A Piece of Personal Fiction: ‘On the Care and Feeding of Animals’

A S I MENTIONED before, fiction-writing is both a hobby and a passion of mine. And so for the start of this new year I am offering a piece of worn fiction. It is a story that I have drafted in many versions over the past three years. And while it is still a work in progress (as fiction always seems to be), “On the Care and Feeding of Animals” is a story about sisters in wintertime, and thereby perfect for a TSP January.

On the Care and Feeding of Animals

F IONA HAD WATCHED their cat, Charming, pace in front of the bathroom, pawing at the uneven crack between the floor and the heavy wooden door, for almost an entire episode of I Dream of Jeannie before she called Betsy upstairs.  The sisters pushed open the door slowly, and Charming sprung through the crack when the door was only a few inches ajar. Fiona said that cats can fit through any space as wide as their whiskers.  Betsy said she already knew that, thinking of the time they pinned Charming to the kitchen floor and measured his whiskers with a wooden ruler so they could knock out a hole for him in the mudroom. She remembered how he had sprung up when they let go, like a nervous cricket. He was springing the same way, from the tile floor to the metal trash bin next to the toilet. Fiona shrieked that there was something in there. Betsy thought she was right, but still glared at her.

Fiona knows. She knows when Lola wants to come in before she barks or comes to the porch. And she knew that their neighbor, Nilla, was pregnant with a dead baby before their mother even told them. Their mother’s friend Lanie Lovitt, who smoked Virginia Slims and worked at Price Chopper, sent a letter to The Montel Williams Show telling him about Fiona. Betsy thought Fiona knew because she swam around in their mother’s belly for almost three months with a dead baby. Betsy never saw the brother but she heard the doctor say that he was born with Fiona’s leg wrapped around his throat.

She yanked Charming’s head from the trashcan and threw him to the floor. Fiona crouched down over her naked knees and hissed in his face to shoo. When Betsy looked in the bin she saw the mouse. There were two crumpled tissues and a tampon applicator on the opposite side of the bin massed together in almost the same form as the quivering gray fur.  She took hold of the body and lifted it to Fiona’s eye level. The mouse’s broken back legs dangled from Betsy’s fist. She felt her palm grow sticky beneath the soft fur and she yelled that the little twerp had peed on her. Fiona wasn’t sure if it was an accident, but Betsy opened her fist. And for what was the probably the second time that day, the mouse tumbled through the air and landed with a muffled thud.  Charming lunged from the doorframe, where he had been sulking and flashing his fishbone-skinny teeth. Fiona had to get on the floor to bat him off.  Betsy stepped over Fiona and the mouse. She scooped up the cat, and walked off down the hallway.

S OUND MOVES with ease through the little rooms of old New England farmhouses, and Fiona could hear the musical twitch of Samantha Stevens’ nose from her mother’s closet, where she was pulling the empty tank from Betsy’s late goldfish off the shelf.  She went up and down the stairs with scissors and then a tissue box. Betsy watched Fiona without speaking, Endora’s orange cloud reflecting in her eyes. Fiona removed the tissues one by one and crumpled them in the fish tank. She cut up the empty box and laid the shreds on the bed of tissues. She remembered the gerbils in Mrs. Pendleton’s classroom liked to chew on the cardboard bones of paper towel and toilet paper rolls. The refrigerator was sparsely furnished, but she managed to salvage some pieces of lettuce and slice of avocado. She paid Betsy 50 cents for the cherry Fruit Roll-Ups that she knew were stashed in her underwear drawer.

They both stood at the kitchen table while Fiona installed the mouse in its new home. The padding of tissue sunk beneath the animal’s weight. Betsy asked why it wasn’t eating anything. Fiona rolled up her sleeve, and moved the little body closer to the fruity pink ribbon. Betsy said that wasn’t enough, and that mice don’t even eat Fruit Roll-Ups. She grabbed the mouse and pushed it headlong into the avocado slice. Its snout left an indent in the soft green after Betsy pulled her hand away. It reminded Fiona of the masks they had made in preschool, and how she had to put plastic straws up her noses so she could keep breathing.

As the winter sun retreated, the mouse huddled between the family’s distorted shadows—irregular forms spread on the hills and valleys of crumpled tissues and jagged cardboard squares.

Fiona recognized the synchronized snapping from the chattering TV as the intro to The Addams Family. She followed Betsy into the living room, leaving her Playmobile family with the rodent charge, their plastic faces and geometric hairdos pressed up against the thick glass. As the winter sun retreated, the mouse huddled between the family’s distorted shadows—irregular forms spread on the hills and valleys of crumpled tissues and jagged cardboard squares. But the next morning the mouse was hard and cold to the touch. The family looked on, their smiling expressions unchanged since the night before. Fiona pushed them off the table, and they scattered on the wooden floor. She said fuck, hoping Betsy would hear.

T HE GROUND WAS too hard to dig, so their mother agreed to leave the mouse in the freezer until spring, when Fiona would bury it by the swing set with a plastic beach shovel. The mouse hadn’t been wrapped up for a week before she padded over to the sofa and told Betsy that there was a bird trapped in the bathroom. Betsy said that was stupid, but she went upstairs to look anyway. They waited by the toilet, ears pricked for the chirping sound that Fiona insisted she had heard. She was wearing a long turtleneck without pants, and she kept gripping and releasing her bare toes on the cool tiles. When they finally heard it, Betsy was sitting cross-legged on the toilet, telling Fiona a story she heard on the news about a mall Santa who stole children. The noise sounded like their rusty silverware drawer, or like a squeaky wheel on the food tray that their mother pushed around at work. Not really like a bird, but like a mechanical imitation of a bird. Fiona put her ear up to the white cabinet that held towels and cotton balls. She said that the bird must be trapped behind it. They both knew their mother’s shadow would pass through the dim hallway on her way to bed and not before, so they stacked the towels on the toilet and leaned hard into the cabinet, pushing it away from the wall.

When they saw the mess of string and paper scraps gathered at the baseboard in a nest, Betsy looked at Fiona and called her a dummy for thinking a bird could be trapped behind a cabinet. Among the rubble were the bodies of nine mice, their mouths opening and closing. They were the size of fingerprints with pink translucent skin that revealed webs of veins and knots of organs. Fiona stumbled backwards, and hit her heels on the base of the toilet before she turned to the sink. She opened the third drawer, where their mother kept hairbrushes and hair ties, a blow dryer and a little basket of nail polish. A Zip-lock sandwich bag held scrunchies. She dumped them on the edge of the sink, letting some fall into the basin, and then carried the empty bag toward the nest.

The mice were helpless between Betsy’s fingers—like soft cranberries that could be popped with a quick pinch.  She could feel their bodies throbbing to stay alive, resisting the pressure of her thumb and middle finger. The sisters dropped all nine of them into the bag. Fiona held up the bag while Betsy squeezed the air out, pushing the bodies down to the lower left corner. Soon they would stop writhing.  After Fiona sealed the bag, they studied the huddled mass for almost four minutes, waiting for it to be still.

Thanks to painter Amanda Blake for the art used here of Lily and Jane at Sea. A show of Amanda’s work is not to be missed in the TSP Galleries.

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