raccoon-sized or bigger
by Silas James
i keep calling 311 about these dead squirrels in the bike lane, i keep calling 311 about these dead squirrels in the bike lane, i keep calling 311 because there are dead squirrels in the bike lane and i am starting to think it’s only me who can see them, which feels unfair, honestly, at this hour, with my blood full of yesterday’s bile and my back wheel a little soft. hello, yes, hi, it’s me again, i say, trying to sound normal, trying to sound like a real-live tax-paying unit of the city-body, trying not to sound like someone who has already called twice before breakfast, hello, yes, there’s another one, middle of the lane, laid out like punctuation—or maybe some kind of omen.
and i tell them someone should come pick it up (someone with a van, someone with city-branded gloves, someone who will write a number on a clipboard and nod like they’ve done a job) and she tells me, in that municipal customer service voice that sounds like a smile pressed through a screen door, that i should just do it myself, that i should pick it up personally with my personal hands and throw it in a garbage can, any garbage can, blue bin if i’m feeling ecological, because they only make outcalls for animals that are raccoon-sized or bigger, that’s the exact language, raccoon-sized or bigger, and when she says it i hear capital letters, i can tell it’s in a manual.
but it’s city property, i tell her, which is to say it belongs to all of us and maybe none of us, which is to say i don’t want to touch it and also i don’t want to be the kind of person who won’t touch it, and i pay my taxes (well, others do, but i participate in the spirit of the thing) so i don’t have to touch a dead squirrel blocking the bike lane. i contribute to municipal coherence, which i believe entitles me to not have to touch a dead squirrel before 9 a.m. with my raw civilian fingers.
and i’m sweating already, and i’m late for work, and i’m tasting metal, and also i am suddenly very sure that “property” is the only prayer they understand in there.
it’s hard, i say, it’s hard having to dodge these dead squirrels in all these bike lanes. it’s hard having to snake my bike around these little crash sites because there’s been three this week alone on my route, one by the old billboard with the half-peeled condom ad, one by the fence that rattles when trucks pass, one right in the paint stripe, and i don’t know what it is this summer but something is killing them. maybe heat, maybe pollution, maybe the city is humming at a frequency that only young animals can hear, a music that says come here, my little metronome, come keep time against my tires.
and i watch them come apart, you know, slow and municipal. first day it still looks like a squirrel. second day the body flattens like gum, like paper mâché. it’s trying to merge with the asphalt—it’s applying for quebec residency. third day the tail is just a string of vertebrae with one desperate tuft of fur, like a bad paintbrush, like a saint’s relic someone forgot to put behind glass. little teeth still perfect. little hands still polite. and then something else comes in the night—raccoon-sized or bigger, yes ma’am—and edits the scene with its teeth, and then the sun bakes what’s left down into a tax stamp, and then it stops being an animal at all and becomes a shape, a stain, a note in the road only i can read.
the lady on the phone and i have a relationship. i know her hold music by heart. she knows the sound of my breathing. we are co-parenting this issue. it’s become a game we play except i don’t think she knows it’s a game. i call every day and she still won’t send someone and every day she asks are you SURE it’s city property, like she’s testing jurisdiction, like maybe today i’ll say no, actually, my mistake, it’s federal, it’s under the pope, it’s in god’s hands now. are you SURE it’s city property, she asks me, again, and her voice is very kind in the way a fence is kind, and i say YES, i insist, YES IT IS, it’s in the literal middle of the pavement, which belongs to you (plural you, bureaucratic you, the great and powerful you printed on the back of my hydro bill), and i am telling you with my mouth and my legal name and my active pulse that there is a dead squirrel obstructing forward motion.
and she says i hear you, which is not the same thing as i hear you, and she says we only make outcalls for animals that are raccoon-sized or bigger, she says, and i can hear the tape measure retracting into her lungs, i can hear the unit of measure nobody admits to, and i say you told me that yesterday, and she says i have to tell you again today because it’s policy, and i say but it’s city property, and we do our little dance, and i feel something slip in me, like a gear, like a knee.
