DON'T FENCE ME IN

By Labor Day dead squirrels littered the landscape. Red squirrels, grey squirrels, flying squirrels- all fell from that tree. Any time, day or night, if I heard an acorn fall, or that incessant chattering (that sounded so similar to Jeeves' accent)....well lets just say I was running out of shells. The gun was always loaded.
During the day I wrote...pitiful love songs. I was too depressed to work. Mr. Asser kept calling to get me to come back, but I kept putting him off. I couldn't face the grind. One of my ex students from the OSSS wanted to get married in the church, so for a little while i busied myself with that. I hoped it would shake be out of my funk, but it had the opposite effect. All the hugging and kissing and coochy-coo just made me feel worse. "Do you take- blah, blah, blah...." I smoked. I drank. I snorted. I popped...and still felt like shit. Nothing was lifting the oppressive fog. Then another acorn would hit the roof. Gunfire echoed across the valley.
Then, one hot morning an especially cagey grey squirrel shot across the high branches of the oak. I missed. BANG! Missed again. On the fourth shot he fell dead at my feet. A couple of minutes later there was a knock at my door. It was my ASSHOLENEIGHBORS. "DO YOU HAVE A SHOTGUN?" I thought he asked if I wanted a shotgun. "What kind?" I asked. "What?" he looked puzzled and angry. "Did you just shoot?" I told him I did. "WELL, WE WERE SWIMMING IN THE POOL AND SHOT HIT THE WATER! WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?" I guess that squirrel had led me out on a limb. I didn't tell him what i was shooting at and made some excuse about the wind blowing the shot. It was all bullshit. Thank God I hadn't hit any of his kids. The next week the chainlink fence went up. Finally the squirrels went silent. My property now looked like a minimum security work farm. The depression deepened.