The Hole

Another ten-hour day. Non-stop email. Clients blowing up my phone.

I quickly drive home, past the conifers and pine trees and other flora I never bother to notice.

The sun is receding by the time I pull onto my street.

I loosen my collar as I park my car. Multiple black marks line the garage from where I’ve turned too wide and scraped paint off my front bumper. It’s always the same spot; it’s happened more times than I can count. I could get my car fixed, but I don’t see the point.

I walk briskly past my building’s makeshift garden—a couple of sad-looking succulents and an indiscernible bush that leans in a slow-death type of way—up the grey-stained stairs, and into my apartment. I drop my keys absentmindedly on the entryway table and sling my jacket over a stack of clothes on a faux leather chair. The interior of my place could best be described as spartan. I haven’t bothered to decorate much. Plain walls suit me better.

I open the fridge, grab a beer, and unwrap an old package of pork chops.

I’ve been cooking pork chops for dinner going on six months in a row. They do just fine; not as tasty as steak, but less bland than chicken—some sort of palatable in-between state, like most of my days. 

I slide the patio door of my apartment open for some extra light. That’s when I notice it.

The hole.

There is a grapefruit-sized hole in the cushion of my patio chair.

It’s confusing. It’s out of place. It doesn’t compute.

I stare at it for a while. I take a picture. I look at the picture as if a digital version of the hole will somehow make more sense. It doesn’t. I turn my phone sideways for a different angle.

The hole is a perfect circle. Who did this? Aliens? A rabid hole-puncher? Sharon from 6B? (Sharon might be an alien, I’ve always assumed…) It’s as if someone took a cookie cutter and made a cushion cookie from my chair.

I walk outside to examine the hole closer. I gently touch it and the surrounding area—maybe a den of mice made a makeshift encampment. Nothing stirs.

I go back inside my apartment—away from the hole—and quickly season and sear my pork chops. 

As they finish cooking, I get an idea. Whoever made the hole might be back. I need to be patient. I need to sit, wait, and watch for them. I’ll catch the hole-maker when they return for more.

I take a chair from my kitchen table and slide it over to face the patio sliding door. I grab a plate and sit down with a too-hot pork chop—balancing it all awkwardly on my lap—and slowly eat.

I watch the hole.

I wait. 

Eat, chew, gulp. Eat, chew, gulp. I wipe my mouth. Nothing comes. I look out at the rest of the patio. There are some dead leaves piled up around the corners of the concrete slab. I really should sweep them. When was the last time I did that?

My eyes drift across the rest of the outdoor space. It feels odd to be staring at my patio so intently. I always eat my pork chops in front of the TV. Looking out my back door waiting for something to happen feels disorientingly peaceful. A sort of serenity only lifeless patio furniture can provide.

The sun starts to set. It’s the color of cotton candy. Palm trees sway in the foreground as the colors shift from orange to pink to purple to blue. It’s a nice place where I live. I never really think about it. Most things in my life have a certain blurred quality as I move from home to office and back to home, delivering report after report and manically answering emails on my phone. When I’m not racing from place to place, or frantically keeping up with messages, I’m ruminating on the various unfinished tasks that need to be done—there’s never time to sit and stare at patio furniture or watercolored clouds or paper mâché-looking leaves.

But now, with my pork chop and chair and the sunset over the back patio, things are quiet. There’s a dilated quality to the moment—a stretching of time. It feels like if I sit still for much longer I’ll get swallowed up by the spaciousness of it all.

I hear a twig crack. 

I turn my head.

Something moves in the back corner of the patio.

There’s an outline of something. I stare at the shadowy silhouette for a second. Neither of us makes a move, as if moving would make the situation more real, and neither of us really wants that—it doesn’t want to be seen and I don’t want it here.

The hole-maker.

As it moves closer, I have to marvel at its girth. 

It’s truly a well-fed squirrel. It hasn’t missed a meal in some time (my patio furniture cushion, clearly a part of that balanced dining regimen).

I place my pork chop plate on the ground, slowly breaking the trance, and gently slide the back door open. Things are still for a few seconds. I can hear my ears ringing. The chubby mammal-demon twitches. I don’t move. It turns its head ever so slightly to the right. I go for it and run out onto the patio screaming and flailing. I don’t know what I’m trying to do, (exert Darwinian dominance over a lesser being?) probably scare the thing, scare it so bad it won’t come back.

It feels good to move. To scream.

I stop flailing and look around. The portly bandit is gone. I walk back inside and sit down at my kitchen chair. I take a deep breath. The uncoordinated tirade worked. 

