My brothers and I shared a bedroom with a fireplace when we were very young. Early one night, the three of us screamed like we were being ax murdered. Our dad rushed in the room and found us huddle in the opposite corner of the bedroom of a flying squirrel that whooshed down the chimney. Omnisciently, Dad tossed a towel over it, scooped it up, and told us to go back to sleep.

“Can we keep it!”
“We’ll see,” Dad replied.

He secreted our new pet into the bathroom that our family shared. In the middle of night, the flying squirrel got thirsty, found a water source, fell in the toilet, and drowned.

Dad drank some. No, Dad drank a lot. Early in the morning, he went to take a leak. (Dad was legally blind half his life, a detail I should’ve noted earlier.) Partially drunk, mostly blind, and oblivious to the previous evening’s flying squirrel fiasco, Dad looked in the toilet and shouted, “Dammit, flush the toilet, boys!” His collective scoldings gave the impression that the three of us were all in cahoots whenever he detected malfeasance. No, we did not take a tri-poop in the night. It was flying squirrel carcass that he flushed.

Dad awoke with three pairs of eyes beaming at his bedside. “Where’s our squirrel?” Having pieced together the night’s events, he replied, “It was homesick. I had to let it go.”

Though he was ours only briefly, we miss our pet squirrel.