The Ghost on the Highway: When Things Get Weird in Lynn Abbey's Squirrel Story
Book: It’s About Squirrels… | Author: Lynn Abbey
So up to this point, the story has been weird but explainable. Squirrels frying themselves on a transformer? That’s just Florida wildlife being Florida wildlife. A dead hard drive? Bad luck. But in this section, Lynn Abbey pulls the rug right out from under you. And it happens on the side of a road with no sidewalks.
Walking to the Post Office
Nic packs up her dead hard drive, boxed and sealed, ready to ship back to the manufacturer. Her neighbor’s truck is blocking her Honda, so she walks.
Here’s the thing about where Nic lives. There are no sidewalks. Traffic is surprisingly heavy for a road in the middle of nowhere. This road used to be called “the Hobo’s Highway.” That name matters in about thirty seconds.
She’s paying attention to the cars rushing past. She doesn’t even notice someone is walking beside her until he speaks.
“Don’t Do It!”
A man appears next to her. And this guy is not okay.
He’s wearing long, loose, layered clothes that are literally falling apart. Everything about him is faded and covered in grayish dust. His hair matches: gray-dusted, limp, shoulder-length. Nic figures she could outrun him, and she’s not a runner. But his eyes? Dark and wild and locked onto the box she’s carrying.
He tells her: “Don’t send it away! Take it home. Get him out of the box!”
Then: “He belongs here!”
Two things to notice. First, he said “him.” Not “it.” He’s talking about whatever is inside that dead hard drive like it’s a living thing. Second, he knows what she’s doing. He knows she’s heading to mail this box. How?
Nic clutches the box and holds her breath as they pass each other. When she looks back, he’s gone. Not walking away. Not hiding behind something. Gone. No footprints in the sand. No trace. Just grass, sand, roadside trash, and the Chevrolet dealership in the background.
This is where the story shifts. A faded man on a road once called the Hobo’s Highway, who vanishes without leaving footprints? That’s a ghost. Straight up a ghost. And Nic knows it too, even if she won’t say it out loud. She calls him a “waking dream” and a “brain-cramp.”
But she doesn’t go to the post office. She turns around and goes home.
Squirrels Waiting
Back at the trailer, the squirrels are everywhere. One sitting on her car hood, twitching its tail. Another perched above her front door. A third racing along the overhead wire toward the transformer pole. Nic’s heart skips when that one leaps, but it lands safely on a thicker wire and just sits there. Scolding.
The manufacturer gives her a whole month to return the hard drive. So she decides not to mail it. Not yet.
Something told her not to. Something faded and dusty and gone without a trace.
The Email to Sara
And then we get the saddest part of this section. Nic sits down with cold coffee in a rinsed cup and emails her friend Sara. The email is short and it’s honestly painful to read.
She mentions the suicidal squirrels. She mentions the ghost on the highway. She mentions sending out resumes “by the score” and hearing nothing back. And then this line: unless it’s her parents calling, she’s lucky if she says two words to another human being in a day. She complained to the power company just to have someone to talk to.
That hit me. She called Sunshine Power not because she needed help. She called because she needed a voice. Any voice. That’s real loneliness. Not dramatic movie loneliness. Just the quiet kind where days blur together and you realize you haven’t spoken out loud since yesterday.
She tells Sara she misses winter. Misses everything she ever complained about. And signs off.
Abbey lets you feel how small Nic’s world has gotten. A trailer she doesn’t own, a computer held together by hope, a neighborhood where she knows nobody, and now a ghost telling her to keep a dead hard drive. The weirdness isn’t scary yet. It’s just lonely and strange and building toward something.
And those squirrels are still watching.