I went to the park today to let my pet snail, Snaily, go. In my adult life I've gotten less creative with my pet names. For instance my last gold fish's name was Ball and the pet rat I had a few years back was named Rat-fink. When I was younger though I had a lizard named spooky because he had a pattern in his scales near his plump tail that resembled a ghost when you tilted your head just right. Then there was Princess Squeebers the kitten I dressed in pink dresses made for poodles. I guess somewhere along the line I lost my talent in naming pets, because as I was holding Snaily, the snail, in my hands today; I couldn't help but feel slightly sad that it had come to this. Snaily's other snail comrades, snail 1 and snail 2 have recently passed away because every mosquito in Kansas City decided to lay their eggs in my fish tank, and apparently they attack things even in the water. I don't think they were actually harmed by the larva, I literally think they pestered my snails into their shells where they starved. I figured the mosquito larva would just spring wings soon and fly out the window in one big swarm. Instead they attached themselves to my poor snails and annoyed them to death.
But Snaily was hanging on for dear life and I knew I had to let him go. I drove to the nearest park and sat by the water inspecting the intricate details in his shell. I half hoped one of the children running and playing near by would come up to me and ask if they could see the snail. I would say yes, and unload my wealth of knowledge on snails to the curious kid, while the mother joined in and we all waved goodbye to my snail as he slowly meandered into the depths of the man made pond. I don't know why I wanted this to happen but I played it in my head for the entire duration of my cigarette. I think it's because the kid in me that fell so in love with that snail wanted to share the burden of letting it go with another kid who would understand the magical strangeness of letting an animal go back to the world.
Then, before I let Snaily go, a toddler came up to me and said, "Whats dat in yeour hand?" FINALLY, I thought, now I don't have to do this alone! "It's an apple snail, I'm letting him go in the big water because he wasn't happy in my fish tank." The kid grabbed Snaily out of my hand, but did it gently, as if he knew it was a fragile creature. His mother who was holding his other hand, slapped it out of his curious palm, "Get that nasty ass thing out of your hand." Snaily plopped into the water, and the mother of the year all but ripped the kids arm out of socket as she drug him away, scolding him. It didn't go as I had planned, "what a total bitch" I mumbled under my breath, just loud enough so she could hear it from twenty feet away.
As I watched Snaily spiral into the water, slowly entering a depth that the sun could not reach; I couldn't help but be reminded of how terrible I am with animals and pets. Try as I might to love them and take care of them, they always end up dying or freezing to death. When I was about 10 I had a pet rat named Ratski, Rat-fink's mother. Ratski decided to sneak out of her cage and rape my brothers pet rat, named Rat. A few weeks later Ratski gave birth to 14 babies behind the dry wall of our downstairs living room. I guess there wasn't a lot of food back there because when my dad cut a hole into the wall with a power saw, she had eaten a considerable amount of her children. "Throw these rats outside where they belong" my father bellowed as he began patching the massive hole in our wall. "But it's snowing outside and they don't have hair yet." "They will grow hair when they have a reason to." So I lovingly set the 8 baby rats into a soft pile of snow. I checked on them the next day and they were still there! Only they were frozen. I stood there staring at them, wondering why they couldn't move, where body heat came from, and if it was my fault they were dead.
Accidentally murdering an entire litter of baby rats is one thing, but intentionally killing a baby blue jay when I was 6 turned out to be much more traumatic than one would expect. It was an ordinary day in the prevailingly boring town off Stillwell Kansas, and I was forced to go outside and socialize with the neighborhood kids after spending half of my day playing hangman on a toy computer. My brother must have been digging holes somewhere because he was no where to be found. I wasn't the most popular kid on my culdesac, this was reveled to me one day when some ass hole kid named Chase thought it would be funny to slap me in the face with his little brothers shitty diaper. He did it in-front of all five of the other culdesac kids, and they all joined in. But they were the only kids to play with so I learned to make due with torture, after all it beat the hell out of lining up my stuffed animals and yelling at them for not cleaning my room. There was one kid named Joshua, he was my age, and he was my best friend when no one else was around.
Alone, we would play power rangers in his basement, feed his dog mustard sandwhiches and laugh when the dogs farts smelled the hole house up. Before school each day I was dropped off at Joshua's house, at the end of our street, where he lived with his grandparents who were comically old. My mom left for work before the sun came up, so sometimes Joshua would still be sleeping. On those mornings I would crawl into bed with him, and we would giggle under the covers, sometimes falling asleep against each other. He was my first crush, my purist crush. It was the kind of crush kids get before they are tainted with the poison of sex, lust, and emotions. So when I was sent outside to play I looked for Joshua, even though he pretended not to know me around the other boys.
I stepped outside and into the sun. I could feel the sun on my scalp, my hair was white and thin as a child; my skin was even whiter. I felt my mother watching me so I walked towards the kids in the distance. They were in the middle of a field in a circle yelling when I got to them. I slowly edged my way to the circle keeping my head down, because it was best to wedge yourself into the group rather than come running. When I got close enough to see inside the circle, my eyes were immediately fixated on the baby blue bird they were kicking and poking back and fourth. There were no trees around so it must have just begun to learn flight, and got just far enough to land in a field. I've never been an intimidating person, a truth I was forced to accept when I was 16 and worked as an usher at a movie theater. I asked a group of kids to keep it down during a movie. Somewhere between getting a 40 ounce coke thrown at me, and cleaning up the pee they left me under the seats, I realized that perhaps I'm not the most assertive person in the world. But something came over me and I jumped in front of the bird and flailed my arms like a lunatic, telling them to stop hurting it. To my surprise it worked, because they ran away laughing.
I remember looking at the baby bird and knowing it wasn't going to live, and because I recently had my toe nail ripped clean off by dropping a can of tomato sauce on my tender six year old foot, I understood what pain was. I also understood that the baby bird was in pain. I picked up a rock that was stuck in the earth nearby and hovered over the baby bird with the rock held high above my head. I watched it's broken wings try to flap away, but instead of flight, it let out sounds. I looked at Joshua who was lagging behind the other boys who were almost home. I threw the boulder down, crushing the bird underneath. Joshua stopped and looked back at me, he waited for me as I ran to him. He was crying. I think I was too, I don't really remember how I felt. All I remember thinking was that I had to let the baby bird go. Joshua and I ran side by side, confused in the magical strangeness of letting an animal go back into the world.
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