Small Animals – Shannon Waite

October 9, 2024

SNOW BUNNY

I know Grace from Vacation Bible School, where she was pig number three in our “Three Little Pigs” puppet show. I don’t remember how she got the part, but she probably wouldn’t have taken it if she’d have known how it was going to end up.
        We spent hours practicing for the Friday recital between the weekdays’ Bible verses and hymns we recited. Something about performing became the thing us kids on summer vacation enjoyed the most. On the final day, we kneeled in the same way we would at communion, but behind a small, wooden stage. 
        Vincent from school told us one time that our hearts are the size of our fists. Our little fists were placed deep in the stuffed skins of each puppet. Voices we’d never used before cackled from our throats with new emotions as we practiced our lines. Danny, our wolf, became an expert at huffing and puffing, and during our final rehearsal, when he got to each pig’s house, he blew the houses down with an enduring sufferance. Being number three, Grace’s pig built a sturdy, brick house that couldn’t be blown down. Danny though, determined, blew and blew and kept blowing, despite the script that told us the third house does not fall. As our teacher Mrs. Blanchard waved at Danny to cut it out, Grace became flustered by his dominance and knocked her own little brick house down. 
        Mrs. Blanchard told us that’s why we practice. It makes perfect. 
        Danny told Grace it didn’t matter, she’d never be good at anything.
        Grace’s pig built something sturdy, something that couldn’t be blown, but then it did. I went to the bathroom and cried about the fall. Or maybe I cried for the wolf. I can’t remember. 

Nowadays, Grace spends her time as a snow bunny, playing hard-to-get. She failed out of college and couldn’t go back home or else her mom would know, which means she started hanging out in the Colorado mountains instead.
        When the men in puffy coats and thick gloves at the lodge try and talk to her, she rolls her eyes and says, “I stopped dating ski instructors when I was sixteen.” She’s quoting Aspen Extreme. No one ever catches her. 
        Then, like clockwork, she wiggles closer to them. So close she can see the spots of hair on their chins they missed shaving. 
        If you promise not to tell, the truth is that she actually only started dating ski instructors after watching Aspen Extreme on Louanne’s television in the dorm. Then she splurged on a blush Cordova Mogul jacket with matching blush Bormio pants, because girls who look like those movie stars are cute and probably bag a lot of men. And that’s when she learned that guys like it when you play games, and that it doesn’t take long, in an outfit like that, to catch some men holding their poles, looking over at you from out in front of the lodge, like you’re a damn snack. That’s right she is. The actor Paul Gross looked at the women in the movie like they were something to devour too. 
        Robert has never even asked Grace to ski since she let him put his hands down her pants a few weeks ago. She’s all eyelashes now, pressed heavy against his chest, like wet snow, in his room at a charming, vintage European ski lodge when she gets a text from Donovan. He asks when he can see her. Oops. 
        It doesn’t matter that she can’t ski. She’s found one thing she’s good at.

Something about this reminds me of the wolf, but I’m not sure how.

