Cora stepped off the bus onto the woodland path where the pre-dawn hour rang with the chirruping of spring peepers. Among the pines and shin-high carpet of ferns, she stole a moment to stand and listen, letting the cool air settle on her brow. Then she hurried to the entrance, flanked by an escort of moths, for her first official volunteer shift at SOAR, the Sanctuary for Orphaned Animal Rehabilitation.
It was quiet inside, the graveyard shift, with few staff shuffling about. She hung her coat on a peg and smoothed her bunny print scrubs she’d needlessly gone to the trouble of ironing. She was assigned to the nursery. Through its windows, Cora watched Simon, who would train her. During the orientation, the volunteer coordinator had prepped the newbies for Simon as if they were telling stories around a campfire: “We call him The Lord of the Nursery. He’s so good with the animals that even the skunks don’t spray him.”
Through the window, Simon appeared to be whistling. He pivoted his long body on a stool between two surgical trolley carts, his lips puckered as if balancing an invisible Cheerio. He swung his blond hair away from his wire-rim glasses as he measured dull yellow formula into plastic syringes and slipped them into rows of graduated sizes on a stainless silver tray arranged with bandages, eye droppers, ointments, swabs, and cotton balls.
The coordinator had offered some tips. “Full disclosure: Simon is an excellent teacher, but when he gets stressed, he can get tetchy. If he seems out of sorts, take a break—as in leave the room—give him space. And don’t expect eye contact . . .” By the time she’d finished, the volunteers stared as if they were watching a full moon rise while a werewolf chuffed in the mist.
Cora had grabbed the early shift so she’d have time to check on her father at the nursing home after and still get to her paying job on time. Until her last visit three days ago, she’d been able to see him every day, but she hadn’t been able to drag herself back.
Gathering herself to meet Simon, she reached to fluff her curls, then remembered the brigade of small bruises on her wrist and yanked her sleeve over them. She fixed her gaze on Simon’s military precision, which she would have to match. With skunks and squirrels. But if that was what SOAR demanded, she’d hitch up her bunny scrubs and deal with it.
She tapped on the glass. Simon glanced at her, motioning her in with a toss of his horsey hair. Before she could snap on latex gloves, he began. He held a baby skunk over a sink and rubbed its belly until it peed and pooped. The kit was all of three inches, fuzzy, pinkish, eyelids shut.
“Do you get this?” he asked. He hadn’t shaken her hand, and his gaze landed on her shoulder as if addressing a parrot perched there.
“Stimulate the bladder after feeding, or it will rupture. Its mother would lick where you’re rubbing,” Cora recited.
“At SOAR, you are God and Mother Nature rolled into one.”
“A megalomaniac’s dream.”
Simon took no notice and scooped up another baby skunk and showed her how to hold the wriggly kit and slip a formula-filled syringe between its lips. As Cora cradled the kit, the damage on her wrists was again visible and she angled away.
He spun around and faced four narrow lanes of long steel tables bearing laundry baskets, cardboard boxes with cutout holes, and cages filled with litters of squeaking newborns—raccoon kits, groundhogs, and chipmunks along with the skunks and squirrels. All were ravenous, dropped off by human moms and dads on their way to work, unwilling to have their children’s finds become furniture-chewing pets.
“Let’s get them warm, fed, and sorted. It’s on us if they die. That’s the job in a nutshell. Blankety-boo!” He whisked a cloth cover off a basket as in a magic trick. Plumes of stench sprouted all around them. Inside the basket, more skunk kits ransacked their bedding and squirmed in the folds.
Cora gagged. “People say the skunks don’t spray when you’re around.”
“Wicked farters though.” Pointing to a tall garbage bin painted with the letters P-CHOW, he said, “Put the dead ones in there. Set them in. Don’t throw them. No slam dunks. Even if they’re dead, we’re gentle.”
Simon’s way of speaking struck Cora as a little off. His syllables, so precise, trudged one in front of the other, at odds with his jolting bodily rhythms.
