No Pets Allowed
Joan Murray
The first time I saw it, it was sitting on a trashcan, like it was waiting for me, like those people who greet you when you go into Walmart, and it makes you nervous the whole time, knowing they’ll be there on your way out. But why should I be nervous about some cat? We always had cats on the farm – especially Sunny, who looked just like this one – and as I kept staring at it, an aura came around it, a pale orange aura, maybe because the cat was orange and white. Then it stood up on its hind legs, like any cat who wants someone to pet it, and I was someone if no one else was there.
But I wasn’t going to waste my morning on some trashcan cat, was I? I had a job, didn’t I? But when I turned to go, something scratched my back. When I turned to see, it was sitting like an Egyptian statue on its green trashcan, next to the blue recycling one. I still had ten blocks to go to the PATH train, which would take me to Manhattan, and the blocks in Hoboken are long ones, which means there can be lots of men staring at you, unless they’re gay. Gay men don’t stare at you, or grab your thing, or call you Hey, Hot Red, or make a sound like a straw in the bottom of a glass.
When I got to my office at Loanstar Services, the whole place seemed different than yesterday, like it was yellow now, not blue. Like it was in a good mood. “Kara!” It was Mr. Z. “Come get a donut,” he touched my arm, but not in a bad way. “Can you believe it – Bob brought us a whole box? Take one before he eats them all himself!” He opened the lid. They all were chocolate with colored sprinkles. Which one, which one?
“Go ahead, Kara, pick yourself a winner.” It was Bob with his mouth full. And when I didn’t say anything, he said “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?”
But how could Bob know about that cat? But I wasn’t taking any chances. I shut down the lid – even though Mr. Z. was holding it up. Oh, why do they always have to stare when I rush down the hall to my office?
“Everything okay, Kara?” It was Mr. Z. at my door. The nice one. The one who hired me because of someone at Harland’s bank. I acted like nothing had happened.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I thought you guys were playing a joke.”
“With the donuts?”
“Bob’s always kidding around. I thought if I took one, he’d start up with me.”
“I’m glad that was all it was. I thought maybe something upset you.”
“I don’t like donuts that much.”
A big pile of folders was waiting on my desk. Inside them were the delinquents. Not juvenile delinquents like most people think, but grown-up delinquents who’d been given “every chance,” as Mr. Z. puts it. First, they got a phone call from someone in collection – a “benefit- of-the- doubt call,” as Mr. Z calls it, to remind them they forgot to pay their mortgage. But, as Mr. Z. says, “None of them really forgot.”
Some of them can’t pay because they lost their jobs – those are the sad ones. I picture them sitting in their pale gray houses, watching TV, and I wonder where they’ll watch TV after their house gets taken away. The other ones didn’t pay because they bought a big show- off house, which “plummeted in value,” as Mr. Z. puts it.
My job is not to feel sorry for them, and not blame them either. My job is to stick to the facts, but there’s only one real fact, which is that they agreed to pay back the mortgage company for lending them money to buy their house. I have their signatures to prove it. And I know they were given a chance to pay back part of it, until they could pay back all of it, and they were warned what would happen if they didn’t. The delinquents are the ones who didn’t.
My job is to check their folders and make sure all the documents are there, all of them complete, all of them in order, so there’s a “paper trail,” as Mr. Z. puts it, to show we did everything required by law. Then I double- check the math, which I can do in my head without a calculator. And the last thing is I sign my name. And then they’re not delinquent anymore, now they’re foreclosed, and they can start their new life without their old house.
I like it when there’s a big stack of delinquents waiting for me cause then I can’t spend too much time thinking about things – like, is this Justina, the one I went to school with? Is this Carl, the one who was with me at the center because he was gay and never tried to grab me? My job is to keep them moving, and it’s not that hard as long as I stay focused on the numbers and the lines, as long as I don’t start thinking about Justina or Carl, or about Harland and his bank job and his daughters and his big expensive show- off house.
Coming out of the PATH station that evening, I thought of walking on a different street so I wouldn’t have to pass that cat again. But why should I be worried about some cat? We always had cats, especially the two that were mine. But the cat wasn’t there, only its green trashcan and the blue recycling one, both empty with their lids hanging down. As usual, I ate my dinner on the couch while The Situation Room was on. It was seafood salad, the same as I had for lunch. But it wasn’t Wolf Blitzer. It was that substitute woman. Oh God, is that the cat outside? But it was only the giant sunflower with its head leaning on the window.
