Fray special issue: Wild Life: Stories of the Animals We Love

Fray is the quarterly of true stories and original art. This is a special issue about pets.

Wild Life Stories of the Animals We Love

Illustrations by Goopymart

Contributors Heather Armstrong dooce.com Lance Arthur lancearthur.com Ben Brown benbrown.com Heather Champ hchamp.com Jessica Donohoe peacedividend.com Goopymart goopymart.com Susan McNeece Derek Powazek powazek.com Magdalen Powers foolsparadise.org Contributions are Š their creators.

Everything else Š Fray Quarterly.

Join us at www.fray.com.

Fray: Wild Life 4

Paris in the Toilet

By Lance Arthur

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Captain Bojangles The Most Awesomest Chicken Ever

By Ben Brown

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I Am So Not Kidding About This

By Heather Armstrong

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Cat Burglar

By Heather Champ

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The Cars in Heaven Have No Wheels

By Magdalen Powers

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Beauregard Granddaddy of All Cats

By Jessica Donohoe

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Saving Lizzy

By Derek Powazek

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Bunn, James Bunn

By Susan McNeece

Paris in the Toilet

By Lance Arthur

I

have pissed on my cat. There. I said it. But it wasn’t entirely my fault.

My cat, Paris, has a problem. Or maybe it’s not a problem, per se, but more of an interest. A special interest. In me. More specifically, in my bathroom activities.

Maybe this is normal cat behavior. No other cat I have ever been around has exhibited it, and I want to attribute it to two unrelated things: One, the door to my bathroom has no latch so it will not stay closed if someone really, really wants to come in, and two, she’s still just a kitten, more or less, doing kitten things like exploring her boundaries and showing curiosity about every fucking thing I am doing all the time unless she is asleep, in which case she wants to be asleep on me.

I know I haven’t yet actually mentioned her behavior.

That’s because it reflects on me in some ways that I’m not entirely happy with sharing, yet I think the amusement factor overshadows my own embarrassment concerning some of the things that have gone on in my bathroom between my cat and me.

If I begin to take a leisurely piss, she comes a-runnin’, because Paris likes to watch. It’s always the same. I will be standing at the toilet holding my johnson and wondering if, this time, I can get away with taking a piss without the cat. However, almost immediately after the stream hits the water, she is there.

Sometimes, she knows where I’m headed and she’ll sit between my feet, staring up at my willy, waiting for me to begin. I believe she thinks it’s like some piece of clothing I own, or perhaps a dangly toy she should be able to play with. So I get a little pee-shy, look down at her looking up at me with her innocent yellow eyes, and finally begin.

This is when she hops up onto the toilet rim for a better view. So now I have a cat-sized moving target that I’m actively trying to avoid hitting. I’ll lean forward, one hand against the wall behind the toilet and the other attempting to control the targeting aspects of taking a piss.

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The penis is not a well-designed tool. It does some things very well, but given a target to hit (or avoid) of anything smaller than a foot in diameter, a guy’s gonna splash. And the thing’s pliable, and the causeway sometimes thins out or opens up, and the stream’s suddenly going on the floor or the back of the toilet, up on the seat, on your own foot – honestly there’s just no telling what’s going to happen.

So I’m pissing, trying to avoid the cat, and one would think – cats being so clean and all, you know, taking a dump and burying it and being all fussy about where their food is, and licking themselves constantly – that walking into a stream of urine, let alone wanting to play with it, would not be something they’re apt to do.

But you’d be wrong.

First thing she does, Paris reaches out with her white, furry little paw, head tilted in such a cute way that you just want to take her picture as she’s reaching out to capture your piss. So I’m moving the stream, shifting my hips. I start laughing, which only makes control more difficult. I’m trying to tighten up and shut off the stream before she reaches it, I’m peeing around her leg and head – she’s moving now, shifting to the other side of the toilet, I have to pee, because holding it after you’ve started going is somewhat challenging. So I’m pissing again and she’s paused to observe – she’s leaning out farther and farther, reaching, I’m laughing and, all at once, I’m pissing on my cat’s head.

I know what my reaction would be. First of all, it would be an extremely rare occurrence that you’d find my head anywhere close to a place where there’s even the slightest chance that someone’s going to piss on it. If, through whatever bizarre circumstances I might be found in such a state, and someone actually pissed on me, I’d be upset.

Here’s what Paris did: Paris sort of shook her head like, Oh, what is this light, warm rain falling against my skull? and then she reached right out and did it again.

