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By Root 2368 0

plastic teacups, teakettle, and saucers, a plastic vase stood as centerpiece. From the lip of the table protruded the green plastic stems of fabric flowers. On the table, along with all this mock-Victorian crockery, were strewn several small rubber effigies of beautiful naked women, lankily proportioned and Nordic-featured, with heads of flowing bright blond hair; the women were disturbingly desexed, with smooth nippleless breasts and no discernible genitalia in their crotches, and one of them was, due perhaps to some horrific imaginary accident, missing an arm, for only a plastic peg the same color as her flesh protruded from the socket of her shoulder. Four small chairs that matched the wire table surrounded it, and the lumpy, lifeless forms of stuffed animals were pushed up on the seats of three of the chairs: a rabbit, a bear, and a duck (three animals that in the wild would obviously never sit down together in peaceful communion); the fourth chair was empty—reserved, perhaps, for Elijah. The corners of the room were obscured under mounds of other stuffed animals: a whole cuddly and disorderly menagerie of bears, birds, bunnies, horses, cows, pigs, camels, marsupials, waterfowl, ferrets, badgers, monkeys and—yes—apes. Among all these creatures, all these animals with their sweet dopey unblinking marbles for eyes, and cloth for skin, and cotton stuffing for bones and blood, I hid myself. I burrowed myself deep beneath them, and they enclosed around me, warmly enveloping my body—my cold, hurt, shivering, naked body—and, weak and battle-wracked in my aching bones, from fear and chase and cold and hunger and a thousand other stinging thistles of my fugitive deprivation, I made a soft nest of them, and my mind passed gently into the darkness of sleep, true sleep.

Later—I’ve no idea how much later exactly—my nostrils woke me. I smelled the very distinctive odor of cigarette smoke. The sense-memory had caused me, just before I woke, to dream of my father. For he, fat, mean, implacable Rotpeter, my biological father, was the one with whom I will always associate that odd rank musty smell, half-sweet and half-stink. I saw him squatting on a log in our chimp habitat in the Lincoln Park Zoo, smoking his chest weak and his teeth yellow and making our air stifling with his smoldering ill-gotten and clandestine-kept tobacco. I gently pushed aside the plush curtain of a stuffed pig that lay before my eyes, and peered: there was a girl—a pretty little girl—dressed in jeans and a sweater of azure silver-threaded cashmere. Her hair was brown as a nut and parted precisely straight down the center of her head and falling past her skinny shoulders on either side of her face, which was round as a full moon and nearly as radiant with the luster and smoothness of delicate youth. Her mouth and skin looked like they had been sprinkled with a film of gold dust, and her chipped fingernails were painted alternately red and green, Christmas-tree colors. She sat in the fourth chair, the previously unoccupied chair around the tea table, in the fluffy, motionless, and mute company of bear, bunny, and duck, smoking a cigarette. That’s what had woken me. She brought the white stick to her lips and shallowly inhaled, and as she did the thing deftly crackled and the end of it glowed orange for a moment, and she blew the smoke out from between her gold-dusted shiny lips, and with a poised index finger she tapped on it until a cake of ash crumbled off of it into the hollow of a teacup. The fragile beauty of the girl and the childlike innocence of her surroundings contrasted with jarring sharpness against the unwholesomeness of her activity.

I must have made a noise of some sort then, or a movement, or else the girl sensed she was being watched, because her head snapped toward the pile of stuffed animals under which I lay buried. Perhaps she thought she had heard something and looked, but wasn’t sure what she was looking for amid the jumble of stuffed animals heaped up in the corner of the cottage. Her eyes scanned searchingly over the animals until she