Bird

I don't encounter a lot of wildlife at work. Once a friendly puppy bounded into my office, but it was promptly removed. Another time I caught a giant venomous spider in a plastic cup - perhaps a suitcase stowaway originating from the American west - and set it free in our parking lot. Last night was one of those rare brushes with the animal kingdom. The lull in incoming phone calls was interrupted by a bird thumping against our picture window.

My co-worker Heather and I leaned close to the glass to get a good look, hoping it was not dead. The bird tumbled back onto the concrete, its wings flung awkwardly to the side and the wind knocked out of its lungs. Soon it began twitching, its chest heaving violently.

"That's it. The bird's fizzling out," I said sadly.

Our picture window is tinted like a pair of FBI sunglasses. During the day, you can't see in from outside unless you are pressing your nose to the glass. Heather speculated that the bird might have been somehow impaired before the impact. Such a collision seemed otherwise unlikely.

"Maybe it was having a stroke as it was flying by the window," she suggested.

"Or a brain aneurysm," I offered. "It probably has all sorts of neurological damage now."

I kept trying to envision the bird straightening out and flying away like it was nothing. In reality, the quick little pulses of the bird's chest did not make the situation look more hopeful. Now its tail was pointing upwards, it seemed to be curling into a ball. It's gauzy bird-soul was rising to the deck of the ship, trying to balloon its way to the avian heavens.

"I think it's having a seizure," I said. "What can we do? Should I give it CPR? What if it has a family?"

I imagined how mouth-to-beak resuscitation might work and what sort of diseases I might get from performing it on an accident victim. I considered going on break and bringing it breadcrumbs from the kitchen. Maybe the resulting sugar rush would give it the energy it needed to resume flight. I felt so helpless just watching and not taking action.

I left the office for a few minutes to use the copy machine. When I returned, the had bird flipped upright, looking tired, slouched, and hung-over. My hopes were skyrocketing.

"I wish it would just fly away like nothing happened," Heather said. We were still hovering at the window with our eyes on the concrete ledge below. I kept picturing the bird fluttering into a nearby tree. Suddenly, the bird straightened its posture, took a few hops in place, and flew into the bushes.

Penelope

I wanted a broken cat. A cat with a clubfoot or an eye patch or an oxygen tank, neglected by kitten-hungry shelter-goers for the furry youngsters of YouTube fantasies. And not for entirely selfish reasons: Olive needed a friend. Olive, uncommonly extroverted and perpetually bored, was adjusting rather badly to my full-time work schedule. Her kitten energy was pent up and all of her human playmates were pre-occupied with petty human things. Rolling little feather toys across the kitchen didn't tucker her out the way it used to and no walk on the cat leash was long enough to settle her yearnings. She took her frustration out on exposed hands and ankles.

Dave and I decided the time had come for us to find another cat, but not just any cat. We needed a playful cat that would entertain irritable Olive when we weren't home. A cat that is gentle with humans but catty enough to resist any bullying from our tuxedoed beast. And this cat would also preferable have hemophilia or an eye patch. If I had a beautiful rainbow of foster children, at least one of them would have an eye patch.

We started browsing cats the day I failed my road test. Dave thought that rooms full of cats would cheer me up. We went to Pets Alive in Elmsford, NY that appeared to be in the middle of a land development project. The area around the shelter was a wasteland of bulldozers and mud with the occasional out-of-place jogger with a pit bull.

In the elderly cat room, tubby cats rubbed up against our shins and shed their dead fur on our pants. I knelt down to pet a black cat and he answered with a roundhouse kick to my hand.

“Some people are put off by that,” said the volunteer who was giving us the tour. “But he’s a really sweet cat.”

We explained that Olive plays a bit rough and we needed a cat that could keep up with Olive’s frenetic kitten energy, perhaps a big, burly adult with fists instead of paws. She introduced us to an affectionate ginger with a pot-belly named Cobb. The shelter has a program where you adopt an older cat and the shelter pays the vet bills for the rest of kitty’s life. Some people are put off of elderly cats by the prospect of extra vet visits.