The next morning, when I was scooping salad into my GladWare for lunch, I started thinking how cats love seafood, and I had made enough for the whole week. Probably that cat never had seafood salad in its life – at least not with real crabmeat – but there was no way I was giving it a GladWare. Instead I tore off a piece of foil and folded it into a dish, and another piece for a lid, and my hands kept folding till I made a swan on top. I used to do lots of origami before I got better. Sometimes I miss it.
My heart kept thumping all the way up the street, but the cat wasn’t there. Good, bad. Good, bad. Then it came squeezing through the iron fence and leapt onto its green can and sat there like an Egyptian statue while I took the foil dish from my lunch tote. It didn’t even look at the swan – all it cared about was what was inside, and as soon as I took off the lid and set it on the blue recycling can, it stepped across, and out came its little pink tongue and it began to lick – licking and licking, trying to get every last bit, till it knocked down the dish and waited for me to pick it up so it could go on licking till nothing was left. Then it stepped back to its green can while I crumpled the foil and lifted the recycling can lid and threw it inside.
“Is that your cat?” A brown- faced boy in a blue Catholic uniform.
Think, think. “Yes, he is.” If he wasn’t mine, why would I be feeding him?
“What’s his name?”
How am I supposed to know his name! But if it was my cat, I’d know his name, wouldn’t I? “His name is Sunny.” That was the name of my favorite cat. The other one was Smokey. But Smokey was gray, not orange- and- white like this one.
“He’s nice. What do you feed him?”
“Crabmeat. Real crabmeat.”
“Can I pet him?”
“All right, but not too much. He’s sometimes afraid of boys.”
“I wouldn’t hurt him.”
“All right, go ahead, then.”
I nodded at the cat, and the boy pet him gently on his shoulder. Not rough and tumble, not like Harland. “Hello, Sunny,” he said. “You’re a nice cat, Sunny boy.”
“That’s enough,” I said. “He gets overexcited if he gets too much attention. He doesn’t like people looking at him.”
“But he likes me.”
“Sometimes he pretends to like people. You’d better go to school or you’ll be late.” I watched the boy jog ahead and turn around the corner.
The cat kept sitting like an Egyptian statue, so I reached out to pet it, but it ducked from my hand like I was disgusting. ”If you think you’re getting crabmeat tomorrow, think again!” I told it. Then I headed for the PATH.
The office seemed pale green when I got there, nothing special either way. Just say Good Morning Good Morning to all the people on my way down the hall. There were lots of delinquents waiting on my desk, so I sat down and started checking them. One after another, no special treatment unless it was a woman living alone or two men living together, which meant they could go to the bottom of the checked pile and be the last to lose their house, or people with a super- expensive house could go to the top. But I have to foreclose every one of them, and no feeling sorry and no blaming either, cause as Mr. Z. says, all the sorry and blaming were over by the time they came to me. I was like a funeral director, I wasn’t there to save them. All the saving had been tried already, all the counseling, and mortgage modifications, and the bridge loans. They came to me when it was too late to do anything but send them off to their new lives. But just try to do all that math in your head. Even if you’re a mathematical genius, it still takes time.
Mrs. Quincey told my parents I was a mathematical genius. She came all the way out to the farm. She wasn’t the math teacher at Musconetcong Middle School, she was the music teacher and the director of the lower- level orchestra and I was in fifth grade and she wanted me to play the cello.
My parents didn’t know what a cello was.
“It looks like a violin,” she said, “but it’s bigger. The player holds it between his or her legs. It has a deep, rich, resonant tone.”
Harland snickered. “Playing with Jell- O between your legs.”
“Shut your mouth!” Father said. Then he turned to Mrs. Quincey. “Why can’t she just play a fiddle and hold it with her chin like they do? We have a fiddle up the attic from my father.”
“Mr. Mosher, your fiddle may be a fine one, but the cello would be a perfect instrument for Kara. Your little Kara with her long red braid is a mathematical genius, she has depth – she has synesthesia.”
Mrs. Quincey could see they weren’t following. “She sees different colors when she hears different notes.”
“What are you saying?” Father asked in the voice he used when he thought the milk company was cheating him on the hundred- weight.
“We believe Kara is gifted. She exhibits many of the inborn traits of highly gifted musicians. But if she doesn’t begin the cello soon, her gifts won’t count for anything.”
Mother turned and looked at me like she was noticing me for the first time, but she didn’t say anything. Which was her way.
“And how would she get herself a cello?” Father asked.