Things are still once more.

Then, just as I start working on my pork chop again, a head pops up over the patio fence. 

The squirrel.

It hadn’t run off; it was hiding. And it had been waiting. The moxy of this creature.

Another idea comes to me. I will make a weapon. A club. Out of an Amazon box. With a cardboard club I can strike the little vermin, and at a minimum, make even more noise—show it my strength.

I run to my recycling and come back with a broken-down box and fashion it into a club. The squirrel is already on the patio chair taking more stuffing from the hole. My stuffing. I bolt back outside and start blindly swinging. I yell tribal noises. I don’t make contact with the squirrel, if I’m honest I didn’t want to, but it does the trick; I scare the furry trespasser away once again.

I walk back inside, sit down, and continue my watch. I won’t be fooled twice. I keep the cardboard box club in my hand. I grip it tightly. I watch the hole until the sun fully recedes behind the trees; until the night bugs start their croaking and the neighborhood birds return to their nests for slumber.

I look up at the stars above my patio. I feel a cliched connectedness to them at this moment—the squirrel-battle stirring up something primordial within me. Something that has lain dormant for a long time. Some sort of uncomfortable aliveness.

I shake the feeling and finish my pork chop, clean up the dishes, and tie up all of the patio cushions outside, making their surface area as small as possible. If the squirrel comes back, it’ll be near impossible to get at the stuffing meat of the cushions now.

I admire my handiwork. Squirrel: 0. Me: 1. I head upstairs to bed. I dream of ancient wars.

---

I ended up in trench warfare with the squirrel for over a week. It made several more holes in my patio cushions; nothing I did seemed to deter it. I contemplated buying a cat, buying a pellet gun, developing primitive rock contraptions and other complicated snares, chemical warfare, the list went on.

As I devised battle plans, I forgot about my overcrowded inbox, my incessant clients, and my unending list of to-dos. In the week the holes first appeared, my day job didn’t seem to exist. Things slowed down. I could feel my chest expanding in and out in a more visceral way. I bought salmon instead of pork chops and took the time to properly season it. I somehow had more time. Time to sit, wait, and listen. Time to watch the palm trees sway and listen to the wildlife that congregated around my patio. My life moved at a more human pace. I noticed things. So many things.

I noticed what it felt like to prioritize a sunset over a deadline and to interact with the nature around me instead of lobotomizing myself in front of a screen each night.

Things started to feel, dare I say it, good.

But I wasn’t ready to sacrifice all of my patio furniture for this feeling.

So after a week of fighting with the squirrel, I took all of the cushions from my patio and hid them in an extra storage space in my apartment. This made it impossible for me to sit on my patio furniture, but the cushions were safe from the squirrel. I’d chalk the squirrel war up to a tie.

---

A few weeks after pulling the cushions inside, the squirrel stopped coming around.

I sort of missed the little guy. A respectable foe. A worthy adversary compared to the faceless enemies within my email inbox. Hell, maybe not an adversary at all, but a sort of furry-tailed teacher.

With the squirrel gone, things sped back up.

I stopped sitting facing the sunset at night, watching the stars, and enjoying the late birdsong transition to the sound of crickets.

I returned to eating my pork chops on the couch watching TV.

A familiar color of grey slowly crept back into my life. My chest felt tight again. I stopped noticing, not just my patio furniture, but all the small things around my apartment I had communed with for the past month. Work got in the way.

Time passed as it did before the hole—hurried, frenetic, and abstracted from the physical plane around me.

One night after a particularly agitating day of work, I went to my storage space to get a bottle of wine and saw my hole-ridden patio furniture cushions. Instead of getting angry, something odd happened. I started laughing. I laughed so hard I thought I might crack a rib. I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed so much. I let it consume me. It felt good to laugh.

I touched the chewed-up cushions, they were a sweet reminder of the days when I did battle with the squirrel—when the hole problem first appeared. A problem that wasn’t as much of a problem as it was a solution. A solution to something that has plagued me ever since I left the unshakable presence of childhood and entered the eternal future of my adult life—a forgetting to be here now; to pay attention—to my life, to my patio furniture, and especially, to a furry-tailed hole-maker. 

So I did the unthinkable.

I got the cushions from the storage space and put them back on my patio furniture.

I took my dinner from the couch and turned my chair around.

I looked at the bubble-gum sky. I listened to the birdsong. And I waited for the squirrel. 

I needed another hole in my life; something to slow me down once again.