🐿️ The Twitching Dance of the Squirrels

A rural elegy, sharpened with absurdity and shadowed by Poe.

Squirrels are suicidal.
It’s true. There is no doubt in my mind. Squirrels want to die.

I drive the long, rural country roads of Kentucky—roads that dance through towns with names like Shelbyville, Simpsonville, Campbellsburg, Pendleton, Bedford. New Castle’s tucked out there too. Between these places lie woods, winding lanes, and plenty of dead things.

Several times a week I take the same stretch—to a community where deer leap over cars like theater performers with poor timing. One road in particular hosts a man who lets out over a hundred chickens to peck at the gravel, along with wild turkeys and, bizarrely, peacocks. It’s a barnyard parade with feathers and confusion.

And on this road: the carnage. The aftermath. The dance.

Huge carrion birds feast on the fallen — birds with wingspans like patio umbrellas who rise lazily at the approach of rubber and steel. Their arrogance is palpable. They don’t rush. They simply glide away, mildly irritated, knowing the road will serve up fresh meat tomorrow.
There are other roads, other buffets, just over the next hill.
A banquet of roads.

It’s a creek road, and each day it’s littered anew with
half-eaten, half-claimed, half-chewed reminders of risk assessment gone wrong.
They share little, or nothing, except for death—and perhaps, a strange camaraderie wherein the eyes go first.
The birds favor the eyes.
Rubbery delicious balls of flavor, apparently.

Because on such roads, there are no lanes, no dividers—just suggestions.
You don’t drive them. You interpret them.

I drive, alert. Always hoping something doesn’t dart out at the last second.
Something always does. And I manage, avoid—except for the squirrels.
Because squirrels, I swear, want to die.

🪶 The Rules

There are unwritten rules to such roads.
You don’t learn them—you absorb them.

Rule one: If you brake for a squirrel, a pickup truck that wasn’t there a second ago will be behind you.
Rule two: If you swerve, that truck will appear from the opposite direction.
Rule three: If you do nothing, the squirrel will dance… and the truck won’t exist at all.

It’s this last rule that leaves you remorseful.

Squirrels time their suicide runs with uncanny precision.
They wait for your approach—darting into that razor-thin moment when impact is all but guaranteed.
It’s not just bad luck.
It’s choreography.
And if it’s not intentional, then surely it’s a dare—a challenge born of instinct and misplaced confidence.
A daring that lacks depth perception.

Most aren’t claimed by death immediately. That comes later.
Squirrels die twitching—often with shattered vertebra underneath a vehicle of any shape or size or color.
At some point, they quiver and lift their tails, and that’s when the twitching begins.

🕺 The Dance

The twitching dance is mesmerizing.

It’s like watching a wind-up ballerina — sweeping fast at first, circling, tail flicking, break-dancing in almost an elegant way.
Many squirrels, I suspect, dance themselves off the road.
What we see are the ones who didn’t quite have the legs for it.
And for every ten roadside dancers, how many hundreds pirouetted out of sight?

As a species, squirrels dance well.
And perhaps this explains why country roads are always surrounded by lush greenery.
Good fertilizer is easy to come by there.

When winter approaches, the dance grows more fervent.
The birds migrate, but roadside cultivation thrives.
The squirrels keep dancing, seeking their final partner—the one with perfect timing and unyielding talent.

The autumn leaves fall, yet the road stays clean—swept clear, it seems, by the twirling dancers of the day and of the night.
Sunrise, moonlight, dancers.
Polished by fur and brush and tail, the dance floor opens again and again.

And so forever it goes on...
The twitching dance of the squirrels.