Animal On the Inside

For a place in the middle of nowhere, Vannattan had people everywhere. They loomed in the backs of trucks (cars and trucks were never empty- someone was always in need of a ride somewhere) and choked the sides of the roads between farms and seethed on the edges of cornfields, and their animals filled the air around them like gnats.

I had eight brothers, and each brother wore his animal on the outside. This wasn’t their fault, necessarily. I could only blame them for their obedience; my mother had told them that it was best for them to wear their animals on the outside, and it’s hard to disagree with the hand that feeds you and pays your phone bill.

“Why?” I demanded to know when I saw all of their animals for the first time. I was mostly upset because of Jasper and his jackdaw. Jasper was willowy, though he wasn’t very tall. But he still gave an impression bigger than a jackdaw, I’d thought. It would be disappointing, or worse, it would draw attention. People liked to stare when they thought you wore a surprising animal.

My glacier-beautiful mother was busy sitting on a couch with embroidered cushions and plastic wrapping. She had a magazine that was almost entirely advertisments for shops too expensive to set foot in. She looked like she was licking her teeth under her lips, or maybe she had some Faberge eggs in there. “It’s natural. It’s more natural than wearing them on the inside. Is that tone necessary?”

I didn’t ask her if it was natural. I didn’t care if it was. I preferred my brothers just as they were, and I preferred to stand in the same room as them without also feelingthat we’d been joined by a third, uninvited guest from the zoo. My mother preferred them to have animals, because it was eight fewer people to which she had to turn her attention. And she preferred to see people’s animals- how would she know who to associate with without them? She had gone mad with power since my father and his ocelot had whisked away. They’d probably done this for good reason. When I told her this she whisked me away to my room. The tumbler only clicked the next morning when she unlocked my room on the way to work. Vanhattan was my next stop. The bus left every three hours. I had at least a three-hour headstart on my brothers. I hadn’t thought they would all follow me.

Vanhattan had no city corners, only country corners, which meant behind trees and in trees and behind bushes and in bushes if you wanted to be alone to focus on not crying. This was how Hector found me just after dark.

“Linda, this wasn’t your smartest move,” Hector said. He tugged me up with some difficulty. I liked to play ragdoll with him. Then I saw his pressed tweed blazer and the slacks he wore to impress company. I didn’t want to be responsible for sullying them. “You could have probably taken her car and driven it here.”

“I don’t like left hand turns,” I said. This was especially pitiful and not very helpful, so I turned away. I already missed the congested streets of the city. I’d been beneath this tree a lifetime already.

Daniel followed Hector, stumbling into the crabapple trees with us. He was out of breath and his forehead had a sheen on it like manual labour. He carried one of my sweaters over his arm. He gave us both a long look as he sucked in air and heaved his shoulders.

“Did something happen?” I asked.

Daniel opened his mouth a few times to give his mind time to demystify. His fox wound between his legs, tongue lolling between fangs. “Some of us have a shorter legs span,” Daniel panted, looking from his fox’ legs to Hector and his gazelle’s lanky ones. “But you found her!”

He tossed my coat at me. The collar of it still smelled the mustier parts of our mother’s flat. The fox eyes the jacket at I put it on. Probably it smelled like another animal; this entire place did. Vanattan was so full of the smell of other people, moreso than the city. I’d thought there would be fewer animals here, but I didn’t know then that Vanattan was filled with people who wore their animals outside themselves.

“If you were a bit faster, she would be too,” Hector told Daniel, nodding at the fox. Daniel and his fox looked indignant. “Wasn’t Adrian with you?”

Daniel had caught his breath enough to speak, but he waited a moment anyway. Probably just so Hector would give him that narrow-eyed look he was giving him now. “Let him behind to unpack. And shop. He was threatening us-“ He slid his eyes to me and smirked. He was the least frightening of my brothers, but he knew something that I didn’t, just then. For once, his ominous expression was actually ominous. “-by saying we might all be sharing rooms. Three to one. Or two.”

Hector’s eyelid twitched. His smile didn’t move. “We should have upgraded in terms of size. This is Vanatten, not New York. Three two a room sounds like an orphanage.”

They took me out of the shelter of the trees. Instantly we were in the presence of someone else’s animal. Even the wheat grass around us smelled as musty as an animal warren. I couldn’t tell what was regular farm-animal pee and what was the pee of many people’s animals hovering about, unwatched.

“Linda,” Hector said when we found the main road and sat down waiting for a truck to come by with enough space between hay and tools and other passengers for three. “Why Vanattan?”

“You couldn’t have picked somewhere else?” Daniel asked, wrinkling his nose and inching away from a tangle of stinging nettle.