“Our school has an arrangement with a national rent- to-own company. You can rent a cello, an excellent cello for a child, for about thirty dollars a month.”
“Thirty dollars a month! I could rent a fishing hut on Owasa Lake for that kind of money! If Kara wants to be in your orchestra, she can play her grandfather’s fiddle.” Then he turned to me, “Unless you want to play a cello. Do you, Kara?”
That evening when I came out of the PATH, I went straight across to the Eden Gourmet to get a package of torn-up lettuce for my seafood, and something nice for dessert. All the little round boxes in the ice cream case were shimmering with frost like a miniature snow village. Which one, which one? Everyone likes vanilla. I picked Ben & Jerry’s since it reminded me of two boys in our orchestra, Benjamin Ostrowski and Gerald Ostrowski. Ben played the flute and Jerry played the cello. Their sister Sharyn had a hearing aid. I played the cymbals since nobody wanted to. Mrs. Quincey loaned me two of them for free. And I got to hear everyone’s notes and see all their colors until my turn came at the end.
When I first got sick and had to go away, they asked me in the office if I played any instrument. “I play the cymbals,” I said, and the social worker glanced up at the nurse and made a snorting sound like when a horse is settling down. That’s where I learned origami. I did a hundred swans my first day. “Leave some paper for the others,” the recreation specialist said.
The seafood salad looked so nice on the lettuce that night, like someone had made it in a magazine. Wolf Blitzer was back in The Situation Room, but there wasn’t much news. Just people with opinions trying to be facts. Then one of them said: “Wall Street knows this economy won’t recover until all the foreclosures have been dealt with and the real estate market can rebound.”
Wolf Blitzer was staring so hard through his glasses that I dropped my fork. Couldn’t someone tell him I was clearing the foreclosures as fast as I could? My stomach felt like an eel had fallen in, so I took the salad plate to the kitchen counter and ate the Ben & Jerry’s instead. After, when I was going to scrape my plate into the trash, that cat appeared to me in a vision. Even if it had ducked from my hand, it was just a poor shivering cat living in a gray- black alley, with no bed to sleep on, the way Sunny and Smokey used to sleep on mine. So I made another foil dish and put the salad in it. But this time no origami.
In the morning, I spotted the cat up the sidewalk, sniffing around the cans, and as I got closer, it lifted its head. It knew I had crabmeat. But I wasn’t going to be a pushover. I waited till it leapt onto its can and stood on its hind legs to let me pet it. Then I took out the foil dish and set it on the recycling can, and, oh how it enjoyed it! – like it never had crabmeat before. And after it finished, it did a big yawn, and I brought my nose close to its nose and said, “You’re my Sunny, aren’t you?” But then I had to turn and hurry to the PATH cause my eyes were starting to cry.
I waited in Shontelle’s office till she said I could go in to see Mr. Z. Mr. Z. closed his door so we could have one of our “private conversations,” as he called them. “Have a seat, Kara,” he said. “It’s always nice to see you. So what’s on your mind?”
I came right out with it: “I want you to know I’m doing the fore- closures as fast as I can. I don’t take breaks, except for lunch or if I need the Ladies.’ I know how important the foreclosures are for Wall Street, and if Wolf Blitzer or any of them ask, can you please tell them I’m doing my best – I did fi fty- four yesterday.”
“Good, Kara. Great. I’ll let them know. Just keep up the good work.”
“I’m going faster than anyone can.”
“I’m sure you are. You’re a good worker, Kara. You’re a smart girl and a nice- looking girl, and you’d make a fine woman if you could just settle down a little.”
That day I went faster than ever. Check. Check. Doublecheck. All the forms in order. Every line filled in. All the names spelled right. And the dates right. And the math correct – the dollar amounts and percentages every time – and every page initialed, everything so fast I thought my brain would explode. Sixty- six! I did sixty- six that day.
That night I ate the last bit of seafood salad while I waited to hear what Wolf Blitzer would say. But all he cared about was Syria. Oh, what’s that in the garden? It was only Mrs. Miksic, the landlady from upstairs, cutting off the sunflower’s heavy head. But it was dead already. Its fringe of golden petals had fallen off and the crows had pecked out its seeds. She waved at me with the garden shears and smiled with all her teeth. Once she told me I could sit in the garden whenever I wanted. But what would I do there except sit like a flower and stare at the other flowers? It wasn’t like I was the owner and could string up a pole with beans.
