Mom awoke at two on a Saturday and then told Dad she wasn’t true to him. His eyebrows furrowed as he asked me to clear out of their bedroom doorway. The next morning, before leaving for church, he made pancakes and gave me a map to hidden money in the house. It was drawn with marker on a paper towel. His ribs dug into me when we hugged like it mattered.
A few days passed and he didn’t return, didn’t call. I stayed home from school on Thursday because my eyes were embarrassing. I discarded all of Mom’s stashed booze, found some money. I hid the roll of cash in a sock, even though she was either gone in sleep or pubs. Nobody forced me to go to school. I skipped and slept. I fried baloney. I hiked down the hill and walked the riverbed my parents had told me to avoid. I found quivering ferns, crushed beer cans, the butterscotch smell of warm bark. I heard a mournful melody underneath the gusts in tree tops, as if a hermit thrush could whisper. Walking on fertile soil made me feel different, like I’d never been home until now—soft on this new carpet—and my real family was waiting behind the next pack of pines.
I had nothing to lose but my clothing. I added my shirt and shorts and shoes to a pile of ashes I had passed. I trudged through blades of grass as tall as trees. And then I found her rubbing her back against the trunk of an aspen and whistling a series of five warm melodies. I watched her eyes like they were the sunrise. Her tail twitched three times, and then she chased me around a lake nobody had ever mentioned to me. The sun set as we lay on giant rocks afterward, feet dipped in the water. She blew on the scrapes she had left on my back. I didn’t know her name, couldn’t think of how to ask. My hair had turned to fur, which I assumed was related to our act.
The temperature dropped. I couldn’t find the spot where I left my clothing. The hill was steep to my house; I used all my limbs for the incline. The front door was tall and locked. I found a reflection in the glass: I had a tail! I knocked as hard as I could at the bottom of the door and then covered the private parts my fur didn’t reach. Mom appeared and was eighteen feet taller than me. She wore somebody’s flannel robe. She screamed and threw one of her pink slippers at my head. She spit her cigarette at me.
I considered my options and the limits of my reach. I returned to the lake and searched in the dark for my new friend. She was peeing on a pile of dead leaves and didn’t care if I watched. I liked the papery trickle sound. Her moonlit coat was blue.
We mated and grew a family, and then another one because some of the others died. We aged, started resting on our hands and feet at the same time, wailing in the trees instead of foraging. We were true to each other. We never mentioned our parents, until it was my turn to die. Her sympathy was quick and serious. We rolled on the ground, stayed close. The sun was setting. Behind her, I saw a cloud that looked like a face, Dad’s heavy eyebrows when he was concerned. I didn’t have eyebrows anymore.
I asked her to deliver a message. I bit into a discarded beer carton and tore the edges with my nails, hoping that I could scare Mom like she had scared me.