Woodland creatures will find you in the night, and they will defile you. Mark Hay, superhuman, tells the terrifying tale:

In case squirrels aren't friendly enough for you, Jorda Kovash spotted this raccoon outside Claremont.

Something about the sound of nail upon metal, the grating and skittering and scraping of it, irks me dearly—so much that it can pull me from the deepest slumber. So when I awoke yesterday to that chalkboard screech and clatter, suffice it to say I was irritated. Surprising, how quickly the welling annoyance in one’s heart can condense with confusion and then sink leaden into one’s gut in bold terror—this I learned when I opened my eyes to investigate and saw a furry little face peering down at me.

The squirrel was perched half a foot over my bed, atop the radiator box beside my headboard. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I had always feared this day, but had suppressed it behind a conviction that it could never happen. I sleep with my window open. I like the breeze. And I use no mosquito screen (the pests seem to, like most other living creatures, find my flesh too repulsive to bother sucking me dry). Somehow this woodland denizen had scaled the façade of 47 Claremont, perched atop my sixth floor sill, and decided to pay me a visit. I always figured any unexpected visitors would be pigeons.

I coiled up off of my stomach, back arched and resting on my haunches, eyes wide and hands hanging in front of my chest in prissy caution and terror—a dead mirror to the squirrel’s natural posture. I screamed:

“Squirrel!”

He moved back a pace, cocked his head. We sat for a moment, wondering at each other. I decided upon a course of action.

Stretching out my hand a foot before his face, I began a beat-poet snap, accompanied by a mixture of pleas and commands: “Leave, shoo, go, please, please, get, get out, go!”

With each snap, my visitor withdrew a step, two, out the window, onto the sill. I slammed down the window and stood, shirtless and disheveled, staring at my exiled guest. He seemed confused—bold as New York squirrels are, they seem unable to understand how they could be denied access to any corner of the city. He turned, giving me a clear and long view of his little, fuzzy ass, and then descended.

Mothers and daughters, close your windows. Morningside Heights is no longer safe; your dorm is no longer sacred.