My parents were like . . . shit.
They had rigid brains. Their point of comparison was my brother Dorkass (not his given name), a developmental psychologist who wowed them with retroactive criticism of their parenting. When he stopped by for holidays, they couldn’t really imagine their baby girl stalking grimy slimy lemon-limeys.
They couldn’t imagine me, sweatsoaked in the jungle, rocking the natives’ warpaint. The spearmint scent of a hunt unraveling among the brush like a ball of yarn, threaded through my nostrils like a septum piercing. Me, baby girl, peeling back a venetian frond and seeing—for the first and only time—a cryobaboon.
Can you imagine? My parents couldn’t. They would’ve lost their baby boomer minds to see its albino coat. Its icicle whiskers. The soil of the rainforest, thin and loose, tundrifying beneath his cryobutt. Frostbitten fruit all around. And me, seven-foot stapler locked, materializing from the foliage. Flipping my weapon to its blunt side and meeting his gaze. Bashing unabashedly at his shrunken, vulnerable testes, as he breathes his last chilly puffs.
They had a much easier time imagining Dorkass, feet on the dining room table, elucidating why he and I would’ve been better off with two daddys. Just to shift the conversation, I would try to say something like, “You know, Mom, there’s no such thing as a small monster. I once wound up astride a desert. . . ” But they would only roll their eyes and ask when I was going to run out of staples.
To date I’ve corpsed seventeen colossi, cretaceonids, and chthonianisms. You can always tell they’re mine by the lethal, crooked ladders running up their sides.
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| "Kitty" by Nicholas Shea |
My first job was for my landlord, and it was bad. Though not “rats in the basement” bad. We had this mangy-ass stray cat lurking around the property because someone kept slipping it lunchmeat. He paid me thirty dollars to wait in the parking lot and bag it up. This was before I stole my office’s mega-stapler.
I spent the afternoon in the shade of the building, reading a newspaper and counting bricks. When I saw the cat on the fire escape, I went up after it with a can of tuna, which had no pull-tab. I had to beat it open on the handrail. The landlord impounded the cat, and now I think it’s dead. But it wasn’t me that killed it.
My first real job was for a small suburb at the edge of rurality. I told my parents that I was going to spend the weekend with a friend, but this friend lived at the foot of a volcano, and if they didn’t hear back from me ever again then that was why.
