Dixie
Legacy Name: Dixie

Dixie loved big, bright maple leaves, foggy mornings, and fresh acorns. She loved her enormous tail and the stripe that ran down it. She loved hearing the crickets at dusk and small frogs singing at night.

But she hated magpies.

They were wretchedly keen and devoted to heckling others with their sharp beaks and claws.

It was a spring afternoon when they went after Dixie. She sprang from tree to tree, scrabbling along the branches bitterly as they snapped and screeched at her.

She hastened out of the trees and onto a dilapidated roof, skidding along its splintered shingles. She darted about frantically as the birds dived at her unrelentingly.

Out of desperation, Dixie made her way for the chimney before shooting down its sooty chute.

Free of the mob of magpies, she sat in a dusty heap at the bottom of the fireplace. Dixie rarely saw humans in the woods she called home, and a human home was an even more rare sight to behold.

An empty room yawned open like a musty mouth before her. The walls were accented in peeling wallpaper, with scattered and broken furniture punctuating the corners of the room.

Dixie slowly left the confines of the fireplace, her tiny feet leaving a trail in the dust behind her. She took in the house carefully, ears straining in the unnatural silence for the breeze and birdsong in the trees.

She was met with a heavy silence.

The house itself was in a terrible state. Dixie wouldn’t know any different, but she was able to sense the sadness that cling in the air. She explored past the living room, skittered across a barren kitchen floor, and took in the mildew-rich linens in the corner of a bedroom. Many of the windows were broken.

That’s when the voice spoke up.

”Get... out...!” it rasped.

Dixie nearly leapt out of her fur. She fled for the fireplace, staring up at the grimy bricks that made up the mantle before realizing she would need to find a different way out.

"Get... out... now...!" the voice wheezed again, like low thunder.

Dixie paused and glanced around the room. Where was that voice coming from?

“Hello?” she called out, uncertainty causing her fur to prickle.

Silence.

The grey squirrel tilted her head inquisitively until she finally received a reply.

“What are you doing here?” the voice hissed.

“The magpies chased me in.” Dixie replied, her fear slowly subsiding and curiosity trickling in.

Silence.

“Is this your nest?” she pressed.

“I hate birds.” the voice’s response amused Dixie.

“...squirrels, especially.”

Dixie’s tail twitched, not caring for the second remark.

Before she could muster a retort, two new voices floated in from outside the old house. A pair of boys had appeared, rocks in hand and a smear of mischief on their faces. The voice boomed at the boys, sharp with anger and indignation as the rocks pelted the exterior of the house.

Dixie was amazed that the boys couldn’t hear it. It rumbled in the floors beneath her, drawing her fur on end like lightning. Were humans really that oblivious?

Out of ammunition and having created two new shattered windows, the boys ventured to the front porch. They seemed to be goading one another into entering the home. Finally, one of them pushed the door open to peer inside.

To Dixie, the voice within the home was loud and clear. Furious, it roared at the intruders who were deaf to its cries.

Dixie had seen enough.

She hurled herself at one of the boys, chittering and scampering across his shoulders. Startled, he cried out and stumbled away from the house. The second boy followed, screeching. Dixie flung herself back inside the house as they abandoned their trespass.

There are good spirits and bad spirits. A bad spirit was trapped in the house, but Dixie had a good spirit. And the two made an alliance of sorts that day.

Dixie would come to understand the bad spirit as it shared more of its history with her. It struggled to remember much of its origin; it rambled on about a witch at times, but she wasn’t sure they were even real to begin with. What Dixie understood more clearly was that the bad spirit wished to be left alone by the mischievous people that occasionally visited with nothing more than an interest in petty destruction.

Dixie found creative ways to discourage such visits. Trespassers could not hear the bad spirit, as it had grown weak throughout the decades. But Dixie helped rejuvenate the house’s haunted status with linen scraps, old bottles, and ingenuity. Humans are not difficult to mislead.

The unlikely pair enjoyed keeping up the façade, the bad spirit and the grey squirrel.

As spring faded into fall, Dixie prepared for winter’s harsh grasp on the forest. She had begun to bring dried grass in through a broken window when the bad spirit requested a final favor from her.

“It is time. The dust calls me, like a whisper in the fog. There is a match near the old garden. Please find it.”

Dixie was puzzled. After bringing several odd objects in from the garden, she finally located an old match. She was instructed in how to strike it, and she did so without singing her whiskers.

The old house went up in flames surprisingly fast, as if fueled by an unseen force. Dixie watched from afar, beyond the garden atop a twisted stump. A great sigh spat cinders into the sky until there was nothing left but a dull smolder where the house once stood.

The dust, the rot, and the sadness were gone.

There are good spirits and there are bad spirits.

There are also free spirits.