When I lay down that night, my brain was worrying so much about Wall Street that it wouldn’t let me sleep. I tried picturing Sunny sitting on his green trashcan so I could get my brain to relax, but instead my brain started sending me pictures of my old Sunny, who used to sleep on my bed with Smokey and me. “You oughtn’t have those cats in the house,” Father said when I first took them in. They were kittens newly weaned from a litter of six, so their mother wouldn’t miss them much. “They ought to be in the barn, learning the killing of rats,” Father said, “not to be made a pet of.”
“She’s just a child,” Mother said without looking at me. “There are always cats coming and going on a farm. For a girl to take one or two for a pet isn’t much to ask.”
“Shush you,” Father said. But he let me keep the kittens at night – which is the worst time for rats, so it was a kindness.
Oh, how I loved those kittens – from kittens to near- grown cats. I was ten and Harland was twelve, and he’d come to my bed to play with them – all of us cuddling and rolling rough and tumble, and the cats scratching us, and us tickling them, and me and him laughing till that time he got on top of me and grabbed my thing and I had to yell, “Stop!”
And now in my bed in Hoboken, I was yelling “Stop!” again – cause a dream was trying to pull me inside it, and I knew which dream it was, so I ran to the living room to escape.
There was only half a moon outside the window, but it was lighting up all the flowers in the garden, and I could see the bare spot by the shed where no flowers grew. It was a lonely spot, just waiting for something. What if Mrs. Miksic would let me keep Sunny there? My lease said, “No Pets Allowed.” My signature was on that lease. But what if it only meant no pets allowed in the house? It didn’t say anything about the garden.
I pulled the couch throw over my nightgown and stepped out in the garden. It was freezing on my bare feet, but maybe I could make a little house for Sunny there. Maybe I could ask for some fruit crates at Eden Gourmet, or I could buy a plastic trashcan like Sunny’s green one and lay it down with a pillow inside, and Sunny could come and go by leaping the fence, and I could feed him from my dinner, so he wouldn’t be a bother to anyone. How could Mrs. Miksic say no? I got so excited picturing it all with Sunny and the flowers in the moonlight that I couldn’t get back to sleep.
The next morning, I got a can of salmon for my lunch and opened another can for Sunny since there was no seafood left. I know most people buy tuna instead of salmon cause it’s half as cheap, except at Walmart where it’s even cheaper, though you have to take two buses. But ever since that time with Harland, tuna is too disgusting, and when I got to the trashcans, I couldn’t see Sunny anywhere. Then I remembered how to make a click sound with my tongue, and out through the fence he came in his pale orange aura, and leapt onto his can to see what I brought him. And he was so joyful for that salmon! And after he licked the can to get every last bit, he stood up to take my petting. “Oh, Sunny, you want to live with me in the garden, don’t you?”
I was never late for work before, but that morning I was so tired since I hardly slept that I dozed off on the PATH train and didn’t see my stop till I was rushing away from it. All I could do was get off at the next stop and run up the stairs and across the gray- black place with all the pillars and down the other stairs and wait for the next train – which was full of people staring at me. And when I got to the office, everyone stared when they said Good Morning as I passed by. But maybe they always do.
There was a note from Mr. Z. taped on my door. “Please come and see me when you get in. ☺ Mr. Z.”
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I was trying not to shake. “There was a problem on the PATH.”
“Not to worry, Kara. Being late once in a while is no big deal. In fact, you’re more punctual than all our other longtime temps – and you’re a much more productive worker, which I think is part of your problem.”
Uh- oh, Uh- oh.
“Two of the folders you processed yesterday got sent back up this morning. It seems you didn’t sign off on them, and that makes me worry that you’re hurrying too much. If you don’t sign the affidavits, they’re no good.”
Say something. Say Something. “Those couldn’t have been my folders. In my folders, the math is always correct, I make sure it’s correct, and the order is correct, I always check the order, and that every line is filled in, and every page is initialed, and the last thing is, I sign my name.”
“Well, that’s good, Kara. But signing your name is the most important thing. That’s what they check for downstairs. So maybe you could switch your routine around. Maybe you could sign the whole stack before you start checking them, and after you’ve done all the signing, take a look at them, but only a once- over. Legal has spent too much time on them already, and we’ve got thousands of these things piling up. It’s not like when you first started and there was time to read them, so just give them the once- over, but remember: sign them all first.”