The room was bathed in stark fluorescent light. Simon and Cora worked for the next few hours steering the carts between the tables, discarding the dead, feeding the living. The tiny neonates made smacking noises as they guzzled formula. Simon kept eyeballing Cora’s technique and she tried not to let it irritate her. She could do this in her sleep.
The word “tetchy” dogged her. Lately she seldom met a word that didn’t have consequences, and she checked new ones for booby traps. She’d lost count of the mystifying terms foisted on her in the past several months, one corrosive syllable after another burning through the hull of her future. Alzheimer’s, power of attorney, medical proxy, insufficient funds.
Forced to quit college at the start of her junior year, she’d hopped aboard the sinking, seasick business of her father’s degenerative brain disease. Her smooth-sailing world of professors, researchers, and dorm mates morphed into a new academy—a relentless squall of doctors, healthcare bureaucrats, lawyers, and accountants. Keeping her father alive had exhausted his modest assets, including her college fund. Her goal, veterinary school, with its six-figure price tag, was now out of the picture, the picture of what she would do with the rest of her wasted life.
Every so often Simon’s whistling shattered their peaceful industry with the sounds of Spring, the first concerto of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Simon’s notes screeched with pterodactyl fury and Cora’s shoulders shot up to her ears. His Vivaldi was a far cry from the melody that Cora’s mother, dead ten years, had hummed on Sunday mornings while whipping up pancake batter with just-picked blueberries. She’d add cornmeal, “for substance,” and give Cora her epic believe-in-yourself wink.
When she thought Simon wasn’t looking, Cora paused in her tasks to cradle an infant to her heart. When the survivors were quiet and expelling air peaceably, Simon lifted the garbage bin. He groaned and froze rock-still. Cora was sure he’d hurt his back and stepped around the table to help.
“Time to go.” Simon’s voice was tight, his brow an accordion. His body cemented in place, his lips moved wordlessly, and his pupils were riveted on the wall behind her, as if watching something scale it, until his head flopped all the way back. He still held the bin.
“Simon?”
He whistled a full-on offensive.
After an interminable moment, mid-note, he spoke to the stratosphere. “You can go now.”
“My shift isn’t over.”
“Then get rid of this.” Simon dropped the bin and lurched out of the nursery.
Cora looked around for a lid. She had no idea what had just happened with Simon, but she’d gotten a clue about “tetchy.” She carried the garbage out into the corridor and asked a woman in a hedgehog print where to empty it.
“You want the P-CHOW barn. Outside. We feed the dead to the predators. You know. Cycle of life.”
Cora stepped into the warm sunlight and inhaled the vapor trail of the SOAR compound: the mushroomy scent of mulch and loam, the sharp pinch of drying hay, the sweetness of early blossoms, the animal musk. The name, Sanctuary for Orphaned Animal Rehabilitation, was a misnomer—the clinic treated injured wildlife alongside orphans, and was a top-flight teaching hospital for veterinary students. They treated native wildlife as well as rescued domestic and farm animals, even creatures hidden in the margins—the occasional star-nosed mole some kid had captured.
She lugged the bin along a path past a tidy network of white clinic buildings, faded barns, kennels, outdoor pens, and flight cages. A stream sparkled and skipped off into the distance toward the uncultivated boundaries of wetlands, meadows, and woods. Animal Shangri-La. Cora’s dream had been to work here someday as a full-fledged vet, not some no-credentials volunteer. But at least she was here. Ironically, she’d gotten here a lot sooner than the five years it would have taken to score an internship or residency.
P-CHOW was painted in large letters on the hanging door of a dusky barn in a half-mowed field. A worker at the barn was wearing a black T-shirt with a graphic of a cat reading To Kill a Mockingbird. He explained that P-CHOW was short for Predator Chow. “Nothing is wasted here. These’ll go in the freezer. Some will be minced.”
“A gourmet ending,” Cora said, flashing on her mother hand-grinding goose livers for the holiday pâté.
“I like that.” Simon appeared at Cora’s side. Where had he come from?