I’m hoping this is all a phase. I’m also looking forward to having guests over so they can have their own Paris target-shooting practice. Then I’ll know whether or not it is everyone’s toilet that she enjoys, or only my own. f

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Captain Bojangles The Most Awesomest Chicken Ever

By Ben Brown

T

wo things happened in August, 2002.

1. My wife of 11 months left me for a boy she met playing Internet counterterrorism video games, transforming me into a wretched mess in desperate need of human contact.

2. My younger brother Alex went to the county fair and came home with a tiny, peeping chicken.

The chick was so small and so adorable, my parents allowed Alex to keep the bird in a shoebox in his bedroom.

In the mornings, he would let Captain Bojangles, as the chicken came to be called, out of her box, and he would play games with her. They played soccer and tennis, and on days when the weather was bad, my brother taught the chicken how to play a variety of board games. Bojangles became excellent at Monopoly and Stratego, the latter a game I myself have never understood.

But eventually, as happens with all farm animals raised in shoeboxes in the suburban bedrooms of adolescent boys, Bojangles became too large to remain inside. When, one morning, my brother opened the box and was presented with a full-sized chicken sitting on a nest filled with delicious eggs, my parents were forced to make a difficult decision. What were they to do with this animal? My father turned to the internet, and discovered that there is a huge community of web-savvy suburban chicken farmers. He downloaded a set of instructions, and set about building Bojangles a beautiful new home in the backyard.

Very quickly, Captain Bojangles and my father became best of friends. In the morning, my father would descend to the backyard and let the chicken out of her coop. He would harvest the eggs she had laid the previous evening, and feast on their delicious contents. He would then return to the yard for a day of hard work in his vegetable garden. And while my father sweated, grunted, and tanned, Captain Bojangles worked alongside him, eating snails, slugs, and other garden pests. When they were done with the day’s work, my father would sit on the

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little bench in his garden, snacking on a cluster of vineripened grapes. Bojangles would sit on his lap, and my father would feed her grapes. She would coo, and so would he. When the grapes were gone, the chicken would hop to my father’s shoulder and peck at his eyes, which look to a chicken very much like vine-ripened grapes.

They were happy, and the world was at peace. For a while.

When my parents learned of my divorce, they decided that the only thing that would solve my bottomless grief was to fly me home for Thanksgiving.

“We’ll have a lovely meal,” my mother said. “And you will be able to cry your eyes out while your family watches in horror.”

“Sounds great,” I said. “And I sure could eat me some turkey.”

“Ah,” she said.

“What?” I said.

“Well, we’ve got this chicken, you know.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“And we really love this chicken. I mean, your father really loves this chicken.”

“So?,” I said.

“Well, we’ve, um, we’ve decided to have a vegetarian Thanksgiving this year.”

“But it’s a chicken,” I said.

“Oh, don’t be speciesist,” she said.

“It’ll be fine. Everyone likes the stuffing more than the turkey anyway.”

I disregarded my mother’s plain ignorance of the fact that what makes stuffing so good is that it is stuffed into the corpse of a dead animal. Thanksgiving without turkey is like Ebert without Siskel, or Sublime without Bradley Nowell: fat, hairy, and ultimately pointless.

It was with this in mind that I ventured out of my tear-soaked house on the day before Thanksgiving to find myself a hearty serving of Thanksgiving turkey. At 10am, I left the house and went to a barbecue restaurant. I ordered a three pounds of smoked turkey, an amount I considered to be totally reasonable. I consumed it in 15 minutes. My stomach became painfully bloated, and I found it difficult to move. To deal with the pain in my stomach and the pain in my heart, I consumed an elaborate concoction of substances, both legal and illegal, and got, as they say, very, very high. By the time I boarded the plane for my ride home to Washington, I felt like a million dollars.

This is the funny part: I discovered, when I arrived at my parents’ home, my entire family huddled around the dining-room table, puffy-eyed, snotty, and drooling.

“What happened?” I said.

“Bojangles!” cried my father.

“Oh, Bojangles!” cried my mother.

My brother put his hand on my shoulder and led me into the backyard. “Look,” he said, pointing at the chicken coop.

A jagged hole had been torn in the chicken wire.

Feathers hung from the sharp edges.

“Bojangles got out?” I said.

“Look closer,” he said.

The inside of the coop was a mess – hay and feathers and chicken feces strewn all about. It looked like an earthquake had struck my parents’ yard. In other words, it looked perfectly normal.

