Short Happy Stories

Volume 2 is now available! The book contains 50 stories. Order here, or inquire at a bookstore.

Squirrels

Another Sunday. Joe has a couple of commitments this afternoon, but this morning is free of everything except his dog and this pleasant triangular park. Yellow leaves swirl.

They play fetch, which Truffaut seems to enjoy very much—bounding around and occasionally rolling on the grass. Then Joe moves a few yellow leaves with a foot and sits on the grass and Truffaut stretches out next to him. Not far away sit two women. One is staring at a book and the other is staring at a little screen: though they’re on the same blanket, they’re in separate worlds—and Joe’s in yet another world. Joe feels superior to them, because his world is the actual world: he isn’t allowing anything to distract him from his actual physical surroundings. It hasn’t been easy: years of mental training have been required to allow here—wherever that happens to be—to be enough. But he has done the hard work, and—

Truffaut’s sudden spring disrupts Joe’s self-congratulations.

The inspiration? A squirrel.

Truffaut runs after the squirrel. The squirrel reaches a tree and runs up the trunk and disappears—at least from Joe’s view—in the branches. Truffaut barks and barks and barks at the branches.

What, Joe wonders, will barking accomplish?

Joe yells “Truffaut! Come back!”—and Truffaut, despite his instincts, returns to Joe’s area. And sits. Sits there, almost bursting with the belief that he isn’t doing what he’s meant to be doing. He knows he ought to be barking up at those branches. He ought to bark and bark and bark and bark until that squirrel comes out of the tree, at which point—

Another squirrel! Truffaut springs—and runs and runs in sun and yellow leaves, after the squirrel.

They run around a tree.

They run around another tree three times.

They run around the first tree again.

Over the course of the chase, a few moments arrive in which Truffaut opens his jaws and gets them so, so close to the squirrel—but then, at what seems like the exact last possible moment, the squirrel, with a motion that seems almost magical, changes course, causing Truffaut to close his jaws on nothing but crisp fall air.

“Truffaut! Stop being so stupid!” yells Joe. “You will never catch that squirrel. You will never catch any squirrel.”

Truffaut stops running. Some yellow leaves settle. Is Joe right? Is he a dog who’s incapable of catching a squirrel?

No man or beast knows the future. But Joe presumes to know what will never happen? Presumes to know Truffaut’s limitations?

Truffaut starts running again—this time straight out of the park.

Joe’s pathetic cries—“Truffaut! Truffaut! Truffaut! Truffaut!”—cause Truffaut, shortly after reaching the sidewalk, to pause and look back; and he sees Joe running in his direction; and he knows, just knows, Joe will never catch him.

Hours later Truffaut enters the woods. Instinct tells him there are many squirrels here—and there’s one right there! He’ll catch this one!

But he doesn’t.

But there’s another one! He’ll catch this one!

But he doesn’t; and when he finally stops barking at the branches where the squirrel found refuge, the woods are in eerie peace.

Weeks later snow falls on a big house. Truffaut shivers as he stares at the warm-looking yellowy orange rectangles. He didn’t see a single squirrel today.

The squirrels are probably cozy in their burrows or dreys—while he is out here, slowly turning white.

If he hadn’t run away from Joe, he would now be warm. He would be lounging in Joe’s comfortable living room, back in that town however many towns away. But he would also be submissive to someone who doesn’t think he’ll ever catch a squirrel. And sure, Truffaut hasn’t yet managed to catch a squirrel… but… Well, it just hasn’t happened yet.

Two new warm-looking yellowy orange rectangles pop into being.

Months later Truffaut walks between green trees and water and feels calmer than he has in a long time. Trash receptacles are scattered throughout this big park, and Truffaut has learned that the overfilled ones are a fairly reliable source of OK-tasting items. And, if he isn’t lucky in this big park, he can always exit this big park and find something acceptable in the city streets.

People around here talk all sorts of ways. The man and woman Truffaut just passed were talking the way people were talking when Joe would tell him “This movie was made by François Truffaut—the guy you were named after!” But though Truffaut, inspired by Joe’s enthusiasm, would examine the strange changing rectangle, he could never understand what—

A squirrel!

This is it! After months of tricky living, he’ll finally catch a squirrel! This is the squirrel he’s going to catch! No way will this squirrel escape!