“Let me show you something.” Simon’s collar was wet, perhaps from splashing water on his face. Otherwise, he seemed uninhabited by whatever had taken hold in the nursery. He pulled on leather gloves and led her through a stand of trees where a breeze nicked at the leaves until they came to a weathered shed. Large screened windows ran the length of it and more were on its roof. Simon ducked inside, and Cora heard him greet someone in a voice for reciting nursery rhymes. He stepped back outside with a large pack slung off his shoulder and, balancing on his hand, a Cooper’s hawk. He lifted a leather headdress from the bird’s blue-gray head.
“Brad, meet Cora.”
Brad’s wing feathers were a metallic hue, and ladders of rust-colored rungs patterned his chest. Leather jesses dangled from his feet. The bird shook his head and focused the pupils of his orange-red eyes on Cora’s.
“Brad was found half-starved with an open shoulder wound. He was a ragged soul, weren’t you Big Bird?” Brad stretched a little taller. “He’s healed up and has a good chance of release.”
Simon held out a pair of gloves. “You take him. Time for his flying practice. I’ll teach you.”
Brad stepped onto her arm and cuffed his talons around her wrist. He turned his head, scanning the field. Inside the glove, Cora’s bruises stung, but she was good right where she was, hawk in hand, and nowhere else.
Simon lifted a cyborg from the backpack, a drone with dangling strings attached. He fixed one to an orange tulip-shaped piece of fabric and the other to a dead mouse. Simon dialed the drone skyward, the prize trawling the air.
“Let him go.”
Cora dropped the jesses and Brad sailed after the lure, latching onto the meat in seconds. Surely, he meant to keep going forever, but stalled midair, losing the current, and flapping sloppily above the wide meadow. Cora clutched her rabbit smock as the bird floundered earthward.
“Keep your eyes on it. Wait for it.”
The “tulip” opened into an orange frock—a miniature parachute slowing the bird’s descent. Brad steadied his wings and landed on his feet. He strutted through the grass to Simon, who was sitting back on his heels waiting to greet him. Brad hopped back onto his wrist.
Simon looked up at her with something like a dare. “Stick it out and you’ll get to know all our patients.”
Oh, she’d stick it out, she thought. Cora’s heart was still in the sky.
The next day, after the morning feeding, Cora took her break on a bench under the portly crimson buds of a dogwood tree. The beauty of SOAR, the urgency of keeping the orphans alive, combined with Simon’s . . . whatever it was . . . his moments . . . were a lavish distraction from her father.
Just a month ago, his condition had taken a sharp turn. Moments after Cora had changed his blue plastic bed pad, he soiled himself. “We’re never going to make it out of here!” he screamed. He dug his fingers into Cora’s shoulders and hoisted himself up, kicking his bony feet free of the sheets. She struggled to lay him back down, her shoulders burning. He fought harder—“Never, never, never!”
She folded him back onto the bed and he collapsed into the pillows. She wiped his tears and let hers fall as she washed his bottom and genitals. Her father was right. Never. She made the call.
At the nursing home, he blinked on and off, alternating between combat and newborn quiescence. Cora put the house on the market and managed. She thought of the courses she was missing and her classmates who knew nothing of the plunge into responsibility. Adulting. They tried it on like it was an elective, with family standing by to catch them if they fell. Her parents were already old when they had her. She had no siblings, no living aunts or uncles. Had no one considered that she might need somebody someday? Bitterness congealed in her throat and she hoped it would go away.
Simon sat down next to Cora on the bench, startling her out of her reverie. He loomed over her, a kindly scarecrow, shy and quiet. There were things Cora wanted to ask him; she wasn’t sure how.
“Do you ever wonder,” he said, “how you can go through your day being a person who loves the sky or human beings or rhubarb pie, and still, no one sees who you are? But if you do something small, almost invisible, you are so much yourself you don’t need anything else?”
Cora knew exactly what he meant—but her cell phone rang. “Hold that thought, please,” she said. It was Elizabeth, a nurse from the Alzheimer’s facility. She asked after Cora’s injuries.
When Cora last visited her father, she’d set a chair by his bed and read the paper to him. Elizabeth said he found Cora’s reading voice soothing, but Cora doubted anyone could know what went on inside him. Maybe her reading was grating, random sentences pinballing around the room.
