Pallbearer Squirrels and Florida Power Problems in Lynn Abbey's Short Story
Book: It’s About Squirrels… by Lynn Abbey
So Nic calls the utility company. She’s lost power at exactly 9am for four days straight. Not a full blackout. Just a tiny hiccup. Barely enough to notice, really. Your microwave clock wouldn’t even blink. But her computer? Dead. Hard drive completely fried.
And the utility rep tells her it’s squirrels.
I need you to sit with that for a second. You call the power company, furious, expecting some kind of technical explanation about grid failures or transformer maintenance schedules. And they hit you with: squirrels.
But here’s where it gets genuinely wild. The spokeswoman explains this thing called “pallbearer squirrels.” Squirrels are creatures of habit. They chase each other along the same routes every day, taking turns being the leader and the followers. If the lead squirrel makes a wrong move and falls into a pole transformer, it gets electrocuted. Dead. The transformer resets itself in less than a second. Barely a blip on the power grid.
But the next day, the followers come back and run the exact same route. Another squirrel takes the lead, hits the transformer, and dies the same way. This repeats day after day until the entire group is wiped out. The utility engineers actually named this phenomenon. They call them pallbearer squirrels.
That is one of the darkest things I’ve ever heard described so casually by a customer service representative.
The story goes on for up to nineteen days in some cases. Nineteen days of squirrels repeating the same fatal mistake because they literally cannot break the pattern. It’s horrifying and absurd and weirdly sad all at once. Like a nature documentary written by someone with a very bleak sense of humor.
Now, about Nic herself. She’s a dot-com crash survivor. Six months ago she was working in a real office, making internet marketing campaigns, drinking coffee, living a normal urban life. Then the bubble popped. Now she’s in a one-bedroom trailer at the end of a dirt road in the dead center of Florida. Somewhere between nowhere and, as she puts it, the warmer levels of Dante’s Hell. Her parents are paying her rent from a nearby retirement community.
If you’ve ever had that moment where your life goes from “things are going fine” to “I’m living off my parents’ goodwill in a place I never imagined existing,” you get Nic. The dot-com crash was the late-90s version of getting laid off from a tech startup today. Same energy. Different decade.
And now the one thing connecting her to the outside world, her computer, is dead because of suicidal squirrels. You can’t make this up.
The spokeswoman also mentions ospreys. These are endangered birds that nest on platforms the power company built on their poles near lakes. When ospreys bring fish back for their babies, they sometimes drop the fish into the transformers instead of the nest. Same result as the squirrels: a tiny voltage hiccup. But ospreys usually learn after one miss, so when the problem repeats at the same time every day, the utility company assumes squirrels.
Nic, being practical despite everything, had already bought a UPS battery. Fifteen pounds of backup power that arrived right alongside her replacement hard drive. Smart move. At 9:08 the next morning, the battery’s lights flicker from green to red and back. Another squirrel down. But this time, her computer survives.
Small victories.
She boxes up the dead hard drive to send back to the manufacturer for a warranty replacement and heads out to the post office on foot. And that’s where things start to get strange. But that’s the next part.
What I love about this opening is how Lynn Abbey sets up a completely mundane, almost boring situation and fills it with this dark comedy about squirrel behavior that turns out to be real (Florida power companies actually do deal with this). Nic is broke, stuck, humbled, and now she can’t even keep a computer running because of rodent death loops. It’s the kind of absurd bad luck that feels too specific to be fiction.