Little Weirds(5)

Here is the dog’s life in a very short description: I went to the orthodontist, the orthodontist said I didn’t have any canine teeth, my mother said to x-ray more of my head. They found the teeth up there in my head. I had braces for seven years, along with a terrible speech impediment and ugly face, accompanied by horniness that had started way before that and also never went away. At this time, we were allowed to get a hypoallergenic dog. We weren’t allowed to take the dog upstairs. The dog was undisciplined because we only wanted to teach him how to hug, and he and my father were at war for thirteen years until the dog couldn’t see or walk, and my father took good care of him and they became unlikely companions with a true bond. The dog’s butthole fell out while he was pooping and they got an operation to put it back in. The butthole fell out again and because the dog was blind and his butthole was ruined and he was suffering from tumors and old age, they let the dog pass on.

But back in the time when he is still alive, my mother probably walks him up there and finds a giant dead Deer on the tennis court. Its eyes are open and it’s just a huge mess. She has to call the animal control lady to come, the same lady who came for the rabid raccoons lolling on the lawn, and the coyote who pranked us by streaking through the yard. When the lady gets there, it’s either this or that: This is that we cut a hole in the chain-link fence. That is that we cut the foot off of the dead Deer, saving the fence. Well, the Deer was already a goner, says my mother. “SO YOU CUT OFF THE FOOT?!” I scream. “Jen, we had to.”

And in the aftertaste of what my mother says, I know she means, “Well, you were the person who planted the tempting grapes and then moved to New York and didn’t get a home phone and makes us call you on your cell phone, which is only supposed to be for emergencies. You did that.”

There is a feeling that by doing the natural thing of growing up, I have carelessly waltzed away from a mess. It feels that I have disowned my tribe by choosing to believe that the world is full of creatures and spirits rather than predators and ghosts.

When I go home, I sit and talk with my parents for hours. I love my parents. But now, especially now, when I go there, I hold in my pee and let out my sweat and squeeze my eyes tight because I am afraid of a ghost that is mine. It reflects my will to be wild, my inclination to plant roots, my hunger for treats, my fear that straying too far from the pack is what I must do but perhaps at a large cost.

When I wake up in the night, I know what I am scared to see: It is a three-footed deer, staring at me. Its eyes are eyes and then its eyes are grapes.





Restaurant

Hello, I am a woman on a blue and green sphere that has dollops and doinks of mountains all over it. Some of the mountains on my cosmic sphere splooge out thick liquid fire spurts that run downhill and cool and turn into vacation destinations after a few thousand years. I am a woman living on a planet that has noodle-shaped guys squiggling silently in the soil and four-legged mammal-kings with hammer feet, or horns on their heads, or coats covered in spots and stripes, and my planet has live feathered beaky skeletons flying through the environment, and big heavy creatures who are tusked and trunked and have sad long memories and wash their bodies with cold mud puddles and know who their babies are.

There are large deadly cats watching everything in the dark, sneaking through the fanned-out ferns. There are delighted pigs and gossiping geese and dogs that sit with their mouths open so that they can cool off after running around. There are arrows of extra electricity ripping through the air, loud drum noises in the sky when two opposite temperatures collide, deep wide dents filled with water and populated by animals that have scales or blowholes or no eyes or live in shells that look like tiny hard purses made out of little plates. There are white puffs floating in the air here; they float high above my house. The puffs turn into wet water-bloops and fall down and turn my hair from straight to curly. The water-bloops also make the flowers open up, they turn dust to mudslides, they intercept a sunbeam and make an arch that you can’t touch because it is made of swoops of colored light.

Hello? Tonight I am going to the Restaurant, where I will eat a killed and burned-up bird and drink old purple grapes and also I will gulp clear water that used to have bugs and poop and poison in it but has been cleaned up so that it doesn’t make us blow chunks. Oh Joy I am going to the Restaurant and I am just drooling at the thought of the killed and burned bird and I want to sip the grape gunk and so I put skin-colored paint all over my face and I dab pasty red pigment on my lips and swish peachy powder on my cheeks and I take a pencil and draw an eye-shaped line around my eye so that people know where my blinkers are.

And then I take a little brush and I slick black paint over each eyelash and then I take a hot metal stick and wind my head-hairs around it so that everything is spirals. I stuff each breast into a cotton cup-bag, and the bags are sewn together as a pair of bags for boobs, and the pair of boob-bags is held on by straps because I guess this helps the boobs from not floating past the mountains and white puffs and into outer space?

This is the right way to appear if you want to go out of the house and go to the Restaurant and not have to stay home and be alone forever, which, on Earth, is bad.

Inside the cotton-cups my nipples press like bright coins against the boundaries of the bags because they want to be out and on a beach and not in bags, and they would gladly pay to be set free, but I can’t give any money toward freedom because my money is for the Restaurant tonight.