'The Next Squirrel Laughs Like Medusa' by Ra'Niqua Lee

Normal smells like whiteboard cleaner, so she seeks the cut where that one professor vapes, far enough from all prohibitive signage. She sets her laptop bag on a bench and douses herself in lavender essential oil. She inhales her wrists as a squirrel action-drops from a tree to a transformer, tucks and rolls, and then beelines for the bushes. So weird, she thinks as she continues to turn herself into a walking aromatherapy candle.

Fall semester is full of squirrels. She spots the next one prancing, an arc of black tail, thick fur. The squirrel stops and nibbles as if chomping down secrets. Then it goes and performs tight rope acrobat along a trash can rim. It screams, or she imagines it does, and she wonders how well it would adjust to the fluorescent sting of a three-hour lecture on Cixous.

The next squirrel collects its fill along a footpath before the campus gardeners come through with their leaf blowers. Happy people traffic these paths all animatronic in puffers and peacoats, as if on a conveyor belt in Macys. She does not wave at them because they do not wave at her, but she figures that they know what she knows, that the squirrels are up to something.

When the campus bell tolls, she has negative minutes until lecture starts, but she takes this non-time as hers. She shoulders her bag and huffs more of herself. “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.” She is all lavender as the next squirrel stop-starts to a spot near her feet. Imagine that her skin is wax. Imagine that she has a wick for hair. Imagine it burns white as she tucks the next squirrel in with her notebooks and turns toward class.