My name is Lily Madwhip and I wish everybody would just stop dying.
It’s been three months since my brother Roger got turned into mashed potatoes by a semi. It’s been five weeks since my therapist discovered she had developed an allergy to shellfish. It’s been two days since Mom and I picked out this hamster that I named Whiskers because it’s got so many whiskers and now Whiskers is lying upside down in his hamster wheel with his feet curled up and his little mouth hanging open. He’s got big buck teeth. Maybe I should have named him Buck.
I did not see this coming. How am I even going to explain this to my mom?
I want to say some swears, but I’m out of quarters for the swear jar because I spent my last two at the grocery store in one of those gumball machines only instead of a gumball I got a plastic paratrooper with a parachute who’s currently dangling from the branches of the tree outside my bedroom window.
“Shit.”
Dear swear jar, I O U one quarter.
Paschar sits at my art table holding a red crayon because his hands are perfectly molded for holding something like that. I sat him down earlier to doodle, but he didn’t draw anything. I made a still life using water colors. I like still lifes. I always include Paschar in my work. The one I did today was a bowl of fruit and a vase, because I saw a painting in a museum and people like fruit and vases in their art.
My mom is at the office today. She’s an executive. I asked what an executive does and she said they execute people. Then she and Dad laughed. I didn’t know what “execute” meant at the time, but I found out later, so in school when we had to write about our parents I wrote that my dad was a music teacher and my mom was an assassin. Mr. Porter gave me a check-mark but wrote that next time I should follow the assignment.
Dad’s in the garage right now. I can hear him through the door, tapping on Roger’s drum set, as I carry Whiskers to the kitchen to get one of the little plastic food containers Mom buys in bulk for me to bury pets in. Normally my dad is in his work room, trying to write music, but he hasn’t done a lot of that since Roger died. He said he’s working on a “dirge”. Apparently that’s a piece where you go to the liquor store at midnight then come home and drink out of a snare drum. I only know this because I woke up once and went downstairs to see what the noise was. I’m not a fan of dirges.
Whiskers is a little too fat for the plastic container but if I squish the top down I can still seal it. I run back upstairs to get Paschar and my jacket. I need to hurry because Dad’s going to hurt himself by accident soon and come into the kitchen angry and bloody looking for the Neosporin and if he sees me with another dead pet he’s going to wig out.
It’s warm out today, and the ground feels soft. Mom keeps the gardening tools in the shed and I grab a trowel. My next door neighbor Jamal is in his backyard climbing a tree by the fence that separates our houses. He sees me and waves. You should never wave while climbing trees. That’s how people fall out of trees. I wave back.
“What are you doing?” I call to him.
“There’s a thing in the branches near your house!” He points at my bedroom window.
“That’s my plastic paratrooper,” I say.
“Finders keepers!” Jamal laughs, climbing up several more branches that reach over our fence.
I don’t think this is going to end well. Paschar agrees.
“You’re gonna fall and die, Jamal.” I warn him.
Jamal freezes on the branch. He looks at me, and for a second I see the branch he’s on snap, and he lands on the fence and the wood slats are impale him, and then he lays there, flopped halfway across the fence and stares at me at which point Dad’s going to come out and say, “What did you do NOW, Lily?” and then I’m going to go to adult jail and – oh, maybe I’ll get a trial first.
But the branch doesn’t snap, and Jamal slowly, carefully, shimmies back down to his side. A moment later he peers at me through one of the holes in the fence.
“Was I really gonna die?” he asks.
“Yes.” I don’t actually know. “You wanna help me bury my hamster?”
“Okay.”
Jamal goes around to the front yard and comes up our driveway. I like Jamal because he listens to me. He’s a year older than I am and goes to a different school because his parents are Catholic. He always has to wear a tie to school. Roger’s head would have exploded if he’d had to wear a tie every day.
“What happened to Whiskers?” Jamal asks, looking at my hamster mushed into the container.
“He ran himself to death.” I don’t actually know if that’s true, but it seems plausible.
“Can you do that?”
“Absolutely.”
Mom marked out a section of the backyard by the woods for me to bury pets. It’s behind her garden where she apparently grows dandelions and those weeds with the pointy leaves. If you go into the woods, it eventually comes out at the highway. Roger used to go into the woods with his air rifle and shoot soda cans with his friends Skeeter and Dustin. They tried to take Paschar once and were going to use him for target practice but I grabbed him back and hid under the front porch until they gave up. There’s a lot of spiders under the front porch. I don’t like going under the front porch anymore.
Jamal holds Paschar and Whiskers’ plastic coffin while I start digging a hole between Raphael my ninja turtle and the goldfish I never named. Raphael got stuck on his back with his head underwater and drowned. I didn’t even think turtles could drown. The goldfish I never named got some sort of disease called ick and fell apart and then the parts got sucked up into the filter so all that we buried was its head. Every pet has a story, but it would take too long to tell them all.