The squirrel escapes. Up a tree. Truffaut barks and barks and barks and barks and barks at the branches. “That dog is wild,” says a teenager on the path. “That dog is mangy.” Though tempted to maul the rude teenager, Truffaut keeps barking at the branches. Because incessant intense barking is, he instinctively believes, the only way to get the squirrel to come out of the tree. And he must get that squirrel out of the tree. That’s the whole point of his existence—and he can’t allow anything to become a distraction.

But what’s that new big sound? What could possibly make such a big sound? Truffaut is no longer barking, but silently turning his head, looking in this direction and in that direction and—

A red and white machine slides across the sky. Truffaut vaguely remembers seeing one of those before…

Truffaut barks at the red and white machine—not because he believes this particular barking will cause a specific thing to happen, but because so many things are beyond his comprehension. Beyond his control. Why can’t he catch one damn squirrel?

Years later Truffaut strolls around a little town with weak eyes; but he can see enough—and smell enough—to recognize what needs to be recognized. The back door of the diner, where the man with the limp often tries to engage Truffaut in conversation, and once in a while places on the asphalt a cracked plate of scrambled eggs. The way from the alley to the creek, where there’s always, even at the end of hot summer, at least a little water waiting. The way from the creek to the side of a little ramshackle house, where, quite some time ago now, a little girl started to give him all sorts of leftovers, and before long placed a big cushion thing a few feet away from the garbage—and the big cushion thing turned out to be pretty comfortable, and Truffaut has been sleeping on it ever since.

When Truffaut wakes from yet another deep sleep, he feels like life has started all over again. And though his eyes are weak, he does, now and then, while strolling around town, identify a shape as a squirrel. His countless efforts to catch a squirrel have all ended in failure—but every time he sees one he still feels certain he’s about to accomplish his destiny.

What a thrilling way to live!

Snickerdoodle, Et Cetera

The grocery store down the street sells good cookies. Each cookie is fairly substantial, and wrapped in plastic. You can buy one cookie at a time, or two cookies at a time, or three cookies at a time, or more cookies at a time. Aspen usually buys one cookie, but sometimes buys two cookies. Those times he gives one of the cookies to someone else.

Aspen really admires the grocery store’s variety of cookies: Chocolate Chip Cookie, Peanut Butter Cookie, Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookie, Double Chocolate Cookie, Iced Ginger Cookie, Butterscotch Cookie, Snickerdoodle, et cetera.

But, actually, “et cetera” is just one cookie: Oatmeal Raisin Cookie. That’s the one type of cookie Aspen will never understand or buy. He doesn’t have a problem with oatmeal, and he doesn’t have a problem with raisins—but Oatmeal Raisin Cookie just seems like a stupid cookie.

While Aspen thinks all of the other cookies are great, two of the cookies actually surprised him. The grocery store’s Double Chocolate Cookie has a sui generis structure: it’s half cookie and half brownie. Magnificent! And then there’s Butterscotch Cookie. Aspen hadn’t known that Butterscotch Cookies even exist—and was delighted to discover a wonderful chew and dramatic flares of flavor.

The cookies, Aspen learned through inquiry, are made not by the grocery store itself, but by a mysterious local entity.

Though Aspen kind of feels like he shouldn’t get a cookie too often, he gets a cookie pretty much every day. His call-in radio show, Askin’ Aspen, can be quite stressful: the callers ask challenging advice questions that he, more often than not, doesn’t exactly know how to answer. As a kind of reward for completing another show, he exits the building for a cookie.

How many people, Aspen wonders as he walks along the sidewalk, go into the grocery store for only a cookie? I’ve never seen anyone else in the checkout area with only a cookie… But there must be others like me. Because the cookies are so good!

And now Aspen is in the grocery store, looking at the cookies. On the way over he’d thought he would choose a classic Chocolate Chip Cookie—but maybe this feels more like a Butterscotch Cookie day. But… Wasn’t yesterday a Butterscotch Cookie day? But… That doesn’t have to matter. There’s no law that says you can’t have a Butterscotch Cookie if you had a Butterscotch Cookie yesterday. That would be ridiculous. People wouldn’t stand for it. But when did he last have an Iced Ginger Cookie? That’s a cookie with tremendous character—and Aspen can’t seem to remember when he last had one… A month ago, maybe? Or maybe he should… There are those peanut-buttery cookies… Should he go for a simple Peanut Butter Cookie, or for a more complex Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookie?

On one hand it’s really great to have so many options; but, on the other hand…

Aspen grabs a Snickerdoodle—because, at a certain point, you must force yourself to stop thinking and actually do something. And “Snickerdoodle” is the silliest, best cookie name.