“LOOK!” screamed my brother, and he pushed me into the dirt, down onto my hands and knees.

From the ground,

I could see into the inner sanctum of Captain Bojangles’ bachelorette pad. And what I saw there was horrifying.

Bojangles’ decapitated body lay in a pool of blood. Her body had been ripped open, torn, chewed – I wouldn’t be surprised if portions had been sliced off and wrapped in Saran wrap, to make sandwiches later on.

“A fox!” said my brother. “A sly fox snuck into the yard and took our Captain Bojangles away from us!”

Hours later, when our tears of sorrow had dried, we went back into the house and into the dining room. My mother, always the strong one, was busy in the kitchen, preparing our Thanksgiving dinner.

My family sat around the dinner table, resigned to spend the evening together in mourning for our dear, departed friend. After an hour, my mother came out of the kitchen and told us that dinner was ready. We took our plates off the table and lined up to accept our portions of mashed potatoes, green-bean casserole, and meatless stuffing. But what we saw when we entered the kitchen changed our lives forever.

Sitting in the middle of the serving table was a huge, steaming bird. Garlic had been pressed into its flesh, and fragrant herbs had been slipped under its skin to flavor the meat. It was the most beautiful and delicious-looking Thanksgiving turkey I had ever seen.

“What is this?” said my father. “It doesn’t smell like tofu.”

“It’s a turkey,” said my mother.

“But!” said my father.

“But nothing,” she said. “If a fox can eat Captain Bojangles, we can eat a goddamned turkey.”

What my mother had discovered that morning is, though Bojangles was a loving and character-filled animal, and though the pain from the loss of the family’s most useful and non-destructive pet would be felt for a long time, poultry is delicious and healthy and a much better source of protein than tofu. For protein was what everyone would need to deal with me when I sobered up and remembered that my wife had left me for a video game. f

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I Am So Not Kidding About This

By Heather Armstrong

S

o there’s this dog in the neighborhood. And this dog is a purebred adult male who still sports a rather large set of testicles.

This dog is named after the lead in a comedy series from the sixties. Let’s call him Beaver Cleaver. His name isn’t really Beaver Cleaver, but for the purposes of this story, that’s what we’ll call him.

It’s important to note that we can’t refer to him as just Beaver, because the dog’s name is Beaver Cleaver. I have attempted to call the dog just Beaver on several occasions, and each time I was quickly scolded and corrected. The dog’s name is Beaver Cleaver.

As I mentioned, Beaver Cleaver still has his reproductive organs. Consequently, he has developed all the bad habits of a mature male dog, including but not limited to compulsively humping every dog he happens to pass on the sidewalk.

My dog recently happened to be one of those innocent and unsuspecting passersby, and while I’m fully aware that most dogs like to hump now and then, you have to understand that I once witnessed Beaver Cleaver humping air. Empty air.

So recently, while Beaver Cleaver was humping my dog, his owner sort of laughed, with a snorting, pig-like grunt and said, “Beaver Cleaver, stop it. I don’t understand why he does that,” as if he were completely unaware of the gigantic sac dangling between Beaver Cleaver’s legs.

And you know, that’s fine – I don’t mind that Beaver Cleaver and his owner are in complete psychopathic denial. But just then, just as Beaver Cleaver’s owner gave that piggish snort, my husband mistakenly thought that our dog was making the noise, and explained to me,

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to Beaver Cleaver, and to Beaver Cleaver’s owner (the one who had actually snorted), “Snort snort snort. He’s snorting!”

Now I know you’re thinking, Hey, innocent mistake.

Perhaps Beaver Cleaver’s owner sounded like my dog. And trust me, he did. The man snorted like a pig in heat. But a few minutes later, while Beaver Cleaver was approaching climax somewhere over my dog’s face, Beaver Cleaver’s owner gave out another laughing snort, again wondering aloud, “I don’t know why he does that.”

And again, while I looked on in complete abject horror, my lovely, my wonderful, my extraordinarily dramatic husband wrinkled up his nose, made his body into an upright monster-pig, and snorted as if his life depended on it, creating the most lifelike pig noise you’ve ever heard.

I think that it was during the fourth body-contorting snort that my husband realized, My God, the man made that noise, not our dog. The look I was giving him could only have confirmed his fears, because I was looking at him like, Dude, I know I married you and all, but snort one more time and I think I might throw up.