She slapped the paper shut and announced to her dad, “I have great news!” She’d secured the gig at SOAR, and would be gaining more experience than she would as an undergrad. She thought it would put a smile on his face, his eternally sturdy kid.
“Goddammit, Cora! Saving rodents! Don’t you see what’s happening?” He yelled and seized her wrists. “YOU’RE WASTING YOUR LIFE.” Over and over, “You’re wasting your life.” His voice brayed wet and hoarse while his fingers and thumbs tattooed her soft tissue, deep into the metacarpals, until Elizabeth and another nurse wrested his hands away. The bruises smoked across her wrists.
On the phone, Elizabeth said, “Your father has been asking for you. Of course, he has no memory of the . . . event. He’s lonely and depressed. We’ll make it safe for you.”
Cora said nothing.
“Even though dementia changes a person’s mood and behavior, they’re still the same person who has always loved you.”
Cora’s thoughts thrashed inside her skull. Going back to that place, to that thing that had once been her parent.
“The longer you stay away, the more he’ll have changed by the next time you see him,” Elizabeth said, as if Cora’s father was growing up instead of disappearing.
“If he’s so demented, what possible fucking difference could it make?”
Simon bolted from the bench. She’d forgotten he was there.
“Oh, God,” Cora said.
“There are counselors here you can talk to,” Elizabeth offered.
Cora hung up.
She raced back to the nursery. She pulled on the door. Locked. Simon stood on the other side. She could see his chest rise and fall under his lab coat.
Cora put her face up to the glass. “Please, Simon, what happened?”
Simon opened the door a crack, his foot wedged against it. “Gale force. Can’t come open. Too much velocity, viscosity.”
“I don’t understand, Simon.”
“IF HE’S SO DEMENTED, WHAT POSSIBLE FUCKING DIFFERENCE COULD IT MAKE?” Simon locked the door and backed away.
Cora steered herself out of the building. The sky was too blue, the grounds a pandemonium of green.
She brooded on one bus and then another on her way to her shift at Pet Euphoria. Was it her fault Simon had gotten upset, or was it his for reacting to something that had nothing to do with him? And why had he become unintelligible? She searched “bizarre speech,” scrolling on her phone for clinical definitions, symptoms, and testimonies.
Schizophasia. Disorganized speech. Word salad. Neologisms or non-words. An altogether involuntary stress response. Examples: Sheep suffer blue trains. Hands ran.
Velocity. Viscosity.
She tried making some up, but it was hard.
Zoonosis halitosis.
Fruit flying nuns.
Delusions higher than air.
Muppet talk. It was like a game, if you had a choice about it.
She read personal accounts of men and women white-knuckling it across the surface of time pursued by serial killers and devils no one else could see or hear. One woman saw her own face bleed in the mirror and watched her arms fall off. Another found out her boyfriend was cheating on her and he claimed she was hallucinating again, but the woman wasn’t so crazy she couldn’t catch an asshole in a lie. Now she was medicated and chugging along nicely as a Hollywood makeup artist, thank you very much.
No one claimed it was a picnic, but what impressed Cora was that, with help, one could be batshit crazy and still do okay, even succeed professionally, marry, and not suffer fools. Some of their dreams were lost causes, but they themselves were not.
When Cora arrived at Pet Euphoria, a big box chain, Macabre Monica was already on shift. Monica had earned the moniker for performing her Wuzzy bit for customers. She reveled in spooking them.
Her routine required an indentured straight man, Wuzzy, a docile but fearsome-looking tarantula with a black hourglass waist, five shaggy inches of red-banded legs, and eight glowing eyes. He balanced on Monica’s bare bicep, tattooed with a sleeve of thorny cacti and a cow skull, with a spider’s face peering from the eye socket. Monica danced across the warehouse-sized store with the hairy rider to greet shoppers under the hemp trees.
“It’s okay, he’s normally a couch potato,” Monica cooed to a circle of wary patrons. “Wuzzy does like to sprint and jump when he’s in the mood, and you can never predict when that will be.”
A tarantula is sensitive to changes in altitude. Monica would lift her arm eye-level to a customer and Wuzzy would lunge toward his audience, all eyes forward, provoking shrieks, gasps, and blood pressure spikes.
