Pets
by Abby Frucht
When I was eight I made another of my imaginary friends. She showed up one morning on a scaffold in a tree in a field behind the house I lived in with my mom, my dad, and my older sister, Sid. I was cutting through the field and caught sight of her up there with her schoolbooks, a flashlight, and some leftover pancakes on a thin paper plate, all of which she commanded me to admire.
“They’re blueberry,” she said, and raised the paper plate “to prove it,” causing the pancakes to nearly flop out sideways.
“Also cats,” she said.
She ran an emergency clinic for pets. People brought her their dead pets and she made them live again, she said, and she held out a cat that was stiff as a board, “to prove it,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the sawdusty platform to show off her palsied feet, more twisted then my sister’s. I said I’d bring her a pair of Sid’s braces, to help. “You’ll need to throw them,” she said, since there was no way up. The tree only had branches way on top, and there wasn’t a ladder, and the platform was far too rickety looking to make shimmying toward it a useful enterprise. I was jealous about the pancakes, of which she tilted the whole stack to take a bite then wiped the blue off her mouth with a red bandanna. The problem with her feet was she had no mother or father, she said, but I didn’t believe her. I felt glad and psychedelic, disbelieving something told me by a person I’d invented. Only then I understood that I wasn’t inventing her. She was real. She seemed to like the idea of me needing to crane my neck to scorn her. It made her think herself important. Which she was. To me. But then she scolded, “Stop looking. You’re looking too hard. Turn around when we’re talking and face the opposite way.”
I did as she said. I saw a man in the distance walking away from the field on a road. Dust rose from his shoes in a zig-zag pattern. He held a ladder on his shoulder. He slid the ladder in the bed of a pickup truck, knotted a red bandanna around the outermost rung, and drove it toward town.
I turned back to my friend. “So how do you get up there?” I wanted to know.
“I jump,” she answered. The cat gave a fine meow, like it was just then waking from a long dream.
“Prove it,” I said.
Abby Frucht is the author of Maids and eight books of fiction including Licorice, Are You Mine?, and Fruit of the Month, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Prize.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Pets”? A funny thing is that although I know the name of the girl in the treehouse, she never tells it, and the narrator never asks. It’s a great name. When I made it up, typed it up, and filed it away in my works-in-progress file, I believed I would come back to it and bid it lead me into a longer story, maybe even a book. But that was forever ago already and I find I sort of like the way the name sits off on its high up shelf, like the girl herself, not calling to me. And I do believe she’s actual. I only hope she’s not lonesome. If I ever do get back to her name and to her story, that will be why.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
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