The Flying Squirrel

It was a damp, gray, February day in Detroit, exactly like the twenty-one days before it and the sky hung heavy, somewhere between sleet and snow. The city bus pulled in front of Immaculata High School and Barb Cunningham and I stepped out over the blackened slush onto the sidewalk. It was definitely a Monday, but Barb's wired smile glinted beneath her hood. I'd seen that smile before. It would be a day to remember.

The principal was an older nun of the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Her office was filled with dead animals--stuffed wildlife contorted in quasi-natural poses provided courtesy of her father, a dismally mediocre taxidermist. A henna fox with a toothy grin stood guard over the outer office. A glass wall with a centered oak half-door divided the public space of the outer office from the inner sanctum. Through the glass wall, Sister Marguerita's desk was visible--a neat pile of papers and record books, a public address microphone and a stuffed snowy owl whose face was frozen forever in distorted mid-screech. A smallish badger with disproportionately huge curved claws, a snarling wolverine--the state animal--and a red flying squirrel whose arms and legs were outstretched as if in midair, but who was actually perched on a log, monitored the comings and goings of students from the window ledge. The two of us entered the building beneath their dead gazes.

Barb and I shared a locker and much of the same class schedule, but she was inexplicably absent from Calculus. Likewise, in Chemistry she was nowhere to be found. I excused myself to get a drink of water and caught a glimpse of her down the hall, in the principal's outer office. Suddenly, her head disappeared and I ran toward the office, impelled as much by fear as by curiosity. There was Barb, on the floor, crawling into the inner sanctum like a foot soldier crawls through enemy fields. To my horror, Sister Marguerita sat at her desk, not six feet from the crawling Barb, writing in one of her record books, obviously oblivious to the invasion. Like a rocket, Barb's arm shot up through the air, snatching the squirrel and the log to which it was eternally attached and brought them to her flattened chest. Fear and disbelief shot through me and I weighed for an instant whether I wanted to be even a witness to this crime.

Almost as stealthily as she came in, Barb wriggled out of the inner office and back into public space, which was surprising considering the bulk of her heist. She rolled her body up to a stand and nonchalantly tried to hide the quarry under her uniform blazer, which, frankly, didn't work very well. She walked briskly past me as if I were invisible, but I swear I could hear her heart beating from where I stood. Then she disappeared down the hall.

I returned to Chemistry, having been gone long enough to have imbibed twenty gallons of water. But Sister Rodriga, about four feet tall and four feet wide, faced the chalkboard and was engrossed in her explanation of covalent solutions and the atomic number of sodium and didn't even notice me. Not five minutes later Barb rushed in, out of breath.

"Sister, there's a squirrel in the chapel!"

Sister Rodriga's eyes grew wide for a moment as the realization of the words dawned on her. She flew into a flurry of navy and white, ranting something about those "pesky rascals" and how they're so difficult to catch and how they'll surely shred the new chapel curtains, and it took over two years to get the requisition for them through the archdiocese, and she whirlwinded from the classroom. Stunned silence was all that was left in the vacuum of her wake.

Incredibly, nothing more was ever heard or mentioned of the incident--it was as if it never happened. The only evidence was unveiled to us insiders three days later when we saw Barb, scrubbing three floors of stairs in four different stairwells with a toothbrush--a wired smile glinting beneath her hair.

Venture 2 | Nancy Grisel

The crimson peaks mount toward the sky as if built by giant red ants. Notched with trees, pitted by absent boulders, their surfaces would make billion-black-diamond ski slopes if only it were winter. Elsewhere, the slopes are gentler, masked by haze and distance, colors muted as if seen through a screen door. Have their surfaces ever felt the pressure of human foot? The trees blend into one another, creating a swash of navy green over any land that is not completely vertical. Eons ago, some cataclysmic landslide sheared off the gentle slope, leaving sandstone cliffs like gaping wounds from accidental amputations. But nature has started to heal herself with piny scabs.

The river gushes forth cascading near my feet into a clay-brown pool twelve or twenty feet below. The rushing sound of the water sounds somehow like the static that remained after the late-night TV national anthem. But in these days of cable and eight hundred channels (and still nothing to watch), that river reminder is no longer available. The water in the pool drifts down, sieved through rocks and bigger rocks. Goldenrod and pre-tumbling tumbleweed flank the path that itself cascades to the waterfall pool.

Shadows from the reeds behind me fall on dust and ants. They think the sun has disappeared and that it is twilight. The shadow from the quarter-pebble creates a haven for mites and the smallest of beings. Twigs, micro-mini logs, would provide barriers to the smallest of creatures. Is this why their feet and legs were engineered to propel them up straight surfaces?

Outdoor Venture 1| Nancy Grisel

First Foreground
Stones hard as steel. Good for sitting on next to the stream. Space for the stream that must be there divides the two rocks. Water splashes, an apparent cascade filling the stream with water and air. Sun-dappled leaves reflect a healthy plant. The leaves are the color of what Crayola would call "spring green"--slightly yellow, mostly pale green with a luninescence that can only mean a sunny day. The ground smells of wood chips and decaying pine needles. Some dead twigs on the otherwise healthy plant may show signs of autumn or signs of insect infestation. Regardless of the reason, it is a sure sign of death--either temporary and serene or permanent and brutal. The insects ravaging beneath the surface of the bark, the plants scream silently in pain.

Second Foreground
A youngish pine attempts to grow in the midst of the shade. Its needles at the top reflect its struggle for life, for light. But the healthy part looks as soft as feathers. No wonder Native Americans and cowboys and Hansel and Gretl could sleep on a forest bed of such fluff. But surely by the time they fell to the forest floor they are brittle and prickly, like an old man's stubble who could not bring himself to shave one more day. His dead wife would have rebuked him. But now, what's the point? Birds fly overhead and occasionally chirp and chatter to each other, boasting the day's catch or ridiculing the students perched beneath them.

Background
Tall stems must support an unseen tree obscured by the boughs of the pine.

Evidence Room | Nancy Grisel

Down the stairs at the end of the hall
lights flicker green-gray,
first-edition issue from the First World War
gasping for the last electrons in their tubes.
The man walks in with the black plastic bag
and spills bits of a life onto the gray slab.
Yes, this belonged to me.

Down the stairs and across the street
four lives wait
second-time offenders in second-degree crime
sighing at their own mistake of being caught.
The man walks in with his worn brown case
and lays out their fate on the gray table.
No, they will be tried as adults.

Down the stairs and to the left
scrubbed abusers inquire
third-strike parents in a third-rate home
choking on their last tears--all the others spent.
The man walks over with the white paper file
and lays out their future on the gray counter.
No, their children will not be going home.