And then, well, then ... it all happened in slow motion, you know. Or it seemed like it happened in slow motion. It was like that part in Making the Video where they’re filming the “club scene,” and the colors are all supersaturated, all yellow and orange and burning gold, and in what seems like four minutes of film, the camera pans across two glistening women, slithering in rhythm, popping out of their hot pants. Except in this instance, the two glistening women are two panting dogs, one ejaculating hot canine semen in a rainbow arc above the other dog’s head. f

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10

Cat Burglar

By Heather Champ

P

rincess Dorothea Blanche Champ was named for the two sooty spots that marred her otherwise perfectly white pelt of feline fur. We called her Dot for short.

What I didn’t know was that white cats are typically deaf or mute. Dot’s mother had been mute, but Dot wasn’t. It wasn’t until her six-month checkup that I realized Dot was deaf. But by then she’d already gotten a taste of the great outdoors, and it seemed mean to keep her in, so out the door she went every day. Dot was fearless.

At one point in our journey together, we inhabited a dingy apartment above a store on Queen Street West, Toronto. The back door of our apartment opened out onto the roof of a bicycle shop, and if you walked out the edge and turned around, you could survey all that was Dot’s domain. I don’t know what drove her to it, but my beautiful white cat turned to a life of crime.

I think it began with a pair of yellow rubber gloves.

When I saw them casually discarded on the deck outside, I thought they’d fallen from one of the apartments above or beside us, perhaps carried on a strong gust of wind. I didn’t think much of it until the socks started showing up.

Singles, pairs, grey, black, red – every morning there were more socks on the deck. It became clear that our Dot was the culprit. What do you do with a growing collection of stolen socks? We could poster the neighbourhood: “Are you missing socks? Do you live on the south side of Queen Street and leave your windows open? If so, then please call 555-1212 and ask for Dot, Cat Burglar Extraordinaire.”

I caught her red-pawed one day. Randy had left his upstairs window cracked just a little too wide. When one balled pair of expensive hiking socks appeared on the deck, I went out to investigate, only to find Dot soaring through his window with another sock ball in her mouth.

Her purloined pile grew; when she exhausted his supply of clean socks, I gathered them into a shopping bag and hung them from his door handle with a note attached.

Dear Randy,

Dot has broken in to your apartment and stolen your socks.

We’re very sorry,

–Heather and Dot

Randy must have spread the word because, after that, Dot returned from the hunt empty-handed more often than not. She went on to have many adventures, despite her lack of hearing, and fell asleep forever in my arms years later in New York. f

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The Cars in Heaven Have No Wheels

By Magdalen Powers

B

uford was not as dumb as his name might imply. Well, sometimes he wasn’t, anyway.

For a while, he ran with a bad crowd – the dogs from down the road that took to killing the sheep across the river. We knew that our dog was just scavenging what the others had killed; we also knew the sheeps’ owner would have every reason and right to rid himself of any canine scourge, even ours.

So we started chaining Buford up when we weren’t home. It was a long chain, but still: cooped up all day in the driveway with only three trees to play with. And one to play in. It was nearly dead, with a hollow at the top of the trunk that filled with rain on a regular basis. Buford would sometimes scramble up, to stand and drool amid the few large, lopped-off branches before skittering down to wave his long feathery tail at us as we cheered.

That beautiful tail, longer than my forearm is now. At least it was for awhile. One bright fall day as my stepdad was splitting firewood on the porch, Buford came to watch. Chop went the ax. Wag went the tail. Then a chop and a wag and a FLOP. Half the tail laid on the porch. The dog didn’t make a sound, only looked up beseechingly, trying to figure out how he’d deserved this terrible blow.

Then there was the kitten. Those days, we always had around a dozen barn cats, in various stages of ferality and disrepair. One litter contained an addled, fragile, runty thing that we knew wouldn’t last a week with its brethren.

Evidently Buford thought so, too. I can’t remember the

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kitten’s name, or if it even had one, but it did have a fine foster parent. They were always curled up together or playing somewhere. Their favorite game was catch: Buford often carried the kitten around in his mouth – the little thing lying luxuriously across the dog’s bottom jaw; then he’d stop and flip it gently into the air and catch it again.

The kitten, dizzy as it got, seemed to love it. Then Buford would set it down, amazingly gently for such a big dog.

Once back on land, the kitten would dance drunkenly for a moment before pressing up against Buford’s leg in mewly affection.