Because if there was a place to get rid of animals, I thought, surely it would be the wild.

The transition to Vanattan was a difficult one. I don’t mean the physical transition- that had been a bus ride. I meant getting to know the city. It sat next to me and leaned over to know what I was doing and when I didn’t respond it opened up immediately to show me what it was up to. It pranced up to me and licked my hands. It was loud with all sorts of animal sounds: birds whistling, dogs howling, cats rumbling like car engines. Even in the dark, when animals stayed closer to their people, it felt like they were on all sides anyway.

Theo gave me a very specific set of circumstances that would allow me to leave the house. Otherwise, I was confined. They and their animals disappeared in the day. I stayed and thought of all of the vicious animals some people wore, the kind that needed to be restrained from goring the neighbour’s dog. We were three to a bedroom, but I didn’t mind. The must of boy was far superior and strong to the must of animal. I was the only one not horrified to be sharing a room. But they fell into a routine, as easily as if they were back in New York again. The kitchen smelled of Indian food whenever Noah had a bad day. Jasper tripped on the same stair every day and nearly kneecapped himself on the stair above that. Daniel and Theo fought until their animals fought as well, and their animals grew much faster than they did. Their fights were always catastrophic. We kept furniture at the sides of the rooms now.

I was inside for two weeks with small trips outside at infrequent intervals. My brothers did the shopping, which was a mistake in retrospect. We ended up having the different parts of different meals in the fridge that didn’t go together at all. Hector was looking through the fridge for something to make into a passable meal when Daniel stumbled through the door. His fox had turned into a coyote, and it tumbled in with him, legs tangled together. They disentangled themselves before they tumbled all over the apartment.

“How do you trip over one another?” Hector said as he rolled a couple of eggs around in his palm. I always thought when he did this he was asking for a floor covered in albumen, but the eggs stayed where they were. “I can’t work out which one of you trips the other one first.”

“Did you lay those eggs or did your animal?” Daniel eyed Hector’s lynx. It was always changing now; the day before it had been a snow leopard and for a moment I’d thought someone else’s animal had somehow got into the flat. But Hector said he could feel it settling down. “Oh wait, no eggs anymore. You can’t do birds anymore. Linda, what did you do today?”

“Nothing.”

Daniel’s coyote pranced into his room. Daniel shook his head. “Sounds awful. Take a walk outside.”

“Theo said it’s dangerous,” I said. I didn’t know why I was saying it; I was desperate to get outside.

Elliot emerged from his room then and snaked around Hector to the fridge. He was two months away from being legal, but you couldn’t tell by the way Hector frowned at the beer in his hand. He didn’t have a shirt on. He was sweaty from running with his deer. He said, “That’s how you know it’s where things are happening, runt.”

Hector kicked him in the ankle. He was trying to separate the eggs and the yolk into two bowls by putting holes in either end of the egg and shaking it. Albumen splattered the countertop. There were six eggs with which to do this. He might end up having his dinner for breakfast. He said, “Linda, you’d be safe around here. Just don’t get on the back of any strange trucks that don’t already have people on them. Oh, there’s a grove of trees near that farm with all the apple trees we saw on our second say. You’d like it.”

“If that was the last of them, I’ll eat you,” Daniel said to Elliot. Elliot rolled the beer can between his hands and then pressed it to the naked back of Daniel’s neck. Daniel yelped, “You traitor.”

Hector’s mouth made a shape like it was holding in a swear word when broken egg yolk began to leak through the hole in the egg. “I don’t even remember who taught me this trip.”

I came over to the bowls and picked up an egg. I didn’t see the point in poking two holes in it when there was an entire shell that would break. Hector wouldn’t forgive me for doing it unless he got his end result so I carefully cracked the egg one-handed, into my palm. I held the yolk in the cradle of my handle and gently shook it. Albumen leaked over the sides of my hand, into the bowl. It took a few shakes to separate it entirely. The yolk looked like a golden dollar, or the sun during a sunset when it was more saturated than blinding. I dumped it into the other bowl.

“Thanks, Linda,” Hector said. “Do you want to cut the vegetables?” I could do this the best of all my brothers except Hector. I felt honoured to be asked.

“You know,” Elliot said, “I saw a woman working with her monkey today in the park. Good with their hands, both of them. It’s like a sort of talent thing you both have-”

Daniel snapped, “Linda is perfectly talented with her animal on the inside.”