Cora hated the whole business. She busied herself cleaning fish tanks and restocking shelves of ceramic divers and mermaids and fake coral reefs. She checked her phone obsessively, terrified that someone from SOAR might text-fire her for freaking out Simon. “Sorry it didn’t work out.” Sad-faced emojis and a thumbs-down.
She straightened a plastic mermaid, and phantom impressions of Brad’s talons tingled along her arm.
Cora and Monica were on closing duty. While Cora swept the floor, Monica pranced around, transferring her passenger from one palm to the other as if her hands were Ferris wheel gondolas. She congaed in Cora’s direction singing, “C’mon, baby, roll that spider!” Wuzzy had had it as much as Cora and made a kamikaze leap onto the floor, scurrying for safety. Cora brought the broom down hard on the creature, harder than she’d intended. When she lifted the bristles, Wuzzy lay still, potentially a twenty-nine-dollar loss that Cora would have to pay back to the store.
Cora grabbed the spider barehanded, marched him over to his terrarium, and set him down. “He’s just stunned,” she said.
Monica backed away and did a hurried check of the hamsters, mice, guinea pigs, rats, and parakeets before leaving. Cora pushed on, bleary-eyed, and finished the floors before looking in on Wuzzy. He was crouched over a cricket leg, apparently in tip-top tarantula condition. He had felt surprisingly velvety and breakable against her palm. Cora was so relieved she cried. Then she bawled.
The front desk staff setting up at SOAR for orphan drop-off was friendly. No sign that Cora was in disfavor. At the nursery door, Simon, looking pasty and exhausted, waved her inside.
“We’ll work. Then talk.” His voice was flat, eyes glassy. They worked the aisles in silence, feeding and sorting. Simon shattered the air with a train whistle, one long drawn-out weary note.
They cleaned up the sticky feeding instruments at the sink.
“If I’m acting scary, it means I’m scared. I react to unfamiliar stimuli. I have an illness.”
They continued down the rows, wiping the metal surfaces. Cora stopped at a basket and picked up a silky red squirrel; it smelled like urine and squeaked adorably. She wiped it with a damp cotton ball.
“I’d like to understand.” she said.
“Before I got sick, voices came from outside my body. Thoughts were thoughts and voices were voices.” He tapped both his temples. “It would never have occurred to me it could be any other way, and then they become one flame. I was a useless piece of DNA. I needed to die. I should slice myself to pieces. That kind of thing.”
“Did your family know?”
“How could they not? I was raving. My parents ferried me to and from emergency rooms and locked wards. They were solid even though they were terrified of me. Imagine caring for someone you fear—but I never felt like a raw deal as a son.”
He slumped on his lab stool, his mane flopping over his forehead. He was quiet for a moment, then raked his hair, pushed away the stool roughly, and began pacing. “Here’s a secret. Do you know why I whistle? To be louder than the hallucinations. To keep them at bay. That’s the best I can do.” His voice rose, “But what I want, what I need, is to claw open my skull, gouge out the voices, hurl them straight back to hell.”
Cora slipped the squirrel back into its cage.
“The voices are still in me, but their volume is lower. My brain floats like a barge on a chemical sea. I was in school to be a veterinary anesthesiologist . . . now I do this.” His arm swept toward the creature encampment. “I’ve learned to live in service of increasing specificity.” He reached into a basket of infants. “I’ll be able to do this well for a long time.”
“Thanks for telling me, Simon.” Cora dabbed cotton balls against the wet stains on her scrubs.
“Not everyone can handle me. Few come back the next day.”
“Sometimes not for several,” Cora said, picturing her father’s knobby limbs, whisk-broom hair, and frantic, pleading eyes.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Cora said. For the first time, she wondered if her father’s rage was at himself.
“You’re a natural at this. Patient. Competent. I can hire an assistant. I’d like you to think about it.”
Cora’s mind was airborne, Brad chasing the lure. When she reached to hug Simon, he took a step backward.
“A simple yes is fine. Still your boss.” He extended his hand.