One day, a game of catch went wrong. The kitten’s neck was broken; it died in an instant. Buford laid it softly underneath the tree where we’d been playing. He howled and cried, in that awful primeval way that makes the hairs on your arms stand up. We buried the kitten under the tree, where Buford sat for weeks, every day, rain or shine.

Eventually he recovered, and put new energy into another favorite game: chasing our truck. The house sat far back from the highway, on the trailing edge of a blind corner. The driveway was long enough to have its own streetlight. In the winter, the snow would fall and Buford would jump and twist and bite at the snowflakes’ shadows.

After a couple of years at our rented farmlet, we moved back to town. Buford stayed with an uncle in the country, where his car-chasing habit finally did him in.

But there is a dog heaven, isn’t there? For certain kittens, too. f

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Beauregard Granddaddy of All Cats

By Jessica Donohoe

B

eauregard is the Granddaddy of All Cats.

East Bay cats, anyway. He used to be the Daddy of Them All in comportment and, to a certain extent, in fact: For a while, there was even a little club of Beauregardkitten-owners.

My last year in college, I had a studio upstairs from a band. The neighbors were on their big world tour when I moved in and, aside from the old cars that filled up what had once been the front yard, there were no clues as to why my place rented for so little. It was when they came home that the evidence started to mount: little holes in the furniture, in the cereal boxes, in my clothes. The strings of all my beaded necklaces were chewed through. It seems that all the rats and all the roaches that had squatted in the six-bedroom flat downstairs moved into my apartment, and my reptile menagerie was no match for them. It was that bad.

I patched and I pounded. I cornered and I cajoled.

Nothing worked. I needed a mouser.

A coworker lived a few towns over, in a house that was the locus of much feral kitty action. Several families of cats ate from the bowls left out on the porch, and some left gifts in return. I went over one moonlit night and waited in the center of the manicured lawn. I felt like the virgin in the forest, waiting for the unicorn.

One by one, the kitties came. They sniffed, snuggled, and slunk off again, until finally the alpha male deigned to meet with me. He was six years old, and an enormous cat: 20 pounds in his stocking feet. The household had called him ‘Bo, a.k.a. Rambo, for his fiercely muscled physique and his clearly virile nature. Of course he was much too dignified for that. That name may have worked in the suburbs, but he was moving to Berkeley. So he became Beauregard, after a favorite friend’s favorite alias.

Beauregard T. Rambunctious sat in my lap and purred, then looked me in the eye. He was ready to go home.

He climbed onto my shoulders and nestled there for

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the whole long ride home (and has never since seen the inside of a car, of his own volition). He kept very busy, killing rats and scaring roaches, and even eradicating a drunken neighbor or two from our doorstep. When he’d cleaned up the house, he patrolled the neighborhood like a furry vigilante.

A box of Burmese kittens turned up on the porch one day. They’d been a gift for the girls downstairs, who were too high to deal with them, but gosh weren’t they cute.

The box sat out there all day, and all the next morning. I wasn’t sure what to do beyond food, water and blankets, but Beauregard knew: He brought them inside, one by one, and settled them on the sofa. He fostered them through their first several months, and taught them good kitty etiquette: how to eat and drink in turn, how to use the litter box, how and where to sleep. If he caught one on the dining table, he would bat it off, firmly but gently. The only time he ever really growled was when they broke into the butter dish. He was a good dad, in spite of his new reproductive status.

One day, as I sat on the sofa (in the same spot where the kittens slept), he started a game of chase with my very long braids. It was fun, but I was suiting up for a croquet game, so I pulled my braids over onto my shoulder.

The chase was on. Beauregard leapt over the back of the couch and landed in my lap. Where my hands were situated. Which was not what he had expected. He kicked off hard with his hind paws, quickly realizing his mistake.

There was an enormous gash in my hand and an abysmal puncture through a vein in my wrist. I’d never seen my own blood gush quite like that, in rhythmic spurts. This was what I got for bending to the pressure of my croquet peers: my regulation white blouse was now pretty much red.

Beauregard mewled from under the table. He’d hurt his mommy.

The emergency room doctor asked if I’d been mauled by a big cat.

“Well,” I said, “pretty much. But he felt really bad about it.”

That was ten years ago. There are still marks, but they’re pretty and dainty, almost like jewelry. I gazed at them the other day, on what would be either Beauregard’s third night in the kitty hospital or his first in kitty heaven.

I was never so happy to bear a scar as I was that night.

