Rose-Colored Glasses

IT WAS EITHER A GOLDFISH OR A SIAMESE KITTEN. I would leave Pets Unlimited with one or the other. Both had their pros, but after making my purchase, neither one seemed possible. The shop was hedged between a nearly vacant comic books store and a Mongolian restaurant that smelled like seaweed.

I walked in and was nearly trampled by racing cats, meowing around, their paws padding across threadbare miniature golf turf. I noted the scum in the fish tanks, the dead mouse in the boa constrictor cage and then the attendant who resembled an asylum escapee, with his one lazy eye wandering and his gut, the size of a large watermelon.

I was in a spell, that was what my mother called it, as if depression was really a form of enchantment, a wish cast by some fairy. I preferred to think of it as a fog that nestled in my head for months at a time and veiled my eyes from seeing anything that mattered. I was always cold and tired, always on the brink of tears.

She had called me last week from her New York studio with the tea whistling in the background.

"Jen, honey—just a minute." She always called to say she was in the middle of something, the talk would have to be short.

"Just get yourself a friend. You know, a pet or something. Juliette bought a goldfish and raves about what it does to the décor of her apartment."

My mother often interchanged relationships with design, calling friends "lovely additions to any cocktail party" and lovers "a real beauty next to the vase."

Feeling the dread stuck in my throat like a cough drop, I swallowed and approached Mr. Escapee.

"You look like a cat buyer," he said, eyeing me with the one good eye. He motioned around him like he was batting flies.

"We got plenty—orange ones, black ones, maybe green ones," and he laughed from his belly, filling the air with a hint of pork rinds.

As he spoke, the feral cats whizzed past again and my head hurt right between my eyes.

"Something else, I think."

In the glass case under the counter, I saw a hairy form on the side of the cage, its legs splayed out in eight directions, orange coloring at the hinges.

"This is Rose. She's a Mexican Redknee." He stepped back to get a better look at her and then picked up the cage and tapped the side.

"You don't want her. She's mean."

"What do you mean, mean?"

"She rears back on her legs when you try to pick her up and fangs at you." To illustrate his point, he did an impression and I nearly fell backward.

She moved only slightly when he tapped, a gentle waver of one leg.

"She doesn't move now because she's molting."

I looked up again.

"They molt once a year and it's really hard on their bodies. They hibernate, real still for about a week and then slip out of their skins much bigger and brighter." He reached for something from the shelf above and pulled out a dried-up shell that resembled a tarantula without its center.

"Was that her?"

"No, that was another one, but this one's doing it right now."

I bent closer. She was very still, the hairs on her legs dotted with tiny flecks of white and orange at her knees. I couldn't imagine her any more beautiful.

"I'll take her."

Rose would make a lovely addition.


Transformations

Fingering her hairy body,
He looks like a boy.
Her eight legs brush his hand, out and in
Like the scrubbers that scared me as a child in the car wash.
She is just as frightening,
Two years old, molted twice.
The mold of her skin, the small replication of who she becomes.

He is 29 years old, same skin,
A boy shedding days to man with no visible shell to drop.

I want to lose my shell
But have no exoskeleton, no drying frame to hang out
     when I've grown.
I change within, some days slightly, others massive tremors.

Lately I feel fit to break,
My skin a stretching tarp pulled sharp against what bursts beneath—

This love for the boy-man,
The transformed patterns of a two-year-old Mexican
    Redknee tarantula,
And me, a girl, two legs, only skin.


TO THE TOP >>