Later, when Hector had made dinner for half of my brothers and the other half had foraged or not come home yet, and they’d all split up to their rooms or to the garden or to the living room couch to play video games, I sat at the table and watched Daniel put together a house of cards. His coyote watched from another one of the chairs. I couldn’t tell how many of the beer cans by the door had been emptied by him. My brothers were all a little bit slower in the evening. They always seemed to get drunk together, so there were no degrees of drunk. Daniel’s hands always remained steady, though.

His coyote sat close to me, but I didn’t touch it. I could have- Daniel and I were close like that- but I knew it was impolite to touch someone’s animal, and if not impolite, it was shocking. I didn’t want to shock Daniel into destroying the house. “Does it bother you?” I asked. I tried to imagine my animal on the outside, interacting with the world without my control, being visible and hurt-able.

Theo and Elliot fiddled with the radio. There were advertisements for people who wanted to change their animals and were already settling. No one wants to settle on marmots, someone said. That’s really called settling!  They laughed sort of like crows.

Daniel laid a card top on the third row of his house. He said, “I just don’t always know what they’re there for.”

There was a grove of apple trees in Vanattan. Probably there were several, but this one looked the least like an orchard. The trees didn’t grow in rows. They grew without order. When the sun shone on them they looked dusted with gold. I wondered if that was where all the stories about golden apples had come from. The haze around them looked like the fuzz on a kiwi. It was a good place to watch people, because they all moved through the grove. It was in the sort of hub that had cropped up between farms. It was the sort of place that Vanattan was too small to have, but it was here anyway.

There were children with rapidly changing animals trying to climb the trees and then tossing apples between them. There were men who plucked single apples and shared them with the animals at their sides or on their shoulders. Women lounged in the grass with their bags and their animals beside them. Everyone co-existed with their animals, drowsily and indulgently. It was sort of complex to look at them all, but the longer I looked the less my brain told me there was a difference between the people and their animals. If Hector thought I couldn’t work out why he’d sent me here he was wrong. I had to push away some man’s nosy foxhound before it could put its nose up my skirt. Suddenly, I wondered what my brothers’ animals were like when I wasn’t around.

I was walking out of the grove when I collapsed. It was no fault of mine. Something had rammed into the back of my knees like a clumsy, miniature freight train. Whatever it was tumbled with my, rolling over my knees and onto my back. It felt like Theo, when he decided to sit on me. My mouth was full of grass and my palms were full of dirt. When I wasn’t breathing in loam, I had the clarity to slap at whatever was on me. I wasn’t careful. The jackal flopped over in the grass, either recovered or in shock. The black line along its back was raised. I touched the skin of my knees, which was red, and then the back of my knees, one of which had been grazed by a claw or a tooth. I couldn’t decide whether to be sorry or angry; surprise had taken over all higher brain function for the moment. By the time I’d climbed to my feet and decided that it was at least polite to check on the jackal, it had retreated into the tall grasses of the grove. I was unkempt enough to attract looks. I wondered who wasn’t watching their animal and how they felt now that I had touched it with my bare hand.

“Sorry,” I said. I was sure I wasn’t loud enough to be heard, and it didn’t bring me any comfort to say it, so I walked with as much dignity as I could muster out of the grove.

In the back of a truck pulling hay, on the way home, I tried not to think that if my animal were outside, then I would keep a better eye on it. I knew myself. I was the kind of thing to go bowling into other people’s knees by accident.

No one was in the flat when I got home. Out drinking or working- those were the only two options in Vanattan. Apart from taking your lunch in an apple grove and getting mowed over by animals. I went onto the computer, because Jasper had left it on and no one was stopping me. I wondered what jackals meant, but mot websites told me what I already knew. Different animals for different people, and jackals weren’t all the same people. I didn’t know that it was even a jackal; maybe it was a jackal for a day. Most people who were jackals seemed disappointed that they hadn’t somehow been upgraded to something larger, like a lion or a tiger. Someone with a lion reassured them that they didn’t want one. Lions were hard to maneuver on city buses.

I logged off the computer before my brothers were home. They were preoccupied with Elliot and Daniel, who were in a spat. It didn’t involve me, so I stayed out of it. I told Hector about the apple grove and agreed to go the next day as well. He still hoped to accomplish something sending me there. I liked the grove anyway. I’d decided when I’d finally brushed all of the soil out of my teeth.

I went to the grove in the afternoon, when no one was taking their lunch. It was only children with their animals now. It played a game where I tried to pinpoint the exact moment a mouse changed into a hawk. I could see how triumphant the children with larger animals were, as though their animals would stay so big when they settled.

There was only one adult in the grove, and he stopped and looked right at me when he spotted me. He looked sort of dapper, in a white shirt of a kind that I didn’t think people wore anymore. There were dusty paw prints on his slacks. It was too late to get up and leave when he started across the grass. We had made eye contact. We were maintaining eye contact.