As soon as I got to my office, I stood facing my desk and opened every one of the folders and signed all the affidavits like he said. Then I sat down and started giving them a once- over until I came upon a super- expensive house in Morristown, which is where Harland lives. But it was two men with different names so they probably were gay and didn’t have to go to the top.
I kept going through the rest of them, and though I was only giving them a once- over, I still had to check the lines and doublecheck the math, which I can do quicker than anyone, even if they have a calculator. But when I was only halfway through, the numbers started saying their names, and it takes twice as long when you have to listen to them, instead of just reading them. So I put my head down on the desk till someone was saying, “Wake up! Wake up!” – just the way I did, when I found Sunny in the hay barn. But this time it was Shontelle standing in my door.
“How you doing, Kara?” she said. “Did you sign all of these?” I stared at her.
“Are all of these signed?”
“Yes. Mr. Z. asked me to sign them all first.”
“Great,” she said, scooping the folders from both piles together – the ones I checked and the ones I hadn’t done yet. “Have a nice night.”
I stayed at my desk after the five o’clock bell rang and everyone started leaving. Some of them stopped to make jokes at my door: “Don’t sleep in there without your pajamas.” “You won’t get overtime, even if you stay till there till morning.” But they were only bluegray streaks streaking by.
On the PATH train, I rode in the space between the cars where no one can see you. And when I came out, the air felt so good I leaned against the side of the newsstand to breathe it in. The sky was turning a lovely soft pink like in the old paintings, and I crossed over to Eden Gourmet and bought some vanilla, and sat on my house steps and ate half of it before I went inside. The rest was for Sunny for tomorrow morning. And tomorrow night, I would ask Mrs. Miksic if Sunny could live in the garden. But first I had to get some sleep.
Just before 3 A.M., I woke up soaked with sweat in the Machine Shop Dream, it’s the one where Sunny hadn’t come home for three nights.
“Don’t worry,” Mother said, just like she said that evening and always says in the dream. “He’s probably got a girlfriend.”
“I’m his girlfriend,” I said.
“Yes, you are.”
Harland was there in the kitchen too – he had just turned thirteen, and was all set to leave to do his evening chores, but he turned and looked at me like he was going to say something, but he didn’t. That was the last time he ever looked me in my eyes. Not even when Father died. Not even when Mother died all those years later and we both got money cause the farm got sold.
After my kitchen chores, I went out to look for Sunny – first in the hay barn, then the milking parlor and the calving barn and the tractor shed and the chicken coop and across the slop yard and in the hog shed, even though I knew Sunny would never go there since he was such a nice clean cat.
I didn’t bother with the machine shop because the door was closed, and no cat could open a door latch. But what if the door had been open and the wind blew it shut after Sunny crept inside? It was dark in there, but the pale evening light came through the open door behind me and it fell over the lathe and then on the back wall, where I could make out Harland with his legs stretched out and his dungarees down, and a naked- lady magazine, and an empty tuna can, and Sunny.
And that’s where I wake up. I wake up from the dream every single time I have it. Cause I can’t let myself see. All I see is what came after: Me yelling “Mother!” and Harlan already zipped up and grabbing me by my braid, and me yelling “Mother!” and Harlan saying he’d kill me if I told. But there was Mother standing in the open doorway.
Harland got the belt right there in the farmyard. Father struck him so bad that he walked with a limp for weeks, and that night he was made to sleep in the hog shed. “That’s where an animal belongs,” Father said. “And if that filthy cat comes back, I’ll give him worse.”
Later, when I was in bed and Mother and Father were listening to Bible Hour, Sunny came back, scratch, scratch, scratch on the screen door. “Don’t let that filthy thing in,” Father called. “No more cats in the house. Cats in a bed is unnatural.” Then Father came striding into my room where my face was wet in the pillow, and lifted Smokey up by his armpits and carried him out with his tail dangling and threw him out the door. But it was Sunny I cried on all night. Oh, Sunny, what did you do?
The next morning when I went to fetch the eggs, Sunny came up behind me. He was so quiet I didn’t know he was there till he started rubbing on my legs. “Go away!” I shouted. But back he came. That’s when I kicked him in his ribs with the toe of my shoe. I kicked him hard. “I thought you were my cat,” I said. I wanted to say, “you filthy thing,” but I was crying too hard.
Five days later, I came upon Sunny in the corner of the hay barn with his yellow eyes open. “Wake up! Wake up!” I shouted. But there was bloody- white stuff coming out of his mouth, and it stunk so bad I didn’t touch him.
