These Things Happen
Originally published in Cygnet 2025-26
I watched from the tire swing as our cat chased two squirrels around the yard. Seamus didn’t actually want to eat them, or even kill them, really. He never left dead birds or mice on the front porch like other cats did. What Seamus loved was the chase itself, rushing back and forth, around trees and over the few roots that jutted out from the soft dirt of our manicured lawn. The squirrels, cheeks fat with nuts and squeaking wildly, circled the trees frantically, cornering sharply at random points in the yard.
All three animals looked just like race cars speeding around a track. If Dad were here, he would say, “These squirrels know how to pick a great apex.” I didn’t actually know what the word meant, but he and the guys on the racing videos he puts on before dinner say it a lot. Watching videos with Dad is my favorite part of the day. I always rush to meet him on the couch when he comes home from work. We hold our hands out and lean side to side, pretending we’re the ones driving a hundred miles an hour. Or he’ll pause the video during a pit stop and point at all the different tools, explaining the differences between those and the ones in our garage. Sometimes the drivers fly off the track and crash into a wall, and Dad will explain how it could have gone differently if they had only taken the corner earlier.
Last week, we watched a driver run right into the side of another, sending both cars flying off the track. One of them caught fire, and the driver had to be pulled out before he burned right along with it. It was scary, and I asked Dad why the driver did it, run right into the other’s side like that. He told me that it might not have been on purpose, that it probably wasn’t. Sometimes, those things just happen.
The squirrels picked a tree and ran up the trunk, carrying their loot in their cheek pouches. Seamus jumped three feet up the tree after them but quickly gave up and jumped back to the ground. He must have already tired himself out with the laps around the yard. He sat under the tree and groomed himself.
I started swinging on the tire, looking up at the squirrels as they perched on a branch high above Seamus. Every time I rose forward, I leaned back so I was parallel to the ground. I liked the feeling of floating; it felt like freedom. And it gave me a good view of the squirrels as they chattered back and forth with each other.
I wondered why they hadn’t jumped to another tree yet. I’d seen plenty of squirrels leap from branch to branch before. I had expected to watch these two arc through the air, tiny arms reaching for the next tree. My guess was the nuts they had in their mouth; they couldn’t jump normally. And if they couldn’t jump right, kind of like when race car drivers don’t brake right, they’d fall right into Seamus.
I kept swinging on the tire, leaning back and forth and switching my attention between watching the squirrels talk to each other, watching Seamus lick his paw and rub it on his head, and looking down the road for Dad’s work truck. The animals weren’t doing anything interesting anymore, but they were at least something to look at while I waited. Dad will love hearing about how Seamus lost a race against two squirrels.
I was trying to think of how to tell the story as if it were McLaren losing against Aston Martin (who I affectionately call the James Bond team), when Seamus meowed loudly, almost a yell. I stopped swinging to look at him. Seamus was crouched low to the ground, looking straight up. The squirrels were looking back at him and laughing, flicking their tails back and forth wildly. It wasn’t a human laugh, but I couldn’t describe it any other way. They were rapidly doing that weird bark that squirrels do. Dad laughed that way sometimes when he drank.
I watched as one of the two squirrels took a nut from its cheek, fumbled it in its little claws for a few seconds, then threw it at Seamus, making him yowl again. I was so shocked my mouth hung open. Did that squirrel really just attack Seamus like that? To answer my question, the other squirrel pulled out a nut from his own cheek and threw it the same way. The squirrels were getting back at Seamus. I wouldn’t have believed it even if my best friend, Tyler, or even my dad had told me it had happened.
Seamus moved over a few feet to get away, but the squirrels moved along the branch, taking turns to throw more nuts at him. Seamus was getting annoyed; I could hear his low aggressive growl from a few feet away. The squirrels, meanwhile, were still making that bark-laugh sound as Seamus moved to the side again.
The two squirrels didn’t let up. They raced back and forth along the branch just to get better angles on the cat, laughing whenever a nut hit Seamus anywhere on his body. On a branch high above Seamus, they must think they had the freedom to do whatever they wanted to him.
It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. Cooler than when Dad said something smart about the racing videos and the parkour videos that I watched when I hung out with Tyler. It was even cooler than the one time I was playing video games with him, and we finally got the hardest star in New Super Mario Bros.
The mission itself wasn’t hard, but for some reason, getting the last star was. To get it, we had to jump at just the right time, with the right speed and the right height to land on a tiny wall. That wasn’t too hard. The hard part was jumping off of that wall in time to land back on a moving platform so that we could get to the end of the mission. For weeks, we took turns playing on my NintendoDS, trying over and over to get that star. We’d get frustrated and move on to different missions, or we’d turn it off and play something else entirely for a while, but we always came back to that one mission to try to get that one star.
