Animals

by Jeb Taylor
illustration by Opie

Sometimes the summers in New Jersey get really nasty. The heat is one thing, but it only gets oppressive when the air is so full of water that motion becomes a struggle. Cold showers help, sort of, but five minutes later, the sticky film grows on your physical self which causes discomfort and helpless anxiety in your mental self.

At some point in time in the life that I have lived until now, I met Lenny. His furry brown beard remained free of the brainwashing effects of comb and brush. The oddly-shaped bulbous mass of flesh above his moustache served as a breathing apparatus and as a handy perch for his smudged eyeglasses. He wore his favorite T-shirt for weeks at a time. He didn’t bathe on a regular basis. Acknowledging the cage-like effect thick humidity imposed upon humans and not worrying about it, allowed Lenny to concentrate on other things. Many people spend time trying to escape the heat not understanding that if they just changed how they thought about the inevitable, they would be free to do whatever they felt.

When I met Lenny, he told me to pick up bird shit and rat carcasses. He had been doing that for most of his life. At some point in time, long before the point we met, Lenny decided to help birds. Much of the time he was awake, Lenny nursed injured or orphaned birds back to health and if possible, set them free. Between a rarely traveled road and the edge of a crowded green murky swamp, a dozen large cages of varying largeness held secrets of the universe, which turned out not to be so secret after all.

So I said, “Okay, I’ll pick up bird shit and rat carcasses.” Lenny specialized in raptors – hawks, eagles, owls, falcons – birds that eat other birds for lunch. Feeding birds of prey is a little different than opening a small tin of salmon-flavored Fancy Feast for your fluffy white kitty. For the birds, you take a frozen white rat out of a freezer filled with frozen white rats and cut the rat into two halves: the beginning and the end, both of which are lunch. After allowing time to pass for proper thawing, serve chilled. There is less hypocrisy in chopping rats in half than in ordering a Meal Deal at McDonald’s or a pate de fucking foie gras at some inanely insanely expensive restaurant where people obsessed with materialism and French wine enjoy other humans acting like slaves. These same assholes judge fun and life by how much it costs.

So I said, “Okay, I’ll pick up bird shit and rat carcasses.” The cages, while temporary prisons, were really big, so, if healthy, the birds could fly around, even though in a confined enclosure mandated by someone other than themselves.

One morning I stood before the wooden door of a very big cage, my hands encased in yellow rubber dishwashing gloves. My left hand held a plastic bucket. My right hand held a small gardening shovel (it might have been a gardening trowel; I don’t know, I’ll check it out). My skull held a pituitary gland, a brain, and a medulla oblongata, which I guess is just a modest quantity of gray and red squishy stuff, but that squishy stuff enables me to write these words which you are reading right now, and which don’t count for shit but at least I’m not trying to sell you anything.

I put the gardening utensil in the plastic bucket, opened the door and went in. The sun rose high towards noon, heating the swamp like so much bread pudding. I smelled a rat.