Maybe he felt my anguish, and maybe even my stumbling thoughts: What will I do? Should I get a new cat right away? There are so many great cats out there that need homes; some of his foster cats, and maybe even his own progeny, still roam the streets alone. But he could never be replaced.

We called the vet early the next morning, the day we were to Make the Call, and asked if we could just come and

hold him while we waited for his final test results. “I think he can go home,” she said. “He’s eating and drinking again, and weighs an almost-lifelike six pounds.” We dropped everything and brought him home.

An old shepherd named Sophie left her humans and trotted up our stairs yesterday. She bumped the front door with her nose and whimpered, then bumped it again until I came and opened it for her. She gave me a liquid-eyed look, as if to ask Can I help?

I squatted down and let her sniff my hand. “No, sweetie, you can’t come in. We have a very sick cat inside.”

Sophie licked my hand, then turned and walked away.

He can’t make the rounds as the Daddy of Them All, so instead Beauregard receives visitors. This seems befitting for the Granddaddy of All Cats. f

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Saving Lizzy

By Derek Powazek

I

t’s 1981, and I’m on my way to Mountain View Elementary, a string of one-story brick buildings in Southern California that is not in view of any mountain thanks to the blanket of smog. I’m carrying a Star Wars lunchbox that contains a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a cookie.

My name is written on the X-Wing spaceship on the front of the lunchbox in my mother’s handwriting. I’m still mad at her for defacing it.

I am 8 years old, and I’m about to get my first pet.

After school, I’m picked up by an older kid. He’s got a van with beige shag carpeting on the inside. In the corner is a half-constructed disco ball, the Styrofoam still showing in the southern hemisphere. It looks like the Death Star. I picture myself in the X-Wing, flying into it. My X-Wing, signed by my mother. All the other rebel pilots fly by, laughing at me. I’m an outcast even in my fantasies.

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The van fills with a gaggle of other kids, and we’re trucked a dozen blocks away to our after-school latchkey location. I think it was a church or some kind of activity hall. All I remember is it had a large, barren backyard.

That’s where I met Lizzy.

I was back by the fence, trying to be invisible, when I heard the commotion. The bigger kids, the bullies, had a laundry basket turned upside-down. Two were holding it down and a third was on his hands and knees, peering in. They were all whooping like howler monkeys. My curiosity drew me closer.

Inside the laundry basket, flitting back and fourth, was a small lizard. The bullies towered over it, lifting the basket and grasping for it from all sides, screaming. In the back of my mind, I could hear the echoes of my parents fighting, screaming at each other when they thought I was asleep, and me, trapped in my room, pacing back and forth, their voices reaching in at me.

The lizard was freaking out. The lizard was in danger.

I had to save the lizard.

In the fantasy, I’m flying that X-Wing, and the Death Star’s laser turrets fire at me from all sides. I turn off my targeting computer and speed past all the other rebel ships. I’m going so fast, the hull of my ship glows red. My mother’s handwriting burns away.

One of the bully kids has the lizard now. His smile is evil. He takes the lizard by the tail and swings it like a lasso over his head. He’s having some sort of cowboy waking dream. Bullies always dream of cowboys.

All at once the lizard separates from its own tail – a natural defense against the slow-witted, but drastic nonetheless. The bully screams like a girl and drops the tail to the ground; the bullies gather around it in a circle, watching it twitch.

What they don’t know is that this is all part of the plan. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution has led to this moment, where the predator is distracted by the dying tail as the lizard escapes. I know this because Grandma got me a subscription to National Geographic.

The lizard, free from its tail and its predator, flies across the backyard, hits the ground in a tiny explosion of dust, and slides to a stop at my feet. This poor lizard with fighting parents. I reach down on instinct and grab the lizard and pick him up. He’s still alive – I can feel his tiny hyperventilating heart. I look him in the eye and feel this strange, intense kinship.

In my fantasy, I fire the torpedoes into the hole and fly away from the Death Star at light speed. It explodes in a fiery burst. All that anger, all those bullies, all the fighting parents in the world explode. Gone.

I put the lizard in my pocket before the bullies notice, and keep him there when my mom picks me up and takes me home. I tell my parents about him that night, about how I saved him from the bullies, and beg to keep him.

He lives in the garage in a fish tank for a few months. I go with my dad to the pet store on Gary Avenue every week and buy grubs to feed him. He bites my hand when I reach into the tank. He’s still so angry, and I can’t blame him one bit.

