'This is a story about squirrels' by Shelley Roche-Jacques

‘What do you want to get out of life?’ the doctor had asked her that morning and she’d said nothing and hung her head apologetically.

Now she is standing at the window of the dayroom watching the squirrels rough and tumble in branches of the chestnut tree. They look like they are trying to get something out of life – frantically seizing something in their tiny paws then turning tail, scampering along dead-end branches, realising there’s nowhere to take it to, nowhere outside of life to bury it or squirrel it away.

The multi-volume pain diaries, notes on sleep and cutting this or that: caffeine, gluten, sugar (sugar! The insanity!). She hadn’t dared tell the doctor she’d ripped the pages out and thrown them away. In a fit of madness or clarity.

She presses her cheek to the cold window and listens. For the squirrel’s heartbeat. For the grass growing. Nothing. A mercy probably.

“Don’t keep pushing things down,” her husband had said to her. Before. “Don’t keep making things about things they’re not about.”

She thinks about the squirrel who lives inside of her. Fuzzy, blue, adorable little guy. She likes to invite him to climb up into her brain, into the control room, to help her assess the pain (is it a wave? A spiky ball? A slab of sensitive fudge?). Together they watch the sensation, with curiosity, from a well-wadded distance, like watching clouds go by.

She listens harder. Cranes to hear something nearer than the roar on the other side of silence – something between a squeak and a bark – are the squirrels singing? Always the squirrels. There must be something more, she thinks, breathing deep and placing her hand over her heart, trying not to bury the feeling.

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Shelley Roche-Jacques’ work has appeared in magazines and journals such as Litro, Brevity, Flash: the International Short-short Story Magazine, and The Boston Review. Her poetry pamphlet Ripening Dark was published in 2015, followed by a collection of dramatic monologues, Risk the Pier, in 2017. Her short fiction has been highly commended in the Bridport Prize and shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Prize. She lives in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, and teaches Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.