“So it’s a Snickerdoodle Thursday,” says the woman at the register.

“No cookie has a better name,” says Aspen with unusual certitude.

“You’re probably right. Snickerdoodle. Snickerdoodle. Yes. It’s very fun. I wonder how it got that name.”

And now Aspen wonders too.

Climbing Around On Rocks

The trail ambles along above the ocean. The space between the ocean and the trail is occupied by big rocks—jumbled; falling and rising; unpredictable. Natasha turns toward her companions on the trail and, pointing at a pointy rock from another age, says “Why don’t we proceed that way? Climbing around on rocks would be more exciting than this trail.”

The others say they’re fine continuing on along the trail—so Natasha steps off the trail alone.

The rocks go down and the rocks go up: there are many little cliffs: to keep moving in the right direction, climbing is required: Natasha climbs. With gentle waves in her ears.

The others turn around and look at her a few times—but she doesn’t notice, and when she takes a break and looks over, up, at the trail, the others are gone. The air is nice and cool, but she has started to sweat, and her breaths and the waves are now the same volume. She looks beyond the waves. A massive boat, barely visible, is going somewhere.

Now and then, as Natasha continues going somewhere, she’s forced to decide if she should jump from one rock to another rock, or climb down a little and go a roundabout way. A safer way.

Usually she jumps. To make this more like an adventure. The feeling in the air: I’m alive!

After deciding a certain jump isn’t worth the risk, she descends to a pocket of clear water. The pocket of clear water is a fine format for life: Natasha sees green anemones and a bright orange starfish.

And then she continues climbing around, going up and going down, at least once wondering what she and the others will do for dinner, and there’s something quite pleasing about how one cactus pops up here and another cactus pops up there and another cactus pops up over there, greenly punctuating the rocks. It’s actually amazing, how life managed to happen in this dry hot severe space. And that cactus over there even has a bright orange flower!

While moving with the instinctive focus required to avoid a fall, Natasha wonders if there are rattlesnakes around here, and wonders what here was like long ago, when this vast rocky desert was filled with water. What creatures used to swim above her head?

Though she wouldn’t admit she’s tired, her legs and arms definitely feel like they’ve been working. How many minutes have passed since she started? Twenty or a trillion? She pauses, looks at one hand, looks at the other hand; both are scraped; she puts her scraped hands on another rock and climbs.

She kind of feels like she’s in conversation with the land.

And the rare cactus flower is like a little gift. “Take a look at this!” the land seems to say.

Natasha jumps from one rock to another rock.

She’s alive—and doesn’t want to forget it.

As she brings her body up the most substantial cliff yet, her exhaustion becomes undeniable. But she remains inspired by a hope.

After God knows how long, she experiences an unsettling satisfaction as she secures a foot, as she straightens her body on top of the cliff, as she surveys the sparkling formations all around. These sparkling orange rocks and sparkling green rocks are quite different from anything she ever saw back on Earth. And, looking up, fine lines—orbiting ice and rocks and dust—curve across the lavender sky.

She places her eyes on the horizon.

What’s that odd form of life, bounding across the sparkling formations?

Three Views of T. E. Lawrence

Before T. E. Lawrence became Lawrence of Arabia, he was an archaeologist who participated in an expedition in and a bit beyond Sinai. The expedition’s archaeological function was designed to conceal military reconnaissance: the British were preparing for a possible major conflict. But Lawrence’s interest in that aspect of the expedition was dwarfed by his excitement about finally visiting, after years of reading and imagining, the ruins of the city of Petra. And on the expedition he did, indeed, visit the place—and found it wonderful for an entirely surprising reason: while the ruins themselves were certainly interesting, satisfactory, the surrounding nature seemed miraculous. None of the accounts he’d read had come close to adequately expressing what he now sees. The motionless rocks seem to be actively rising and falling, converging into points, forming mesmeric shapes. And the colors of the rocks! Yes, the reds had been expected—but not at this intensity. And how could he ever have been prepared for these strange lines of blue and green, zipping from here to there in brilliant streaks? And the dramatic narrow deep gorges, carved into sandstone by unknown millenniums of water… A single human life, by comparison, almost doesn’t even exist. But how nice, to see those fortunate spots, moments, of greenery and pink flowers. In a February 1914 letter, Lawrence described the place and stressed that no description could be enough. “Till you have seen it,” he wrote, “you have not had the glimmering of an idea how beautiful a place can be.”

