FICTION
The Families of Missing Animals
by Kama Falzoi
The two of you come across a bunny in a field.
But wait, there is something wrong. A dark spot, a moving spot, near its hindquarters. It looks up at the two of you, pauses its consumption of newly mowed grass. It is summer. The sun is hot on your shoulders. He has taken his shirt off, like he used to do back then. His shoulders are covered in freckles, in clumps of freckles. You move as one, his hand on your arm, breathing and stepping slowly and quietly so as not to scare her off. She looks steadily at you with soft black eyes and her nose twitches. You are aware of cars passing. Your movements are low and soft. You both suck in a breath when you see. There are flies feeding on her wound. She pulls at the clover even with you so close. She has to know, the way you know. You insist he run back and get a box, though he wants everything to happen naturally. Just before you bring the box down over her, she darts. Into a thick forest of brambles you can't penetrate. You watch for her to come out, watch for almost an hour after he leaves with his shirt slung over his shoulder. Then you walk home with the empty box.
Something small runs in front of your car and thump thump. You are drunk. You cry for an hour.
In the backyard, in what your mother considered a garden, you practiced, kicked the soccer ball and the garage brick sent it back, right through that garden where nothing ever grew but there was plenty planted. Hamsters, gerbils, a few beloved cats with makeshift grave markers, two twigs crossed and held with twine. You once dug up bones, unintentionally. Tiny bones. You asked your mother who were the Adam and Eve of animals? and she said she didn't know. That was back when you believed.
When you turned thirty you took a trip. It was the trip your mother always wanted to take, to the Grand Canyon, where your father had taken her ashes ten years ago and made a marker out of red stones spelling out her name and the year of her death. He took pictures of it, blew them up and framed them and gave one to you. The drive took five days. You were more by yourself than ever. Kansas got you thinking about pills, Colorado made you forget about them. While you were there you forced thoughts like How magnificent, How truly old, What a beautiful wonder of the earth, turning your face up to the sky and opening your arms, trying to fade into the great expanse before you. Really you felt no different. Nothing opened up inside you. Your mother felt farther away than ever, because she was, and each moment growing farther. It was hot there. You pitied the donkeys and pack mules hired to carry tourists and their baggage up rocky paths. That is why you walked. Your water ran out and you were lightheaded. One of the pack mules, grey with huge black watering eyes and heavy with gear, stopped so its rider could assess your condition. He helped you onto the animal's back.
In the photographs your father took, the nines are backwards.
But you don't point it out.
Something goes bang in the night. You look at your cats. Their ears are tilted forward and they are staring toward the door. You have been living alone for four weeks.
Your apartment is covered in cat hair. You are less determined to get rid of the problem and more determined to ignore it. The first sip of wine is the only clear memory of the night you end up crying on your living room floor and looking up psychotherapists in the phone book. It is a full six months before you have nothing to say on her couch. You emerge from the building like a superhero. You have been cured of it, but are not rid of it. It will remain comfortably nested somewhere between your heart and your stomach, and will make itself known from time to time.
You wake one night to the rasp of his breathing. It is light enough that you can see the freckles on his shoulders. Those freckles are something you think you are going to miss.
Kama Falzoi lives in upstate New York and works as a technical writer and trainer at a publishing company. Her stories have recently appeared in Pindeldyboz and Identity Theory.