I cleaned my wounds from the ninja cat and we moved on to the littler monsters. Next to the kitten room, construction rattled the walls and all of the youngsters seemed perturbed. An elegant Russian blue frowning in the corner took a swing at my approaching hand. The kittens all buried themselves under the furniture. One man found success in the bustling kitten room, holding up a robust young adult ginger.

“I want to adopt this cat,” he said serenely. “What is his name?”

“Muffin,” the girl said.

“No. His name is Buster now,” the man said, letting the cat scramble away. “Buster. Do you have another cat somewhere in this shelter that is as insouciant and gregarious as Buster?”

After warding off a case of cat scratch fever in the ladies’ room, Dave and I discussed the possibility of adopting Cobb.

“It’s hard for me to have any strong feelings of affection for these cats when they keep ripping my hands open,” I muttered.

It was time to call it a day and get some Band-Aids. I wondered if we would ever bond with another cat the way we bonded with Olive.

One week later we were in the New Rochelle Humane Society where we once walked out with a box full of Olive. In the first room full of cats, I made friends with yet another tubby ginger cat.

“Maybe a tubby ginger cat was just meant to be,” I sighed.

“He only loves you because he wants to go outside. Look, he’s standing at the door.”

Sure enough, the ginger was only using me for my ability to turn a doorknob. He meowed at the door handle and gave me an urgent look of longing. All the other cats in the room were asleep or indifferent. We moved on to the Sunshine room, a room the size of a closet with cat trees extending high above me. An enormous gray cat looked down at us from above. A brown Maine Coon named Buni with long, luxurious fur rubbed against our legs. She was happy to let us pet her for about five seconds before lashing out with extended claws. Buni is the sort of girl who would kiss you on the first date and then smack you across the cheek and cry, “What kind of girl do you think I am?”

The handsome gray cat, Wolfie, turned out to be a gentle giant and Dave lavished him with attention that shy cats at shelters rarely get.

“I would adopt Wolfie if we didn’t already have a cat. And if I never intended to get another cat. Or any other pets for the next twenty years,” I admitted. A shy cat would surely incur Olive’s wrath.

By the food dishes, a black and white tuxedo cat dipped her paws into the water bowl and licked the dew from between her toes. The mark of a wild cat. There was no information about her tacked on the wall, so we asked a volunteer about her. Her name was Dallas and she was found in a garage with a litter of kittens. She was about eleven months old and all of her kittens had already been adopted. We can adopt our own little teen mom, I thought to myself.

When we adopted Olive, we were at the shelter for hours agonizing over the decision, holding various kittens in the isolation room, trying them on. Adopting Dallas was a split second decision. Just a few minutes after leaving the Sunshine room I was holding a cardboard carrying case and Dave was signing documents. It was exhilarating.

We have since renamed our new kitty Penelope. She frequently drinks out of the toilet and has a meow like a creaky closet door. Penny’s tail is crooked like a lightning bolt and I wonder what kind of bar fights she brawled in before she got knocked up.

Olive slowly is getting used to Penny. At first she hissed and sequestered Penny in the bathroom. Just the smell of my Penny-scented hand would send her into a fit. Now Olive is curious. She tries to play with Penny, but Penny doesn’t trust her after that initial territory war. I wonder what kind of solution Jackson Galaxy, Cat Behaviorist would produce from his magic guitar case and the answer is clear: a feather on a stick. Somebody get me a feather on a stick.

Apartments

Last week, Dave and I viewed two apartments.

The first apartment was a stucco building in view of a cemetery. There was a stone owl on the roof, which Dave explained was meant to scare away real flesh-and-feather owls and evil spirits.

We were greeted by an older man with a Magic School Bus T-shirt. Until that moment I had forgotten that Magic School Bus and Miss Frizzle existed. Do you suppose she’s married now? I should have asked the landlord, since he seemed to be a diehard Frizzle Fan.

We passed a tiny front yard full of Fisher-Price toys (probably belonging to the landlord) and followed the landlord into the building. The first sound I heard was the wail of a crying infant.

“Already?” I sighed.

