YOUR BOYFRIEND KIDNAPS all of the talking animals. They had such a nice existence, before. The talking animals were friendly and enthusiastic. They danced and sang and did stand-up comedy. They dispensed the most excellent advice, it was widely known that the talking animals gave the best advice, always there with a shoulder to cry on and a reasonable way out of a problem. They were deeply anthropomorphic; many of them stood on their hind legs and had opposable thumbs. The talking lions could open a can of beer, the talking kangaroos could play ping-pong, the talking dolphins were able masseurs. It was a happy existence, just an incredibly happy way to live. You wished you were a talking animal, in those days.
But your boyfriend is good at kidnapping, maybe too good. He hunted the talking animals down, one by one. He caught the talking bears, eating tuna sandwiches on their lunch breaks, he caught the talking elephants at their tennis lessons, he caught the talking owls in their adult movie theaters. Most of the talking animals he captured but some of them he killed, because you only need so many talking alligators before you have too many and he has limited space. It’s like a Noah’s Ark thing, he says, but you fail to see the logic in it, the odd numbers of animals, sometimes one or three or five in a cage, the fact that there is no reason for it, that there is no ark or biblical flood or need to repopulate the earth. That he keeps them underground in the dark. Really, you don’t even know what he wants with them, certainly not conversation, not advice.
Life is as terrible for the captured talking animals as it was wonderful before. Your boyfriend is not kind to them. He takes away their clothes—their tiny animal pants!—and doesn’t allow them access to their favorite reality shows. He keeps them in your very dark basement, and it is inadequately ventilated and your boyfriend is not conscientious about cleaning the cages, which are piled haphazardly one on top of the other, all the way to the ceiling. You shudder to think of it, as you spend your days reading on your window seat in the afternoon sun, eating poached eggs alone in your breakfast nook, tending to your beautiful garden. All that, while in your basement there are all those talking animals, most of them professionals, doctors and lawyers and scholars, weeping in their own filth, and when you imagine you can hear them you quickly raise the volume on your radio. You listen to Ira Glass interview a very old man who has had some trouble with a woodpecker attacking his house.
You know one thing for sure: all that talking animal poop is wonderful fertilizer for your garden. The rhododendrons are positively enchanting this year.