After T. E. Lawrence became Lawrence of Arabia, he finished, in late 1919, a hand-written draft of a huge book about what had happened in Arabia—and lost the manuscript at the Reading railway station. He had conceived and executed grand outlandish ideas that altered the course of history, but failed in the simple transportation of a manuscript. Work began again; another draft was completed; he was tired of being Lawrence of Arabia and started to go by the name John Hume Ross and joined the Royal Air Force as an aircraftman; his true identity was found out; he started to go by the name T. E. Shaw. When he wasn’t developing speedboats for the Royal Air Force, he was often on his motorcycle, zipping from here to there—and every now and then he steers his motorcycle to Churchill’s house for a brief stay, which generally includes at least one meal that’s quite foreign to him in its ridiculous sophistication. So many utensils. Back on his motorcycle one morning, crossing the not insignificant distance to Clouds Hill, his cottage home, he finds himself in a snowstorm. Does this snowstorm remind him of years-ago sandstorms? Do any of his Arabian exploits fill his mind as falling snow fills his eyes? As he and his motorcycle press through white blankness? Obviously I can’t know what he was thinking; but I like to think that he wasn’t thinking about the past. Instead, he was thinking about the near future, about going into town for some newspaper-wrapped fish and chips—which he once described, in a letter to a friend from the Arabian days, as “Perfection.”

When T. E. Lawrence was dead, Peter O’Toole pretended to be him in a movie called “Lawrence of Arabia,” directed by David Lean. Lawrence as played by O’Toole sometimes seems to think of himself as a sort of god—which almost certainly would have annoyed the actual Lawrence had he lived long enough to see the movie. And maybe that god-complex stuff doesn’t quite align with the actual facts; but that god-complex stuff is, in fact, a great part of a great movie. One possibility is that Lean, when conceiving and executing miraculous visions for the public, considered himself a sort of god: maybe, with “Lawrence of Arabia,” Lean made both a historical portrait and a disguised self-portrait. Maybe that’s a stupid theory. In any case, O’Toole was a phenomenal version of Lawrence. And what commitment! He went to the desert early to learn how to ride a camel—and was apparently taught by the grandson of the guy played by Anthony Quinn. And when a terrifying pivotal moment arrived, O’Toole and Omar Sharif bravely did what destiny required: they got drunk and got on their camels and led hundreds of camels and horses in a charge on a flimsy Aqaba that had just been built in Spain. In a decades-later television interview, O’Toole said that Lean had said, at the outset, the movie would be an adventure—and so it was. When filming finally ended, after well over a year in various countries, O’Toole jumped into a car and drove over the Atlas Mountains, straight to a nightclub in Casablanca. Omar Sharif was already there. They had survived.

Reading The Letter

After writing the seven-page letter, intended for his older brother, he puts down his pen and goes back to the first page and reads what he wrote: “Sanity has always felt so delicate. Like a glass sphere balanced on the tip of a long needle. At any moment it could slide off and shatter.”

Though he senses that he should mail this letter very soon, and finally focus on his midterms, he reads those lines again, nodding. That’s a great image, he thinks. A glass sphere on a needle. It makes me seem complex. Interesting. Yes.

“Sanity has always felt so delicate.”

Is that, he wonders, actually true?

As soon as the question is articulated, the answer is obvious: no, it isn’t true. Sure, he has experienced… existential fear and… maybe some instability… But who hasn’t? There’s no reason for him to believe that his darkest moments are any darker than the average person’s.

With newly critical eyes he continues to read. He reads extremely exaggerated descriptions of his daily frustrations and thought processes. He reads pretentious statements about Art. He reads huge assumptions—cleverly disguised as Psychology—about human nature. He reads dismissive lines about classic books he hasn’t exactly read…

Now, finally, he clearly understands the main purpose of the letter: to convince his brother that he’s some kind of Genius. But the writer’s intense desire to impress seems so obvious, so pathetic…

The letter does not contain even one direct honest moment.

Why, he wonders, did I make such a big effort to be fake?

He tears the seven pages of the letter in half and lets the halves fall onto the floor. He puts a fresh piece of paper on the desk and picks up his pen and begins again: “College is going fine. How are you? I was just thinking about something you said at the New Year’s gathering—about how Teddy Roosevelt wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”

He pauses and wonders what to write next.

When he puts the letter in the mailbox it’s one page long and every word is true.

Feel free to contact me at evanpellervo@gmail.com.