“Is this seat taken?” He asked. He pointed at the ground beside me.

“I think seat is a little excessive,” I said, then pulled the remains of my lunch closer to me so he didn’t have to sit on apple core. “No, it’s not taken.”

The young man sat. He must have been Jasper’s height, but Hector’s age. He said, “You were here yesterday, too.”

This made every one of my hairs stand on end. Foolishly, because what could he do to me in a public grove. But I was startled. If I had an animal, it would have bristled just then. The young man must have noticed, because he leaned away. I narrowed my eyes at him, but he looked more uncomfortable than intimidated. “Were you watching me?”

“I was trying to apologize to you. My jackal knocked you over.”

I looked at him for a moment, stupidly. Then I had the good sense to look for his jackal, but there was none in the grass. “It was yours? I don’t see it.”

“It’s not a jackal, right now,” he said wryly.

“How did you know I would be here today? Then- what is it, then?”

“I’m not sure.” He sounded a little miserable, which kept me from snapping at him. He didn’t seem to have any more idea where his animal was than I did, but he also wasn’t looking around. “It keeps going back and forth between a jackal and a meerkat. I really thought it would settle on jackal, or that this was the stage before- I don’t know. But now it’s just switching between the two.” He sighed. He didn’t look exactly like a farmer, or someone who worked for one. He had slacks on instead of cargos, for one thing.

“Did you tell it to stay a jackal?”

“No point. It’ll stay whatever it stays. It’s hard to upgrade when you’re this old. Where’s yours, then?” He looked at me like he might be able to see my animal somewhere on my person.

“Not here,” I said. This was sort of a lie. “Are you on a break?”

He shook his head. That would be why he had no lunch, or refreshment at all. Anyone who worked the fields always rested with a full beer or lemonade or pond, depending on how thirsty they were. I offered him some nuts from my lunch. He munched and talked at the same time. He was surprisingly articulate: “Are you on a break?”

“I’m not working,” I said.

He squinted at me. “What do you do with the day?”

“Get knocked over by jackals.”

He rubbed his hands on his nice slacks, and then regarded the sort of oily residue it had left behind. This is why you shouldn’t wear nice clothing, it shows all the nastiness much more readily. “I really am sorry about that. I try to control it but once it starts settling. You know, you work with what you’ve got. It’s the four legs. I think it just gets clumsy and overenthusiastic. It’s better than being a baby giraffe. I had to apologize all the time when it just sidestepped into people. Being anywhere busy was terrible.” He gave up on the pants. “What’s yours?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” He looked all around me. With his gaze this much closer I felt like crossing my arms over my chest. I waved to bring his attention away from me. “I guess yours won’t settle for a few years, or course.”

Settling seemed the worst part of this. I had some sort of vicarious dread fill me. “My animal isn’t outside of my, thanks. It’s not going to settle into anything. I don’t have time to look after it; I’ve got to look after my brothers’.”

He took another bunch of nuts without asking, but by now I didn’t really want them. He breathed around them, then managed, “Why do you have to look after them? Aren’t they capable?”

Of course they were, and I didn’t really do anything with their animals except avoid them, when they were around. My brothers did all the taking care of, and I just sort of hovered and wondered what would happen if they turned around and their animals wandered off or stuck a paw in the blender or an organ in the path of a speeding car. “As best as they know how, I suppose.”

“Some people could be better," he said diplomatically. Even though I led him to the implication, I didn’t like it. “So are you here to see how other people do it? Learned anything? Do none of them want their animals on the outside, like you?”

This question bothered me the most because even before I opened my mouth, I knew I didn’t have a straight answer. Hector sort of liked having his animal around, because he was never alone. Daniel liked to curl up with his and keep warm. Theo and Jasper were always entertained. Even Elliot, whose animal was small, didn’t seem to hate having it on the outside. And beyond that, I didn’t actually know if I hated having my animal on the outside.

“I’ve never had my animal on the outside.” I’d never tried. I could see him processing the fact that I’d never tried.

He took another handful of nuts. Maybe he needed them to think. He held one out to the jackal that appeared at his side. It’s face slid into a meerkat’s face, and then back, quickly. The young man didn’t even seem to notice when, jackal-formed again, it draped itself over his lap, like Daniel’s coyote when he was watching television. The young man tipped his head over and squinted in the sun. “You know, I think yours would be a little wild.”

I wouldn’t tell Hector about this conversation. He liked to say, I told you so. I told the young man, “Maybe that’s why we moved to Vanattan.”

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay