- I don't think my gerbil is well. Gerbils die all the time--not one ger-
bil multiple times, obviously, but collectively they have a very high turn-
over rate--so I wouldn't worry much over Sticky except that he looks
miserable. He slouches around his cage as though he knows he's dying. They
haven't built the hospital that can cure you of being a gerbil.

-- I am not well. I cannot see far beyond my prison, and with my sight has
gone my hope of seeing Raquel again. Tomorrow I will perform a ritual for
her, much as the butterflies spend their last minutes mourning the future
deaths of those they expect nevermore to meet with. It's a nice tradition.
Her real name, her species, how her people communicate... these things all
must remain mysteries to me as I pass. I don't regret that I've had to make
up everything I know about her. I just wish I could look at her.

- Tax day. I needed counter space for a new display, so I consolidated the
habitates of my own personal animals. My ailing anemone went right next to
Sticky's terrarium, which seemed cute for all of ten minutes until I thought
about it. I've said all week that the import taxes on pot-bellied pigs were
killing me and, ha ha, I've set up a real quarantine area for pets who're
actually dying. I feel terrible.

-- Even everyday tasks defeat me. True thirst will yet get me over to my
water, or so I hope, but the pain in my legs keeps me from crossing my cell
to sip with any regularity. I never finished saying the butterfly-verse for
Raquel. A vision of her, enormous and beautiful, drifted through the far-
thest nebulous reaches of my eyesight. This body, these senses, have never
failed me before, but my faith often has, and so again I abandoned what I
know about the future to swaddle myself in dreams of what might be.

- Hard to get out of bed when there's no chance of a surprise waiting for
you. Today was much like the day before. And so on. If I had the first part
of my life to live over again, I would still have given up on Chris. I would
still have bought that crappy car. I would have made every single stupid
mistake over... except I would NOT have opened a pet store. Years collapse
into days here. You lose track of time because for everything around you,
time is passing so fast. To them, I must seem immortal.

-- In my youth, six of us lived here together. One day we ate the glue out
of the thing we used for shelter, a stupid idea from a practical viewpoint;
as if losing our home was not enough, the glue killed everyone but me. I saw
the face of God, or so I believed. The god of dogs and eagles and coral was
there just as He had been described to me by so many tongues in so many
lives, and what was he doing? Nothing. He laughed at me. Shortly thereafter
was the week in which I saw Raquel. One could draw the obvious connection
between my nascent atheism and the attachment I formed to a distant, pulch-
ritudinous being, but at least Raquel is real.

- Funny how I'll get up to feed the animals even when I won't get up to
feed myself. GG very gently suggested I consider "professional help" when
I called her to bitch last night, and I guess it's a good idea. Even ama-
teur help would be welcome. And I don't expect Sticky to live through the
night.

-- Raquel. I had not the least delirium today and yet there she was. She
has come to preside over my very existence, and I'm as powerless to show
gratitude as I was to show affection. I recall my past incarnations, though,
as so many I encounter do not, and she and I might meet again. I'll be a
tree and she a hawk, or both of us will be human, or I'll ride her tiger-
back as a snail. Though I die many times, it is nothing so long as I am
patient. I do not expect to live through the night.

written for Tom K. at my kitchen table 10/1/01

For some reason (maybe that there are seven of them) when I first looked at these words I realized I was playing Scrabble with them, trying to break up the obvious combinations and make something I didn't see right away. I collided "gerbil" and "slouching" to get an image of a gerbil with its shoulders down, glumly going about its business. Great. I started writing.

At the end of Sticky's first entry, I realized I had a serious problem: there was nothing at all for the human lead (unnamed) to say unless I kept up the "I don't realize my gerbil is smarter than me, ha ha" thing, which had a sort of off-week-Onion feel to it and also provided no plot hooks whatsoever. Why I thought crippling depression was a good solution, I don't know.

I did try to keep the human narrator's *attitude* light, which meant that for the sake of contrast Sticky passed 'dignified' and continued on to 'pompous'. But man, it was writing the human half that took me forever (nearly two hours, breaking my own rules because I decided I didn't need to sleep). And yet in the end, I think it's not a bad mood piece. I'd just watched Ghost Dog, so ponderousness and stoic acceptance of death had established narrative value for me.

Credit Jon Lewis, the author of True Swamp, for the perspective toward animals here and in #2.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

<< back to more fast custom fiction<<