Lizzy the lizard dies after a few months, and I bury him in the backyard. I dig a hole in the wilting vegetable garden – the one my dad and I started before the fights got so bad – and I put a stick in the ground to mark the spot.

After a few months, all the corn plants are gone, and that stick is the only thing remaining upright.

Dad had moved out by then, and my parents got divorced the next year. And I was still waiting for someone to save me. f

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Bunn, James Bunn

By Susan McNeece

I

was living alone in Los Angeles and decided I wanted a pet to keep me company. I’m allergic to cats and didn’t have space for a dog in my apartment, so I decided to get a rabbit. We had a rabbit in my family when I was growing up, so I knew what to expect and how to care for one.

I also knew to get a female because they make better pets.

I went to a pet store in the Beverly Center and found they had several dwarf rabbits. I asked a store employee to help me find all the girls, so I’d know which ones to choose from. I knew rabbits are hard to sex when they’re little because their genitalia is hidden and not fully formed, but surely a teenager with a weekend job at the mall would be able to sex this rabbit for me. I brought the rabbit home and couldn’t think of a name for it for the life of me, so I figured I would just call it “Bunn” until I could think of a better name.

Eventually I left LA to move north to the Bay Area to live with my boyfriend and his 70 pound dog – a Chow/ Lab mix named Kaya. We found a house to rent in the Oakland hills with no traffic, lots of trees, decks, and a huge yard. I figured Bunn deserved a natural life in the wild, even though I was fearful of the coyotes, owls, and other predators in the hills, so Bunn could come and go in and out of the house as she pleased.

One day my boyfriend came into the room and said,

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“Uh, I think Bunn has reached puberty.” I had no idea what he was talking about until I looked down and saw Bunn going to town on his ankle. Bunn wanted to have sex with anything and everything that moved, every second of every day. She would hide behind furniture and wait for us to walk through the room and dive-bomb our feet. Sometimes this would happen in midstep, and I’d accidentally drop-kick Bunn across the room, but she’d always come running back for more.

I found a nice stuffed animal for Bunn to keep her occupied, but it just laid there motionless and didn’t keep Bunn’s attention. It was about this time that Bunn took a look at the dog and decided she was going to make Kaya her bitch. The dog came running into the room yelping in fear, with Bunn attached to her thigh by his teeth, flapping like a windsock as she ran.

This was getting out of hand.

When you have to personally escort your dog to do her business, in order to keep your rabbit from sexually assaulting her, you know it’s time to do something. We went to the SPCA and told the receptionist that I thought Bunn was a girl, but she might be a boy, and either way the rabbit needed to be spayed or neutered or something to fix the problem.

The woman picked up the rabbit and said, “Honey, I don’t know how you didn’t know this was a boy.” She turned Bunn around and my jaw dropped. Bunn had the

biggest balls I had ever seen. The rabbit only weighed about six pounds and his balls must have weighed two.

The receptionist then asked for his name to fill out paper work. I said, “Bunn.”

“Bond?”

“No, Bunn. James Bunn.”

After Bunn got his nip and tuck, he settled down for a while, but he had already had a taste of freedom. He started crawling under the fence into the neighbor’s yards.

One neighbor stopped me out of concern to tell me that Bunn had been in her yard. She didn’t mind him being there, but she was concerned that her dog might hurt him. I told her I would try to keep him out, but he’s such a small rabbit and there’s too much fence for him to dig under.

Pretty soon I heard the yelping of a dog again. I immediately looked around for Kaya, but she was right there at the end of the couch. I ran out back and looked up to the neighbor’s house, and all I could see in the

silhouette of the porch light was this large Labrador running up and down the stairs with this little rabbit chasing him. Bunn got the dog cornered and was about to have his way with it, when I looked up and noticed that the couple who owned the house were standing inside the sliding-glass door holding each other, with looks of absolute shock and horror on their faces.

Bunn’s adventures into the wild became longer and longer. I always wished I could have found some way to rig up a “Bunn cam” on him, so I could follow Bunn on his adventures and see what kind of trouble he was getting into. For a while I could tell how far away he was by the sound of a dog yelping in the distance: “Sounds like Bunn is about two blocks away today.”

Then one day Bunn left and never came back. I’ll never know if something got him or if he just decided to move on in his quest to get some. Whenever I hear the sound of a dog yelping, though, I always think to myself, There goes Bunn. James Bunn. f

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