I’m tired of digging so Jamal takes over. He’s much better at digging than me, but that’s because he helps his dad shovel snow in the Winter. My dad uses a snowblower. He always offers to use it on Jamal’s family’s driveway, but Jamal’s dad always says the shoveling is good for them. It definitely pays off when you’ve got a hamster to bury.
Once the hole is dug (not too deep), we put Whiskers’ coffin in and Jamal offers to say a prayer.
“That’s okay, he was just a hamster.” I tell Jamal.
“Animals have souls too,” Jamal says, “So do plants.”
I wonder if Whiskers’ soul is still in his body. Is he in Purgatory like Roger? I also wonder if this means Jamal says a prayer before eating broccoli.
I fill the hole in with the dirt we dug and pat it down. I’ll need a couple popsicle sticks to make a marker, so I offer Jamal a popsicle.
“Hey, Lily, look,” Jamal points into the woods.
There’s a bunny rabbit watching us. It’s gray and almost matches the color of the tree its leaning against. Oh, it’s not leaning. Oh.
Oh.
“Is– is it dead?” Jamal whispers.
Of course it is.
Paschar tells me not to go in the woods, but Jamal is going into the woods now, and Jamal is the only person that’s nice to me, so I follow him. He stops at the bunny and nudges it with his shoe. Oh hey, Jamal got new shoes. They’re blue and they got big swoops on them. I didn’t even notice before. The bunny crumples over. It looks like a pile of fur now. Jamal kneels down to see if it’s wounded or something, and I notice a couple black birds in the brush beside us. They’re also dead.
“I don’t see any blood on it,” says detective Jamal.
I use my boot to brush some leaves over the dead birds.
“What the heck?”
Jamal is standing up again, and he’s staring further into the trees.
Lily, go home. Paschar tells me.
But I don’t go home. I’m sorry, Paschar.
Jamal steps past the bunny and crunches through the shrubs and sticks until he comes to a big pair of branches lying on the forest floor. Except they aren’t branches.
“Jeeeeeezus!”
It’s a deer. One of the male ones like Bambi with big antlers. Its eyes are gone and you can see into its head, but it’s dark in there and so you really can’t see anything but its eyes are just a pair of holes now. Its fur looks like it got run through a washing machine, it’s all matted and slick. The whole thing is just laying there in the bushes with its head on sideways and its antlers sticking up waiting for someone to trip and fall on them.
“What the heck’s going on?” Jamal’s eyes are bugged out and he’s visibly shaking. I wonder if it’s possible for someone’s eyes to literally pop out and then hang down their face like they do in cartoons. Later I might draw a still life and put Jamal in the background with his eyes popped out just to see what it would look like.
I look around us. The ground is littered with dead birds. I’m standing on one, but I thought it was just squishy ground. I feel bad using the word “litter” because that sounds like the birds are just trash and they’re not. Except for chickens. I don’t like chickens. Even if I was Catholic, I wouldn’t say a prayer before eating chicken. Broccoli maybe, but that still seems weird.
There’s other animals too. Small ones mostly. The deer is the largest one we found, but we also found a couple raccoons and someone’s cat with orange stripes (I think it belonged to the Millers down the street) and a bunch of squirrels. Like a LOT of squirrels. Like, at first I thought maybe we could bury the animals, but then when I started counting the squirrels I thought, “No.”
There were little moles too. Or voles. I don’t know the difference, but I know there’s moles and then there’s voles and they’re related somehow like me and Roger to our cousin Susie who got run over by a boat.
“I’m getting out of here!” Jamal says with his eyes still bugging out and he runs back to the back yard and down the driveway and into his house, yelling “Mom! Mom!” the whole way. I take a moment to count the animals until I get to the squirrels and then I just give up and go back home. I guess we’re not doing popsicles.
Jamal’s mom comes over later and talks to my dad. I like Jamal’s mom. She always smells like coconuts. It’s her shampoo. I don’t tell her that Jamal’s going to have nightmares tonight and wake her up screaming because telling her that’s not going to change it and she might think it’s rude of me to say. Paschar suggests I go to my room and draw that still life I was thinking about while the adults talk, so I do. I see my dad go into the woods with Jamal’s mom from my bedroom window, and then they come out and she’s actually pretty calm but my dad is hysterical. I don’t mean that he’s funny, I mean that’s he’s wigging out.
Dear swear jar, I O U two quarters.
When Dad comes inside, he calls Mom at work and he’s using his outside voice. I hear him say angry things about me and my curse. Paschar tells me not to worry, and that it’s not me. Paschar is always right… isn’t he?