After three flights of stairs, we reached the Lucite crystal door handle of our apartment. Inside, the dark hardwood floors were newly installed and recently waxed. The powdery walls were freshly whitewashed and blinding. Every surface was fuming. I looked to the windowsill, where a bottle of Orange Glo, Windex, Lysol, and a box of Raid conspired. I slowly quickly became unpleasantly intoxicated by household chemicals. The window panes beyond the sill displayed the somber view of a cemetery.

The landlord began to glide his Swiffer mop around the parameters of the living area.

“I just discovered Swiffer mops,” he explained. “They’re amazing.”

We opened the bedroom closet, which had been nonsensically whitewashed from top to bottom. I began to suspect that a heinous crime was being covered up in this apartment.

“What do you think?” Dave asked.

“I can’t think,” I responded as 1,966,254 of my brain cells fizzled to a combustible pulp in a single second. Dave informed me that my face was turning unusually red.

“Do you have any questions?” asked the landlord from the other room, swiffing his Swiffer.

“Can I paint it?” I asked.

“That depends. I don’t want you painting the walls some obnoxious color, like black. Just give me a color and I’ll tell you if you can paint it.”

I suggested yellow as the most inoffensive color I could produce without a functioning cerebellum, and permission to paint was granted.

“Yellow,” he said thoughtfully. “I actually like yellow. That’s nice.”

The kitchen was green and yellow, with appliances that were older than my parents. I glanced at the stove, missing two spiral burners on the range.

“Does the stove work?” I asked.

He told us it did, and to prove it, he set his Swiffer against the counter and turned on the gas. I cringed, expecting the volatile apartment air to ignite. Luckily, it did not.

The landlord showed us the inside of the refrigerator, which seemed to have yellowed with age like a fine artisan cheese.

Dave and I thanked the landlord and took the forms for the apartment to the car. We drove around the area, admiring the parks, the ponds, and the proliferation of Dunkin Donuts establishments. There was a nice indie movie theater and a university, but otherwise the area was rather barren.

We talked ourselves into the apartment, which was pretty reasonable for our price range.

Just as we came to a conclusion, Dave’s phone rang and the landlady of a studio apartment invited us for a viewing.

Perhaps I was still loopy from the first tour, but the second apartment seemed great even though it was in the basement of somebody’s house. Perhaps it was the neutral aroma in the air, or the owner’s furniture filling the rooms, but I actually could imagine this apartment sustaining life. Little ceramic mushrooms decorated the fully-functional stove.

The couple that lived there had a closet full of board games and a hallway stacked with DVDs and CDs. Dave and the owner bonded over a board game. In the end, we were chosen to be the lucky tenants because of Dave’s good taste in obscure board games.

I imagined someone viewing the first apartment, chatting ecstatically with the landlord about the superiority of the Swiffer and discussing educational television. Somewhere out there is the ideal tenant for that place, too.

Along Came a Spider

One night I went outside to gather some oregano for an improvisational bean dip. I approached my patch of herbs with a pair of scissors in hand and jumped as I beheld the most enormous spider web I have ever seen. It stretched from my house to a nearby cedar tree.

The most massive spider I have ever seen (that wasn’t tarantula in a small plastic carrying case with holes on the top) was constructing the outer rings. I suspect that it is one of those spiders from Australia that survive underground for years without water and eat honey badgers. Boy Scout points to anyone who can confirm this baseless speculation.

I ran into the house to fetch my camera-savvy brother. Perhaps I would have found this late night session of nature photography and flashing lights dangerous and invasive were it not for the “PHOTOGRAPH ME” message scrawled in iridescent web. I stood nearby holding an LED flashlight so that my brother could get a good view of the spider.

As we looked on, a fly was caught in the tremendous web and the spider swiftly dove upon it and wound it up like an unwilling bobbin. She left it alone, squirming in an iridescent straightjacket, and went on with her weaving. “This is nature!” I cried.

I carefully picked a few sprigs of oregano that were not bolstering the web to prevent my hand from being mummified in a similar fashion. Nature can be cruel, my friends.

A Sonnet for Ana Perlerina

Sometimes, without warning, five page essays about Don Quixote become fourteen line Shakespearean sonnets about Don Quixote.

