August

Zach had already yelled, though it wasn’t intentional. Completely. He was sitting in a car that was going at a very high speed down a road when a squirrel inhabitant of this asylum suddenly turned suicidal and decided to make a mad dash across the road. The resulting abrupt acceleration in the other direction left him feeling just a little sick.

The squirrel flicked its tail innocently on the other side of the road. Zach glared at it and wondered why no joke was made about the squirrels crossing the road. Who cares about chickens? Suicidal squirrels were way more common now. And dangerous. Perhaps they were picking things up from the terrorist?

“Ugh,” said Zach’s mother, who had decided to sit in the backseat for this trip and was now suffering from a major problem in the form of boxes.

“You okay, Zachary?” his father asked, without ever taking his eyes off of the road.

“Are you?” asked Zach, twisting himself around to peer at his mother, who was now painstakingly restacking the boxes on the seat next to her.

She squeaked, mostly because Zach’s father had just swerved to avoid a squirrel that had taken a kamikaze plunge off of the curb earlier and didn't quite survive the encounter. The boxes tumbled down like dominoes. Zach’s mother re-stacked the boxes and deliberately closed her eyes.

Zach’s father was humming to himself.

Zachary wondered if he hadn’t better do the same and close his eyes too. After all, he wanted himself to be both physically and mentally ready when he moved into the dorms, and that was today, in less than two hours. He didn’t want to unpack thinking about suicidal squirrels while off-key notes of concerto number five was playing in his head.

He needed to stop thinking about squirrels. Except another one just crossed the road.