The day we finally got the star we had been playing all afternoon. It was getting dark, so we gave up and ate pizza outside on the front porch. We talked for a while about other games and Batman and how Ms. Garcia’s pop quizzes are unfair and how when we finally got that star, we’d be the coolest kids in class.
The phone rang inside, and my mom opened the door to say that Tyler’s mom said it was time to go home. I watched Tyler as he put his chin on his chest. He never wanted to go home, said that he could be himself at my house. I’ve asked before what he meant by that, but he never really explained more than that his dad didn’t let him do anything at home except chores, not even homework. And every time he actually had to leave, like right now, he got upset. He lived down the road; on his bike, the ride was only a few minutes. I wanted to cheer him up before he left this time.
I told him to wait while I ran inside to grab something. When I came back out, I enthusiastically showed him the DS. “What if you take it home today?”
He looked at me with wide eyes and shook his head violently. “No, no, no. I can’t do that.” He put his chin back on his chest. “No. Sorry.”
I deflated a little. “Ok. Well, what if we try one more time?”
His face lit up for a second, but he still hesitated. “Just one more?”
His mom was the one that called, but it was really his dad that wanted him to come home. I was the only person Tyler could really see outside of school, and even then, he was never allowed to sleep over.
“Just one. I have a good feeling.” I opened the DS and handed it to him.
It was a perfect run. All of our attempts had melted into his fingers, and it looked exactly like one of the many tutorials we had watched on how to do this mission, especially the final jump. When we saw the completion screen, we both screamed, hugged, and even ran around the yard.
My mom came back outside and told us to stop making so much noise, but she didn’t stop us right away. After a minute, maybe two, she said that it was dark, and Tyler had to get home. Tyler’s gaze shot upwards at the sky like the change had happened suddenly. He rushed to his bike and yelled, “Thank you for the pizza!” as he pedaled down the street.
What I was seeing right now was even better than that afternoon with Tyler. I thought that animals only acted like this in cartoons. I kicked my feet up and laughed every time the little squirrels launched a nut in Seamus’ direction. And I laughed even harder when one of them actually hit the cat and made him growl. If Seamus was actually getting hurt, then I would have thrown a stick at the squirrels already. But since Seamus was only getting annoyed, I felt I could laugh right along with them.
Dad would have told me to grab my BB gun. Rodents were eating the veggies that we grew in the backyard, so he kept his next to the backdoor, rushing out with it every time he thought he saw something moving around the neat rows of greenery. On Christmas, I unwrapped my own BB gun. Right after breakfast, I lined up empty soda cans in the front yard to shoot at. Dad gave me pointers with every shot I missed until he said I was good enough to help him out with our garden problem.
I frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
With a smile, he said, “You’ve got to help me out, buddy. They’ve been tearing up our food.” Mine wasn’t as powerful as the one he had by the door, but either way, it would be enough to get the job done. I didn’t ask him what the job was, but I knew. I hid the gun in my closet after that.
I got down from the tire swing and walked up to the trunk of the tree to get a closer look at the squirrels. Just as I reached the trunk, I felt something bounce off of my head. I looked down and saw that it was a sweetgum ball, the small brown spiky balls that fall from pine trees during Spring. They must have used up all the ammunition they had in their cheeks. I looked up just as the squirrels threw another sweetgum ball at me. It missed; I laughed anyway. I’d never seen squirrels act like this. They usually ran in the exact opposite direction of anything bigger than itself, which was most animals. Seeing them get aggressive like this seemed like my own private show. These two squirrels were rebels, fighting against the empire.
I watched one of them scurry down the branch, grab another sweetgum, and then come back to throw it at me. I let it hit my shoulder and fell to the ground, pretending that the spiky ball had flattened me. I heard the squirrels chatter in laughter, but then, instantly, Seamus was yowling and climbing the tree towards the squirrels.
The squirrels, recognizing that their branch was not as safe as they previously believed, ran up the branch. One of them made the jump to the neighboring tree successfully; the other fell to the ground. Seamus didn’t waste a single second, moving faster than I’d seen him move in a long time. He caught up to the squirrel and sank his teeth into the rodent’s neck.
“Seamus, no!” I screamed and tried to chase the cat away. Seamus only dragged the squirrel away by its neck away from me. I called out to the cat as loud as I could. “I’m fine, Seamus! See?!” I patted myself as if the cat would understand.
