It's About Squirrels by Lynn Abbey: A Fantasy Short Story Hidden in a Florida Trailer Park
Book: It’s About Squirrels… | Author: Lynn Abbey
So here’s a story that caught me off guard. I picked up Lynn Abbey’s “It’s About Squirrels…” expecting something lightweight, maybe funny. And it is funny. But it’s also this sneaky little fantasy story that slips magic into the most unglamorous setting possible: a trailer park in dead-center Florida.
What’s This Story About?
Nicole “Nic” Larsens is having a rough time. The dot-com bubble just burst, her career is toast, and she’s landed in a rented trailer somewhere between nowhere and what she calls “the warmer levels of Dante’s Hell.” Her parents are paying her rent. She’s sending out resumes into the void. Her only real connection to the outside world is her computer.
And then squirrels destroy her hard drive.
Not just any squirrels. Pallbearer squirrels. That’s a real term the power company uses for squirrels that follow their leader into a transformer, dying one by one, day after day. Each death causes a tiny power hiccup. Most appliances don’t even notice. But Nic’s hard drive couldn’t survive four days of it.
That’s already a wild premise. But the story goes further. Way further.
A ghostly man on the highway warns Nic not to mail her dead hard drive. A glowing woman appears in her trailer at night, weeping over the same hard drive. Her neighbor Bobby Walker starts telling her about Scottish brownies, the fairy kind. And Nic slowly realizes that something got trapped on that hard drive when the squirrels fried it. Something alive. Something from a world she never believed in.
Why Cover This Story?
Lynn Abbey is best known for creating the Thieves’ World shared universe, one of the original shared-world fantasy anthologies that influenced a whole generation of writers. She knows how to build worlds and she knows how to write characters who feel real.
What I love about this story is how grounded it stays. Nic isn’t some chosen hero. She’s broke, lonely, and skeptical. The magic doesn’t show up with trumpets and prophecies. It shows up because squirrels keep dying in a transformer. That’s the kind of fantasy storytelling I want to see more of.
The story also has a lot of heart. There’s real loneliness in Nic’s life, and the connections she makes, with Bobby Walker, with the fairy queen herself, feel earned. It’s a small story about small kindnesses in a forgettable corner of Florida. And it works.
What’s Coming in This Series
I’m going to walk through this story in parts so we can really sit with the details. Here’s the plan:
- Part 1: Pallbearer Squirrels and Florida Power Problems - How the whole mess starts
- Part 2: The Ghost on the Highway - Nic’s first brush with the supernatural
- Part 3: Bobby Walker and the Squirrel Traps - Southern hospitality meets fairy folklore
- Part 4: The Luminous Fairy Woman and the Brownie Rescue - Where it all comes together
- Closing Thoughts - What this story gets right about urban fantasy
If you like fantasy that feels lived-in instead of epic, this is your kind of story. Let’s get into it.