“He must of choked on a bone,” Father said. “That’s what happens when they go after birds. It doesn’t happen if they learn to kill rats. But that cat was spoiled.”
After Father went to do the evening milking, I asked Mother, “Did Father kill Sunny?”
“If your father had killed him, he’d of buried him where you’d never find him.”
“Did Harland kill him?”
“Harland as good as killed him,” she said. “But I pray that Jesus will heal the evil in his soul.”
But I knew I was the one who killed Sunny. I killed him with the toe of my shoe.
Harland grew different after that. Not cause of Jesus, but cause of the belt. At school he told everyone who asked about his limping that he fell off his motorbike. But Harland never had a motorbike. That year he began to study and got A’s, and the next year, he joined the upper- level glee club and sang “The Impossible Dream” so everyone stood up and clapped. Afterwards, Mrs. Quincey came over to Mother and me and said, “Kara, I’m so glad you’re back with us, but where did your beautiful braid go?” Then she went to talk to Harland.
“You mustn’t blame him,” Mother said to me. “He was only a boy, doing like they do.”
I grew different too – first, cause of not eating, then cause of not going to school, then cause of cutting off my braid and burying it in the slop yard cause it turned disgusting after Harland grabbed it – but mostly cause of the dreams: The Machine Shop Dream where I came upon Harland. And the Hay Barn Dream where I came upon Sunny. And that winter, after Smokey went missing, I would sit with my hands around my ribs and rock back- and- forth, till Dr. Yost told Mother it would be best if I could go someplace where I wouldn’t be so troubled. And Mother said yes, though I missed her terribly. But the center was nice – white and yellow like a tray of newborn chicks, and the other girls were nice and the boys who grabbed me didn’t grab me too bad. And after a while, the dreams went someplace else, and I got to come home.
Yet the dreams still know where to find me when they want, like they found me in my bed in Hoboken. And after they left, I sat shivering in my nightgown till a bird began to sing – then two birds, then three, and more and more till the whole darkness was full of birds, and the sun came forward with its nervous little light – you could see it at the window trying to shine in – and I kept sitting there, with my nightgown getting wetter and wetter, but it wasn’t from sweat anymore, now it was from tears, because that night was over, and that day after work, I’d talk to Mrs. Miksic, and Sunny would come home.
After dressing for work, I put Sunny’s ice cream in a GladWare. Now that he was going to be my cat, he could have a GladWare of his own. I wrote his name – S-U- N- N- Y – on the lid with a Sharpie and drew the rays of the sun around it, like it was his aura.
I went out earlier than usual, cause I could hardly wait for the joy he’d have when he saw I’d brought him vanilla – everyone likes vanilla – and there he was, leaping onto his green can. I was about to call his name when a woman came from the building behind him. He turned and watched her as she came down the stairs in her high- heel shoes. And when she stopped, he stood on his hind legs to take her petting, and she kissed him between his ears, and when she turned to go, she called, “Bye, bye, Creamsicle!” Then he sat down and turned his head in my direction.
But how could that be? He was Sunny, wasn’t he? Who ever heard of a cat named Creamsicle? What should I call him now?
No! don’t call him anything. Don’t even speak to him. He had been fooling me, hadn’t he? He didn’t live in a gray- black alley. He lived in an apartment – a pets- allowed apartment. He only wanted crabmeat. He only wanted salmon. He only stood on his hind legs because she had taught him – so she could kiss him in her high- heel shoes.
But what about the ice cream? He knew I had it. He could smell it in my tote bag. Vanilla. His favorite. He was waiting to stretch across to the blue recycling can and start licking it. Hurry and open it, he was saying.
But instead, I opened the recycling can, and lifted him up by his armpits and dropped him inside. Then I put the lid back on, nice and tight.
I couldn’t stay to see what would happen. Maybe someone would hear him. Or maybe the garbage truck would come and lift the can up with its big metal arms and dump everything inside. But that wasn’t up to me. I had a job, didn’t I? Wall Street was waiting for me. The real estate market depended on me. And the ice cream would be starting to melt.
Joan Murray is the author of the poetry collections The Same Water (Wesleyan, 1990); Looking for the Parade (W. W. Norton, 1999); Dancing on the Edge (Beacon Press, 2002); and Swimming for the Ark: New & Selected Poems 1990– 2015 (White Pine Press, 2015); as well as Queen of the Mist, a novel in verse (Beacon Press, 1999). Murray’s work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize, and featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, RadioLab, and The Bob Edwards Show.