Seamus didn’t care, though. To him, I’d been attacked and wounded. As the family cat, he had always acted like a protector. He had scratched and hissed at my uncle when he yelled at me for something when I was younger. And Seamus didn’t like Tyler’s dad at all.
Earlier in the summer, we had a cookout for the neighborhood. Everyone was invited, including Tyler’s dad. Other than occasionally calling Tyler’s mom over so she could get him another beer, he had spent the afternoon sitting at a table by himself. As Tyler and I ran around the yard playing games, we pretended that his table was the ogre’s swamp, avoiding it because getting too close risked getting caught and eaten.
When the food was finally ready, my dad sat us down and put two paper plates in front of us, piled high with cut up steak, grilled corn and bell peppers, potato salad, and a healthy serving of sweet potato pie. It was a mountain of food, and I couldn’t eat all of it, neither could Tyler (except for the pie, which we both ate first). When no one was looking—and after we ate as much as we could fit in our small bodies—we snuck over to the trash bin and put our plates in upside down. Before we could sneak away, something grabbed our collars and yanked us back to the can. It was Tyler’s dad; his face was flushed and he smelled like Dad’s ice chest.
“Did you just throw away all that food?” He was asking Tyler, who had his chin on his chest again and his arms covering his head.
I stammered, then tried explaining, “We tried to eat it all! It was too much—”
He pulled Tyler closer to him, lowering his voice. “I asked you a question.”
I saw that the whole party had stopped, and everyone was looking at us. Tyler’s dad didn’t notice, and he still had both of our shirts firmly in his fists, despite me trying to pry his meaty fingers apart.
My dad walked over and quickly wrenched me away from Tyler’s dad. There was a whispered, but heated exchange between the two men that I couldn’t hear, but it ended with my dad picking me up and walking away without stopping Tyler’s dad from bending Tyler over his knee and spanking him in front of everyone. When my dad put me down behind my mom, I thought I was about to get the same treatment, but instead he hugged me and told me to stay there. Tears blurred the corners of my vision as I watched my dad, entire body tense, walk back over to where Tyler and his dad were.
Just as suddenly as Tyler’s dad had appeared behind us earlier, Seamus appeared behind him and jumped on his back. Seamus must have dug his claws pretty deep because Tyler’s dad immediately shot up and ran around the yard with Seamus scratching at his back the whole time. To Seamus, Tyler (who my dad had brought over to where I was hiding behind my mom) was a part of the family. He came over after school at least a few days out of the week, and during the summer it was an all-day hangout. Seeing Tyler getting spanked, for Seamus, meant it was time to act.
Through tears, Tyler and I laughed at his dad’s pain.
But I wasn’t laughing now. I cried as Seamus pulled and yanked at the squirrel’s throat, blood pouring out onto the grass. That squirrel and I had been laughing thirty seconds ago. Now, Semus was ripping his tiny head off his body. Seamus’ paw was pressing on the squirrel, pushing slimy guts out like toothpaste from the tube.
I didn’t even notice when Dad’s truck pulled into the driveway, not until he was picking me up, asking me what was wrong. Between sobs I explained what happened. Dad put me down so he could walk over to Seamus and pull him off the squirrel. He growled a little, but ran into the tree line, maw stained a deep crimson color.
Over the next half-hour my dad and I buried the squirrel in the backyard next to Dixie, our rabbit, who had died while I was at school. He hadn’t let me dig or touch the squirrel, but he let me put the last few shovel-fulls of dirt onto the shallow grave. As I struggled to lift the shovel, patting the dirt down, more tears blurred my vision.
Dad bent down and used my shirt to dry my face. “It’s not your fault, buddy,” he said, “These things happen.”
Dad and I stood at the two graves for a moment of silence.
I knew that he was trying to make me feel better, but I couldn’t forget the sounds that the squirrel had made when Seamus landed on him. The racing videos never played the sounds from the driver’s helmet whenever they crashed. And Tyler’s dad screaming around the yard was funny. But the squirrel screamed in terror, a desperate loud-pitched squeal, instantly cut off by my cat’s sharp teeth. It was a pain I’d never witnessed before, watching as a happy living creature had its soul ripped out, the pain of death. I started thinking about all of the people I know now, Mom, Dad, Tyler, and Seamus, and how we were all alive right now. I stopped myself before I could finish the thought.
I wiped my face—I had stopped crying by now. “Can we get pizza tonight?”
“Sure, bud.” We turned away from the graves. “Let’s go ask Mom what kind she wants.”
He grabbed my hand and walked me to the backdoor, leaving the shovel in the yard to put away later.
