Animal Years, an excerpt

BY LORI GREEN

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Before Hal was the beginning. And the lions, still fresh. There were seven of them, each as big as a bedroom and the color of the sun. I was six-years-old and too happy to try being a novelist. Our family had a backyard with shade and acreage and its own stone bench. The maple by the door was devoted to me, and once a year the lilacs bloomed.

Then for Christmas, my parents decided to teach me about responsibility and placed the job of feeding the Pride squarely on my shoulders. I don’t know how they thought it would work long-term when I wasn’t allowed to handle raw meat. Once my maned and tawny darlings had weakened from hunger, they were checked into one of those chimpanzee retirement communities where fur becomes glossy and grabbable again. They thrived and plumped up and made new friends. I sent them postcards and they wrote back but, as my handwriting improved, theirs plateaued.

I mourned. My parents bought me five Goldfish and an indestructible tank. Thinking they deserved better food than brown clumps from a bottle, I fed them the best our pantry had to offer until they died of salted pretzels and sour candy. I mourned again, but less. The fish had been pretty boring. I missed spending summer afternoons with my lions, falling asleep inside the fuzz of their choral purr.

For my seventh birthday, I asked for a notebook instead of another animal. My parents warned This is your last chance! and bought me a spiral-bound soft-cover. That year I completed my first short-story, The Missing Bird, a highly effective series of cliff-hangers resolved sentence by sentence. I knew I’d never top it so I moved on to novels and churned them out, a prolific kid. It was 1998 and by 2000 I’d begun twelve and finished none.

Now it’s 2020 and I spent over a year filling my last Moleskine. Clearly, it’s time for humility don’t forget, a child can write a novel as well as any adult and is probably better at diagramming sentences so I get down on my knees and beg my kid self for direction. She’s lounging under her maple tree flipping through old correspondences, four feet tall and intimidating as hell. I was never that intimidating girl. She tells me, We’ve been starting novels as hiding places. We think we can store faces behind paragraphs, sneak fictions into immortality. We call it stone-soup, believing stone-soup is about the stone.

This seven-year-old is too clever for me by half. I get humble. Patting my shoulder, she says, Just find a store and buy a copy of The Address Book. Better yet, call Hal. She leaves me with a copy of our original story for guidance.

January 27, 1999 / The Missing Bird

Once upon a time, I had a bird; it could talk. The bird was a big help to the family. He was the only pet we had. One day when everybody was out of the house a thief came. The thief stole my talking bird. When I got home I said, “I’m back from school Mad.” Then my mom and dad told me he was gone.

When Mad was about to be choked because the thief was holding his neck, he kept getting closer and closer to a strange mansion. When he got inside he thought to himself, “I got to get out and find a phone to call Lori.” Mad got out by smashing the door down. He had trouble finding a phone. He finally found a phone he called 536-[xxxx]. I answered the phone. “Mad where are you?” “I don’t know, let’s meet at the park.” The next morning I went to the train station. When I got there I saw Mad. We went home and had a great feast!

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LORI GREEN studied across genre at the New School’s Riggio Program for Writing and Democracy. Her work has appeared in Silver Needle Press, 12th Street Journal, and Whitevines Review. She lives, writes, and paints with her husband in Northeastern Pennsylvania.