It's About Squirrels

“It’s About Squirrels…” by Lynn Abbey follows Nicole “Nic” Larsens, a recently unemployed internet marketer who retreated to a trailer park in dead-center Florida after the dot-com bubble burst. When her computer keeps dying from mysterious power surges, the utility company explains the cause: pallbearer squirrels, rodents that follow their leader into pole transformers one after another until the whole group is dead.

But the squirrel problem is just the beginning. A ghostly derelict warns Nic not to mail her dead hard drive. A luminous fairy woman appears in her trailer at night, weeping over the broken hardware. With help from her neighbor Bobby Walker, whose Scottish mother told him about brownies and fairies, Nic discovers that a brownie (a small fairy creature) got trapped on the hard drive during a squirrel-caused power surge. She rescues it with beer and Vienna sausages, and meets what appears to be the fairy queen herself.

The story blends Florida’s real-world weirdness with old-school fairy folklore, wrapping it all in dark humor and genuine emotional depth. At its core, it’s about loneliness, displacement, and finding unexpected connections in the strangest places. Lynn Abbey, best known for the Thieves’ World shared fantasy universe, brings her signature worldbuilding skill to a modern Florida setting where the line between “that’s just Florida” and “that’s actual magic” barely exists.