FIRST STORY OF THE NEW YEAR
I've been wondering why so many swear words attack people's mothers, or denigrate women's body parts, why is that? And of course, the following story is not what I'd envisioned when I picked up my pen. That happens to me a lot, ain't it wonderful?



I Swear

They fought all the time. Ann didn’t want to but they did. There was an inevitability of combat whenever they breathed contiguous air, some flammable chemical they spewed onto each other. It sucked.

On Friday she went to the mall and walked just to get out of the war zone. She walked up one side of the mall past a Victoria’s Secret, a jewelry store, a shoe store with shelves of five-inch heeled fuck-me shoes displayed. She made it all the way down to the department store at the end where the cosmetics counters assaulted her with such a wall of stench she gasped air through her mouth as she made a big u turn past the double doors.

Then she walked back down the right side of the same corridor, looking at clothes she would never buy, books she would never read, and gadgets she didn’t recognize but knew she had no use for.

She stopped in front of a pet store, staring at a puppy collapsed in his straw. He didn’t even open his eyes when she tapped on the glass. He looked hopeless, helpless, unable to make an effort to be cute. She thought he could no longer pretend to be the puppy hoping to be picked up, held onto and taken home, now he was just resigned to the four walls and damp straw.

“Oh God, don’t look,” she told herself but took two steps into the store. There was an overcrowded cage of parakeets screeching at each other and jostling wing to wing for a piece of the perch. Ferrets in a glass bin burrowed over and under each other in frenetic motion. Her eyes hurt.

To her left was a wall of glass fronted cells teeming with rats, mice, gerbils and hamsters. They had bright plastic houses to huddle in and those little wire Ferris wheel cages for running. One fat assed hamster that reminded her of her Uncle Jake plodded steadily in his wheel, his eyes glazed over in futility. That. That’s exactly how she felt. Trapped in a wheel, so conditioned to the motion she never noticed the sides were open.
“Step off,” she told the hamster. “Stop running and look over here, there’s no bars on the sides.” Maybe he couldn’t hear her, maybe she yelled.

The knot of young store clerks jammed in behind the counter pawing at each other’s cell phones looked up in alarm. How like the ferrets they looked, she thought, all that frantic misdirected energy.

There was some commotion out in the mall, shouting and pounding footsteps. A security guard who must have been at least sixty chased a Goth dressed teenager out the side doors. The guard was screaming, “Stop! You son of a bitch!” The kid yelled back, “Fuck you, motherfucker!” The clerks ran out of the store to watch the chase.

“How weird,” she told the hamster as she unlatched the door to the parakeets’ cage, “that so many curses are aimed at the mothers, a much maligned group. Cliff does that too, and he’s never even met my mother.”

“Shit, look at that cunt run!” one of the clerks yelped as four more kids thudded past.

“Or genitals or fluids that come out of us,” she added as she tipped over the ferrets’ bin. One of them climbed up her Levis and clawed its way up her jacket onto her shoulder. Two more security guards pounded by, one was a woman whose gun slapped her thigh with each step.

Ann reached into the puppy’s pen, scooped him up and shoved him down the front of her sweater as she strolled through the store opening every cage door she could see. Some were locked and at those she just said, “Sorry, can’t save the world.” She picked Uncle Jake up by the nape of his neck and stuck him in her coat pocket. The wheel went into her purse.

She stood in the middle of the store noticing that some of the animals just sat in their cages, not seeing the opened doors. She clapped her hands together twice and said, “It’s up to you.” Then she walked out the doors past the guards, three spread-eagled handcuffed teenagers, and the gawking crowd of shoppers, into the parking lot.

She had her keys out of her pocket and beeped the van doors to unlock. She got in, slammed her door and checked to make sure all the windows were up. She put the wheel sideways on the floorboards, set the puppy on the passenger seat and told the ferret to get in the back. She opened the glove box for Uncle Jake and jammed in a wad of Kleenex for a nest. Then she checked her purse for wallet, credit cards, cash. “Okay.” She nodded. “Okay.”

When she pulled out onto the street she turned left towards the freeway, thinking, “Only one more thing to decide.” She drove down the boulevard cranking her head left then right and chanting “north or south, north or south,” with every crank. Just before she hit the on ramp the puppy crawled over and tentatively put his paw on her right leg. “North it is,” she said, and hung a right.