and listen: at this point i’ve started carrying gloves in my bag—bright orange gardening gloves, bought at the dollar store at closing time under fluorescent lights that made everyone look already embalmed—and i keep not using them. i keep rehearsing the move in my head—stop the bike, put down the kickstand, crouch, scoop the soft ruined thing, cradle it like it’s a warm baguette, deposit it respectfully into the public trash can under the NO HOUSEHOLD WASTE sign, whisper sorry champ, pedal away like nothing happened—and i never do it. i can’t do it. there’s a border. i can feel it. i don’t cross it. i don’t know what happens to me if i cross it. the road is a morgue with excellent signage, the road is a congregation of small goodbyes. the road keeps asking me what kind of citizen i plan to be and i keep saying i guess the kind who bikes, i guess the kind who calls, the kind who knows the policy by heart and resents it like family.
and honestly i am starting to feel crazy out here. like maybe the squirrels aren’t even real, maybe that’s why no one comes. like maybe this is a test to see if i’ll touch death with my bare hands and join the team. like maybe once i do it once they’ll send me a vest in the mail and a laminated card and now i’m on the list, now i’m part of the informal municipal clean-up auxiliary, now i’m getting late-night calls like hey we got a pigeon situation at Beaubien can you get over there in the next ten, and i will say yes, of course, i’ll say i’m honoured to serve.
are you SURE it’s city property, she asks again, and in my head i can see her desk now, i swear i can, i can see the cup with the chipped rim, i can see the sticky note that says Smile Voice!!! in pink highlighter, i can see a little framed stock photo of a raccoon in a garbage can like a religious icon, patron of acceptable mess, and i can see the plant on the windowsill that is not dead yet and will never be allowed to die because its continued survival proves something about the department’s ability to maintain life.
YES i insist, it’s in the middle of the pavement, and also i’m in the middle of something i can’t name, and also my life was supposed to be a bridge and it turned out to be a ramp, and she says raccoon-sized or bigger and the city repeats it like a weather pattern, a lullaby i hum at the sink and the door—raccoon-sized or bigger—and now i’m not even talking about the squirrel, i’m talking about me, i am in the middle of the pavement, do you understand, laid out in fluorescent daylight, getting run over in slow procedure, pressed into the road until i’m infrastructure. i am reporting a hazard. please advise.
and i hang up; the dial tone grows fur and keeps ringing in the part of my skull that lights up when a dog looks at me, i pedal through the heat that makes everything look bare, and every squirrel is now both squirrel and symbol, both object and notification, and the lane jitters like it’s buffering, and the city is a giant lung that forgot one of our names, and the clouds are raccoon-sized or bigger, and the pigeons are raccoon-sized or bigger if you believe hard enough, and my shadow throws itself down in the paint like a protester just to see if anyone will come.
are you SURE it’s city property? and the question opens like a service hatch; inside is a clerk with a lantern, behind the clerk a hallway lined with clipboards, behind the clipboards rooms where the city keeps its slightly smaller sorrows. each sorrow tagged with a bar code that scans and leads to a shrug. each shrug smells like summer meat. i say YES and the word fogs the glass and my face fogs with it—two air-breathers lost in a museum of land—and the headset crackles with the sound of something being measured for a burial.
that night i dream a raccoon the size of a bus climbs the overpass like a slow moon and lies down gentle in the bike lane; only the bus has eyes, the moon has pockets, the overpass whispers “don’t look directly at me”. the raccoon’s mask is a tollbooth; i drop a coin and it falls for a very long time past all the dead squirrels who learned to hold their breath. the borough goes quiet like a stagehand with a finger to their lips. the phone rings and rings until even the dead answer in alphabetical order; when they say “hello” it’s my voice, when i say “hello” it’s the road. the city clears its throat through every sewer at once and declares, in a dozen polite languages, that from now on the unit of measurement is dream-sized or bigger, and all at once every glove in the world closes around something weightless, and all at once the paint line lifts one inch off the earth and hums, and all at once the hold music finally resolves into a chord that breaks the thermometer.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Blessed with unflappable Ontarian twang, Silas James is queer and trans writer based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. You might've seen him daydreaming while serving you a G&T at his bartending gig. His work has appeared in yolk, soliloquies anthology, and elsewhere. He loves crosswords and Jesus.
Website: silasjames.ca
Instagram: @notinthephonebook_