Zombie Squirrel

You can tell there have been some big changes over in Central Park because the natural order of things has changed. In the mornings, the scene is generally calm; the dogs are politely engaging, certain mammals dressed in bright spandex and other colored displays trot pleasantly through. When the heat of the day descends, however, musicians begin to grapple for territory and the law of the jungle exposes certain lives to be nasty, brutish and short. It is in these chaotic conditions that the zombie squirrel terrorized the promenade.

We learned that Bathesda Fountain had been made a quiet zone. Indeed this sent certain long time denizens out of their warrens. They were angry, confused, and forced to scrape the earth for another place to dig in. Two colorful creatures, Thoth and Pink Angel, even chose to get arrested in protest of this climactic shift. Then squirrels began dropping out of trees and days later the zombie squirrel reared it’s ugly, over-sized and maggot-ridden head.

I have never seen a squirrel miss a branch and yet high over-head in the middle of a well attended Tin Pan performance, a conspicuously non-flying specimen jumped for a branch and missed. Accelerating rapidly until the very moment of impact, he fell forty feet directly into the middle of the promenade. The kinetic energy was transformed into a painfully high screech of terror. Adrenelized, the failed branch dancer ran in dazzlingly tight circles until he spilled off the main walkway under the benches at peoples feet into the ground covering plants. As startling as this scene presented, it wasn’t even close to the terror and fear caused by the zombie squirrel.

Perhaps it was just a harbinger. Perhaps the zombie squirrel was the very same unbalanced soul to fall so far from his leafy perch. In any case, the zombie squirrel first stalked the promenade under the cloak of pity. It played dead. Cunning zombie. Let them come close to examine you, see your mangy coat, your mal-formed, scabrous, bulbous head, poke at you with tentative sneakers. Caring urban naturalists cooed over you, mourned over you, cupping their hands over their mouths. When you rose in a stupor and plodded forth on your zombie paws you reminded onlookers of the plague. No squirrel should move that slowly. Gradually you regained the very populated promenade where you or your zombie kin had fallen merely days ago. You stumbled deliberately and apparently blindly into a young child’s trike inspiring a different andrellnelized scream. Horror ensued.

Eventually a parks ranger was summoned to dispell you but managed only to chase you up a tree. We were all quite suprised that you had the fortitude or the muscle memory of your previous form to manage such a bold escape. Surely you would fall again. You did – with a thud into the low bushes behind the band. When you climbed up again, you were thwarted by a noble squirrel warrior who fearlessly protected his tree house. Did he touch you? Is he now contaminated? How many more zombie squirrels shall fall?

Nature will assuredly balance itself again. Until then, we must be ever-vigilant, courageous, innoculated against fear and disciplined in our approach to the elements. Regardless how rabid our fans become, despite seismic shifts in the landscape, disproving mockingbirds, fighting off animals, and impervious to our own fears, Tin Pan shall prevail.

These questions answered in our next episode: “Did the zombie squirrel touch Stefan’s Saxophone?” And the ensuing, “Will Stefan’s Saxophone acquire even more undead powers?”