SILVER FOX

My car is parked out front of Taco Bell when my mother tells me about the incredible David Windsor. She holds a basic soft taco, dripping with extra sauce, over her lap. Her black baseball cap is on backwards and the sun crawling just below the horizon in front of us has turned her face orange, almost like an Oompa Loompa from that film about poor people who get taken advantage of. She asks if I know the guy she’s referring to, like he’s any old guy, and I say yes, because his face is all over the new Tommy Hilfiger ads hung up at bus stops and in the mall.
        My mother knew him once. She starts the story with, “Don’t ask how,” because she knows that’s the first thing you’d want to know. Then she says, “He was about eight when the squirrely boys at school first called him Remix after he developed a stutter.” I picture a pack of wild creatures cornering him against a brick wall on the playground. The poor little boy tries trapping the squirrels, but they’re too quick and instead get closer. “The doctor told his mother he’d probably be self-conscious one day, and that his stuttering might affect his future decisions, like job choices and social circles. Stuttering can control you like that.” In my vision, the squirrels win.
        My mother has suddenly become an expert on how people falter. This is because she is an expert at everything when she wants to be. 
        When David started dating his first girlfriend at seventeen, he asked her, “Wh-wh-why do you like me?” She told him people will like anything that looks good. 
        More than how she knows him, I want to know how she knows that. 
        She tells me David went after modeling gigs. He got the modeling gigs. Attended Met Galas with Victoria Beckham and Naomi Campbell. Started inviting the new It Girl as his plus one to events, holding onto her bony wrist as if she were a party balloon. His photo made all the headlines. No one ever asked him to speak. 
        My mother has a bit of her Fire! sauce smeared down her chin like some kind of blood, the way an animal looks after consuming its prey. I wonder if she’s ever been a predator.
        I ask my mother my first question. “Why are you telling me this?” 
        The sun’s almost lost behind the horizon now and leaves a subtle glow around her face. Less like an Oompa Loompa and more like an angel. 
        “I ran into him at a coffee shop on Santa Monica Boulevard.” She’s finished her taco and when I point out the sauce on her chin, she uses her finger to wipe it off, then licks it clean. “You know,” she adds, like she was waiting for this moment. “It was me. I was the first girl he dated.”
        I imagine my mother noticing David at some bougie coffee shop she can’t afford, smiling with her eyes that are now invaded by crow’s feet as they stand there, facing each other. Her hair spidering in a way it didn’t long before. I’m sure that’s all he could think about. I imagine her bear hugging him, saying, “I like the silver in your hair!” Telling him it looks distinguished, and that he looks really great, even after all these years. Getting in one last word as he turns to leave, “It’s been forever, Remix. Till next time.” He probably said nothing to her. 
        I imagine David with his thick lips and sharp jawline, smiling slyly as the shop door shut behind him, looking like a silver fox.
        I imagine my mother, standing there in her bleached sweatshirt, looking like someone’s first girlfriend.
        I’m not sure if either of them won. It might’ve been the squirrels.

GYM RAT

Little girls play dress up. I was once a little girl. Jenna and I begged our mothers for princess gowns and crowns and glamorous high heels that would transform us. Then for our birthdays, they’d gift us thrift store dresses and dollar store plastic tiaras. With what our mothers gave us, the best we could ever be was some kind of knock off. Nothing like the movie stars we dreamed about.
        In sixth grade, Jenna brought home a Cosmopolitan magazine she stole off the front rack at the grocery store. We laid across her bed on our stomachs and, before we even flipped through the pages, got stuck on the cover. Underneath all the words like ‘Hot Issue’ ‘Sex Poll’ and ‘Feel Sexier Instantly’ was a glowing Britney Spears with unreal blond hair, wrapped in a tight, zipped, spaghetti strap tank top, pulling down her low-ride jeans with her thumbs in the belt loops. I remember my cousin Jeffrey calling Britney a really ‘hot chick’ one time.
        “Why can’t I look like that?” Jenna whined. Her hair was some sort of red-auburn color and kinky, frizzy curls. 
        “You could if you tried,” I lied. 
        But if I’m being honest, she looked too much like a rodent. 

For a minute last year, Jenna’s new year resolution was dependent on me, and that was a bad idea.
        She’d grown into a medium-sized body, built a little like you might imagine a gnome, and definitely not very beautiful. 
        She said, “If we both go to the gym, we’ll hold each other accountable.” 
        So I had to explain to her that first, I’ve never been one to hold anyone accountable, and second, I don’t go to the gym. I’m not that type of woman.
        Then somehow, she figured it out on her own. Just started going. 
        If you’re sick of your looks enough, it seems you’ll do the things you hate, anyway, if you’re promised you’ll look like someone’s idea of perfection. I guess that’s how she ended up a gym rat.
        So she started missing Margarita Mondays, our newest tradition, and then would call me up after to apologize. One day, she told me about the room at the gym for stretching. Said it’s got a small window that lets you see inside. 
        “In there, some girl was dancing.” 
        Apparently the girl was moving her hips in the shape of a crescent moon, like her legs were guiding currents. Her arms spun around her head. Jenna said she wasn’t sure if the girl realized that people could see what she was doing through the window. 
        “It was really weird.” Then I could hear her clear her throat on the other end of the call. “Sorry again for missing margaritas. Promise I’ll be there next week.” But she wasn’t. She also missed the movies on Thursday and eventually I stopped hearing from her altogether. 