Cora gave her notice at Pet Euphoria. Her manager paid out her wages minus twenty-nine dollars. For being a good employee, he let her take the terrarium and some crickets, too, as if one naturally took a tarantula to a family crisis. She ignored Monica’s request for a last dance.
She carried Wuzzy off the bus into the Alzheimer’s ward, avoiding the nurses, and set the terrarium under a lit lamp on the dresser in her dad’s pricey institutional room. Floral curtains on the windows, not too cheerful, not too bland. Dinner was over and her father was clean and in bed. She pulled a chair up beside him.
“I remember you, but who’s that?” He pointed across the room.
“An orphan.”
“Oh, honey,” he said, reaching for her fingers. She slid them out of reach. He fell silent, his eyes open, no threat to her.
“Dad?”
He was unresponsive. Vacant. She didn’t want him vacant. Or dead. Or even living it up beyond her reach in a parallel universe, if that’s where he was. She wasn’t ready for any of it. She wished she’d let him hold her hand, that she’d held on in reply.
She inhaled sharply and shook open the newspaper. In no particular order, she began reading sentences aloud. “Almond producer misled investors . . . new brain research promises . . . giant panda celebrates birthday . . . wildcard wins spelling bee . . .” She let loose. “Misled panda wins farm . . . bees spell wildcard . . . HAPPY ALMOND BRAINS!”
Low voices and footfall in the corridor ebbed and flowed from the room. Time was in no hurry to show her what would come next. She stood and the newspaper wafted to the floor, and crossed to the dresser. Wuzzy was on his back, an inkblot.
The guilt rushed at her. She’d pushed too much change on the creature, and it had killed him. Just like she’d forced her father into this place and let him float away like a deserted space station.
She rested her cheek against the glass. It was cold and she felt a strange urge to bite it. Poor Wuzzy. His legs were bent like flexible straws at the bright red band around his “knee caps.” The pointed tips drooped above the bulb of his abdomen.
“Wait, that’s not right,” she informed the room.
Tarantulas die on their stomachs.
He wasn’t dead, he was growing.
His legs began to stir, flexing in unison as if nudged by a passing current. She knew that at the microscopic level, he was vibrating, wriggling free of his carapace, the cuticle-thin exoskeleton. It was a ballet of the birth of new limbs. Cora wondered if Wuzzy could hear his husk crackle.
The spider’s new head burst the casing of his old one, leaving behind a deflated helmet of cellulose.
In slow motion, the molt cranked out new fangs, wet and pale, curving between his pincers. The seams of the carapace ruptured one fiber at a time, exposing fresh sternum and belly. His femora pulsated and the fangs blushed orange and hungry. For the finale, he slid the remaining sheath down his lower body as if sliding off a rented tutu. He flipped himself upright. Dewy. Reborn.
Cora pinched the tattered exoskeleton in a tissue and carried it to the small step can in the adjoining bathroom. She popped the lid open, set the package inside—no slam dunks—and then returned to her dad, took his fragile, thin-skinned hand in hers, and closed her eyes.
They were in their backyard. He lifted her to see two blue eggs in a robin’s nest, then set her down, and she ran ahead to the newly planted snapdragons in the flowerbed, where she knelt and pressed her nose into the soft petals.
“Daddy, make them snap!”
He squatted beside her and pinched the flower and it opened and closed like a mouth. He tugged her cloud of light brown curls and joked that her hair was an entomologist’s dream, a shelter for lacewings and emerald caterpillars. Luna moths would alight to breathe secrets in her ear.
She was listening.
*“First, You Crack” is one of four finalists from The Vincent Brothers Review’s HOUSEKEEPING-themed short story contest. The other three finalists—“Knick-Knack” by Lee Huntington, “Aidan and Isobel” by Ed Davis, and “The Wolf Girl” by Ant Torres—have also appeared in The Vincent Brothers Review Weekly Reader, and our readers will be surveyed soon to choose the final place awards for this HOUSEKEEPING contest. Stay tuned!
I am fixated on Welsh literature at the moment and just started reading Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor. First, You Crack is a story of healing broken souls, recovering from opportunities lost, and unexpected resilience, all themes I am drawn to for inspiration.
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