind. The lowest branches were higher than the roof and now she realized the whipping shadows cast across the window were what had actually drawn her attention. But that was not its end-all. With a worried curl of frown dripping from her chin Sophie dropped the blouse she’d been folding and stepped over toward the window.
What she saw brought her hands to her face.
A storm had blown out of nowhere, obviously. Though she’d gone out to the end of her driveway not twenty minutes before and marveled at the tranquility of the day, there was no clue left of that reality. As she stepped forward a night-darkness drenched the very screen of the window and a deep-seated rumbling issued up through the floor beneath her feet. Something like thunder, but only like. She could still hear absolutely nothing from outside. Oh, her ancient passed-down grandfather clock still ticked ponderously from its stained perch on the wall, but there was not the faintest creak in the attic to betray the tumult above. She’d lived all her sixty-two years in south Louisiana, and she’d seen plenty of hurricanes but this was like nothing she’d experienced before. Somehow this lent the impression of being in two places at once: the railing outer edge and at the same time the quiet eye of a big storm. Rock-sized chunks of hail bounced through the grass; a solid sheet of water seemed to be cascading in a cloud-darkened slip of the backyard.
Then, from the tree itself, small brown furry lumps.
Sophie Kitchen cataloged each one as it hit the ground.
Squirrels. Squirrels pelting out of the tree like stones. It was almost comic Almost funny, actually, until she saw the Colonel.
The Colonel was a miniature poodle, almost twelve years old and her only companion. An inside dog who slept beside her on his side of the bed, and she’d fed him a succulent strip of breakfast bacon not an hour ago from his spot on the couch next to her as they enjoyed the shopping channels. When he had to go to the bathroom (and these times were rigid, indeed, between them) Sophia always escorted the old soldier (as she liked to think of him) to keep him out of harm’s way. After all, he was an old gentleman.
Now he was outside in the storm.
The scream was out of her throat before she realized it. Hands pressed like claws to the window she screamed his name like a person warning another of an oncoming train. If her shrill voice carried the Colonel made no sign.
He was backed into a crouch. Snarling. His tail drawn tight between his legs and his teeth bared as she’d not seen since he was a pup. It was this terror that brought her back to the brown lumps that were now moving in the yard. Moving and circling, it seemed. Circling her poor old Colonel.
She howled his name again and tore away from the window. Ripped her dress on the corner of the bed as she made her way to the doorway, but it hardly slowed her at all. Within seconds she was through the hall and out the side door (her house not really much different in design from her unknown neighbor, Patsy Standish, no more than a block over), her hands still as claws, her voice still shrieking into the wind tearing away in the backyard.
She was fumbling with the gate clasp when she heard him yelp. “Colonel!” she screamed again, yanking up on the handle and shouldering the rusty old thing back into its rut in the grass. She came around the house at a sprint.
The wind was now ominously gone, the sun bright daylight. The wash of a dream touched her and she actually paused in her tracks, a bewildered expression on her face, when the old Colonel howled again.
The dream dispelled.
She could see him now. Seemingly covered in those strange furry lumps. That and blood. There was a great lot of it spattered about the grass, flying through the air. For a moment she couldn’t fit it together and then it came like the storm that’d turned her attention. The squirrels were attacking the Colonel.
She ran into their midst kicking and screaming. Realizing in horror she’d unknowingly connected with her beloved Colonel, rolling him backward through the grass and flinging off those horrible lumps as he went. Then he lay still.
The squirrels did not.
They spun to their nervous feet in a crazy, psychotic swirl of motion and sized up the creature above them. The dog now forgotten. Right before they came on Sophie saw the foam dripping from each snout and her eyes grew wide, and then they were all over her, biting scratching. Building their fury until she fell to her knees, then down completely on her face.
By the time her neighbor got through the gate and down on the ground next to her, screaming his own entreaties, the pack of rabid squirrels had retreated to the high solitude of the monstrous water oak, chattering away like veritable demons from their hiding spots.