When Jenna told me about watching the girl through the window, she told me about how she also noticed the girl’s friend alongside her. Doing the same dance. Jenna laughed, but I imagine her laughter being eaten up by the grunts, almost like growls, on the sturdy weight machines around her. 
        Jenna’s now spent the last year saying “No.” To me, but also to foods, alcohol, and going out. No to time-wasters, drama. No. Instead, she bends her legs at a nice ninety-degree angle so her cherry-shaped ass is parallel to the ground, holding two-hundred-fifty-five-pound weights. She’s glazed in a sticky sweat almost every day to do it, but she’s crossing long red lines through her list of short and long-term goals. 
        That is to say she’s succeeding. 
        Sometimes I think about those other girls I never met, or even saw. 
        Jenna probably exhaled audibly, and gripped the bar, raised her arms. She probably increased the weight that day. To something substantial, unbearable, a personal record. 
        She didn’t have time to dance.

These days, she’s got more of an hour glass shape to her and defined collar bones. Her hair is still a weird red-auburn color. No longer dreams of princess gowns.
        Some people are worried rats might take over. I agree. I mean, I think they’re more likely to than chicks are, although people prefer chicks. 

ROAD KILL

We find dead deer in this area sometimes. They get hit by cars and almost never survive. My mother hit one once when I was about six. It took out the whole front bumper of her car which she never did replace. We got out to look at it in the ribboned streams of our headlights. I remember it. It was a small doe, her back legs pointing straight behind her and her front two crossed, pointing ahead. A splash of blood, like someone threw a paintbrush at the ground, was breaking out of her mouth. The one eye showing was big and black and beautiful. It was open, and it stared into some sort of distance I would one day come to know. My mother didn’t say anything when she picked up the doe’s body and threw it in the backseat like a duffel bag. 
        “Mom, that’s where I’m sitting,” I said.
        “Not any more it’s not. Get in the front.” 
        My mother told me that this meat would last us all winter and there was no way we were going to waste it. I thought about her skinning the flesh from this doe’s body and devouring every last bit.
        She was right. When she cooked it, she made sure it was tender, and forced us to eat it until spring. I sometimes wonder if my mother hit her on purpose.

I saw an opossum on the side of the road last week. It was all smashed, like the way a berry caught under a foot might be, with blood like sweet juice dripping from its nose.
        At first it seemed like someone hadn’t noticed the small animal when they were driving, hit it, and that’s how it ended up there, dead. But then I thought about my mother, and how maybe it wasn’t an accident. 
        By the time I saw it, the ends of its fur had been blackened and textured, like eyelashes sticky with mascara. Its long, narrow snout that had been a nice silver before the crash was tinted a red-auburn from the dirt and blood. It had been destroyed. 
        I kept driving, but couldn’t stop thinking about the creature. It looked like many people had tried to avoid running it over at first. There were swerve marks and tire tracks in the mud next to it. But after a while, they must have realized it didn’t matter. Small animals have short lifespans anyway.

I spent this whole last week mourning the roadside guts like an old figure. I couldn’t stop picturing the animal’s bits, freshly curated on the outskirts of its body by the passing vehicles. There was the lacerated skin, the fractured bones, some bloody insides, and I think I even saw its heart. A little smaller than its paw. I needed to visit it one last time. Something so delicate couldn’t just get forgotten. 
        I realized that I don’t know how or when road kill is removed, but when I went back to check on the thing, it was gone. Barely a stain left over. Only concrete and some wet, plastic bag. A Volkswagen drove by. No animals were near. No more threatened by cars for the time being. 
        I started thinking about my mother, and how she once told me that opossums will occupy other animals’ abandoned burrows. Those small animals will just use what’s already been made. “Lazy,” she said. “They’re lazy.” And I realized the threat is never gone.