It did not work out just fine. Adorable little Penrose, a little white mouse who wouldn’t hurt a fly, jumped into our teacher’s beard and frantically began biting in a blind panic. The projects were cancelled, videos were leaked, and the entire situation was mess. But biology is a high school requirement, because I totally have a career ahead of me studying animals. On the plus side, Dr. Hayka had a project planned to replace the cancelled mouse study very quickly: mouse dissections.
Dead animals hardly ever run away.
In that vein, some kid thought it was a great idea to bring her pet snake into lunch to show it off. It wasn’t venomous, or ten students would be dead right now, so I guess there’s that. This did not, however, stop the hefty lawsuits, investigations, and rather annoying snake hunt that involved me standing in the hallway to stop the snake from entering the cafeteria. I was there for nearly an hour, being scary to a snake that wouldn’t show up.
This was a standard day, aside from the arrival of the serpent. Animals shun me, panic when forced to be near me. That’s why it was such a shift when they stopped.
Maybe everyone else was living like this the whole time, but not being feared by animals is just awful. I hadn’t been bitten by ants in my entire living memory; now they sought me out. I found that I hated the red monsters; I hated their burning bite. Cats would hiss and scratch at me, and dogs … dogs. It was as though they had a personal vendetta against me, as if they somehow knew that I had killed one of their own. I heard barking all night, complemented by Genevieve’s angry bleating. The entire animal kingdom seemed to have been mobilized in a war against me.
Every day during in the summer, I would wake up with mosquito bites on my face.
Genevieve tried to bite me as I walked by her fence, pushing against the painted wood. She bleated angrily at me, almost as if she were saying come back and fight, you yellow-bellied murderer!
I had no idea where the words came from. I’d certainly never thought of anything that strange. But when I stopped to think about it, I was stung by a wasp.
Animals are monsters. They are vicious, powerful creatures and I am sure that they would gladly tear me apart and feast on my remains. Almost all of them have mouths and can bite, and they will bite given any—or, more often, no—provocation.
For weeks the hells that suburban nature could unleash dogged me. Bites, stings, scratches, and howls of rage followed me from every corner. I lived in constant fear of the lower level of the food chain. I felt that I could never be more afraid when my dog spoke to me when I fell asleep one night outside on the hammock.
I assume that if a dog spoke to anyone they would be shocked. The fact that she was dead didn’t make it much more plausible. And yet the pooch I knew from childhood appeared to me, in perfect health, just as alive as she’d been the day before I’d brutally killed her.
“Well, well, well. You’re looking awful. It’s like someone viciously stoned you to death,” she said bitterly.
I didn’t say anything for a while, but when I found my voice I stuttered out an apology.
“I am so sorry, Rover.”
So I had named her Rover. That was a good thing to know.
“I was only a child,” I tried to explain.
Rover barked at me in a way that made by blood curdle.
And just then Genevieve hopped the fence and was heading full speed towards me. Within a split second, she knocked me off the hammock and onto the ground. I was under her kicking hooves. A sharp blow hit my head.
Darkness.
I shot out of bed, slid the nightstand drawer open, and grabbed my gun. The thumping noise had come from the weight room down the hall and it was the third night in a row I’d heard it. I tapped the sensor on the wall and the hallway and exercise room lit up. I held the gun out and walked down the hall into the room.
Nothing.
The rack of dumbbells was organized, the medicine balls were neatly stacked, and the bench press had two forty-five pound plates on each side. Exactly how I’d left it.
But I was positive I’d heard a heavy thud repeatedly hit the black, matted floor.
Three nights in a row this had happened and four nights ago was when Johnny had died from a gut shot wound on my operating table—the one that I used in my office to moonlight for our local crime family
Difficult patients. Awful people.
But did they ever pay well.
Johnny was a superstitious guy though and wound up really tight. I’d gotten the call at 1:17 a.m. that he’d gotten plugged by a rival mob guy and he needed immediate fixing. Twenty-five grand in cash on the spot. Who wouldn’t mind dealing with these assholes for that? But the damage was too vicious and I’d lost him while he was underneath.
And now I was hearing noises late at night.
I spent the rest of the night watching TV and the next morning did fifty laps in the pool, showered, and then went out to Joey’s Omelets for breakfast. It was just after ten when I got to Joey’s and I took a table next to the window. Angela, the waitress, saw me as she poured a fat guy with receding gray hair some coffee and nodded. Five minutes later she set down my usual Greek omelet and tall glass of orange juice.
As I ate the omelet and sipped orange juice I thought about the mess I’d