A Sonnet for Ana Perlerina

Though Ana’s blue of lip and green of skin

Her pockmarks are the graves of doting men

Though smallpox rot her left eye from within

The right one is more beautiful than ten

Her back stoops like a daisy without drink

To shield defenseless suitors from her eye

Though ten or twelve teeth fell out in the sink

Her soft, wide mouth and gums provoke my sigh

Her legs seem shapely underneath the sheet

Though palsy keeps her tucked into her bed

Her hair is thin and sparse like blighted wheat

Behold the luscious smoothness of her head

Would she accept a scorched and wrinkled man?

Flower! Pearl! Extend your withered hand!

Movie Adaptations

After watching Easy A, I realized that my professional direction may be writing teen movies based on books we have all read in high school English class, a project that will challenge my storytelling skills and intellect and give meaning to my life. There may be no nobler task than the dumbing down of celebrated masterpieces for the culturally apathetic youth. I have since set myself to work, diluting beloved literary classics into hollow adolescent clichés.


The Great Gatsby

When Nick Carraway’s family moves to Long Island he discovers that he has a mysterious next door neighbor: Jay Gatsby. The wildest parties at West Egg High take place in Gatsby’s gothic mansion almost every night and his parents never seem to be home. His cheerleading cousin Daisy, her cheating quarterback boyfriend Tom, and her best friend Jordan Baker try to make Nick feel at home as he is sucked into a world of rich kids, crazy parties, and varsity sports. Nick’s relationship with Jordan blossoms as shocking secrets are revealed. What happened at summer camp between Jay and Daisy two years ago? Scandal and secrets unravel without the interference of social themes and symbolism in this gripping new adaptation of a classic story.


Jane Eyre

In Lowood High School, freshman Jane Eyre is the victim of bullies, snotty sisters, and evil principals. When she volunteers to tutor Adele, a glamorous French exchange student, things finally start to look up. Through Adele she meets Eddy Rochester, a silent and brooding senior football star who happens to be part of Adele’s host family. Adele gives Jane a Parisian fashion makeover, and Jane begins to attract Eddy’s attentions. Just when Jane begins to feel happy for the first time, she discovers that Eddy is secretly hiding his insane ex-girlfriend in his locker. Can their relationship survive in this clever adaptation which conveniently ignores the moral questions and Gothic elements of the original novel?


Julius Caesar

In spite of his epilepsy, sophomore Julius Caesar takes the varsity basketball world by storm. While the impressionable students of Rome High School think of Caesar as a hero, his teammates aren’t his biggest fans. Caesar has undermined the rest of the team in his rise to fame and lowered the former team captain Pompey to the ranks of the school mascot. Brutus, Caesar’s teammate and best friend, launches a plan to teach Caesar a lesson he won’t forget. Will Caesar learn what it means to be a team? And why does the janitor who waxes the gym floor keep repeating, “Beware the Ides of March?” The answer will surprise you in this fresh, athletic take on a Shakespearean tragedy that will teach us all a lesson in friendship.

Occupational Fantasy, Part Two

I am standing in a quiet, empty metro station when I feel a stranger’s hand on my shoulder. I turn and see a man in a long trench coat with wild snakes of hair and suppose that he is either homeless or a wizard. He says that he is a cubist furniture designer and that I will be his apprentice. He will teach me to upholster cubist furniture and restore antique cubist furniture to its former condition, and when he has taught me all that there is to know about cubist furniture I will be the greatest maker of cubist furniture in the world. I say okay. The metro appears and he pulls me inside with great haste. We go to his cubist furniture studio where I choose appropriately coordinating fabrics for each grain of wood. The cubist furniture master tells me that we will have to work quickly through the cubist furniture curriculum because of those who would have me fail. His rival cubist furniture designers have spies everywhere, behind the cubist wardrobe and under the cubist bed. In just a couple of weeks I learn the appropriate skills of a cubist furniture designer and open my own shop where my cubist chaise lounges are purchased by wealthy collectors from all over the world. After a long day of upholstering, I have time to write stories.