an unwelcome visitor

A week and a half after I moved in to Naomi's house in the Bronx, the Roberts' cousin Emily moved in. Emily and I became fast friends, but before this, there was an intruder in the house that threatened her when I was away at school. Emily was setting up her newly moved-into room, and began to hear something making its way up the stairs. A fuzzy black head and beady eyes protruded over the top stair as Emily watched, I can only picture her in horror, from her room. The black squirrel dashed into Rachel's room (next to Emily's) and hid itself, and Emily screamed out the window for Jesse (her cousin, whose backyard is shared with Naomi's house) to come help her.

So Jesse, whose pride and joy is a well-muscled Rottweiler named Scrapper, came inside to help--all Jesse had to do was yell "Scrapper! SQUIRREL!" and Scrapper betook herself up three flights of stairs and into Rachel's room to hunt around. There was no squirrel to be seen. Emily and Jesse began to talk in the hallway, and all of a sudden, the squirrel raced out between their legs, bounced off the closed door at the end of the hallway, and ran back into Rachel's room...where it was met with Scrapper. The squirrel made one last desperate leap to the windowsill, but Scrapper met it mid-air with her jaws, and shook it, and killed it. Poor squirrel. From what I heard and what I saw as documented in pictures, Jesse was beaming as if his daughter had won an Olympic medal.

So, the squirrel was disposed of, and Rachel moved in the next day--to the room where it met its end. The squirrel smelled awful, I'm told, so when Rachel moved in, I watched her closely. She said to me at one point, "does it smell funny in here?" I told her to ask Jesse why.