Everything! That! Lives! Dreams!
Sputnik Monroe stood in a Lowe’s hardware holding a length of chain, two padlocks, several triple-strength joist hangars, epoxy chemical welder, and a roll of something called Gorilla Tape.
“I am 34 years old,” he said. He thought that he was only thinking it but he was also saying it out loud to the aisle at Lowe’s without people in it. “I am 34 years old and I will be 35 in June and I own a small business and I will not continue to let a horse outsmart me.”
A year earlier, Monroe had founded an exotic animal boarding facility, meeting a need that he was certain he had identified in the pet-owning community. No questions were asked, no need to prove that you’d come by the animal lawfully, you just paid Sputnik and went on vacation. He had started small, a neighbor’s turtle, some rabbits, but now he was inundated with pigs, lizards, some chickens, a wolf, and a couple of animals that he didn’t dare tell anyone about.
Back in March, a woman with one eye had silently handed him an owl and left only when he indicated that he could house it, yes. She returned a week later, paid her bill and tipped generously but never said a word. Sputnik, as long as he lived, would never want to know anything as badly as he wanted to know why this lady cyclops owned an owl and where she had gone without it.
So the job had its perks, but there was also this horse.
The horse – horses had two names apparently and this horse’s two names were Archduke Franz Ferdinand and, more informally the horse’s other name in a bizarre and unpleasant coincidence also Sputnik – anyway the horse had become a nemesis , a beast that could not be contained, dangerous to the real human Sputnik’s reputation and psyche.
“I will not continue to let a horse outsmart me,” Sputnik repeated to a display of padlocks.
Meanwhile, having just hopped the fence at the tree line of Monroe’s property, standing in long grass being waved by a firm pre-storm wind, two men were holding chickens. They both thought somehow that this was a good idea.
“They are docile this way, upside down,” said the taller one, named Felix Sands.
“They think they’re asleep,” said the other, who just went by Pumpkin.
“They don’t think they’re asleep, they are asleep, and dreaming.”
“No, they just think they’re dreaming. They think they’re having a dream where the whole world is upside down.”
“No,” said Felix, “Holding them upside down puts them to sleep. They dream about whatever a chicken dreams about.”
“Chickens don’t dream,” said Pumpkin with authority.
“I dream,” said Felix, “A dog can dream. Everything that lives dreams, the burden of proof is with you in terms of chickens not being able to dream.”
“A chicken is different than a dog,” said Pumpkin, but he was defeated. He looked at his chicken, which was either dreaming or not. He wasn’t sure anymore.
A fact unknown to both men was that at that moment, each had lived for exactly half as long as they were going to. These each had a lifetime divided into equal parts by an argument about the nighttime imaginations of poultry.
Felix had taken a sort of mentorship role in Pumpkin’s life, and this act of chicken thievery was his way of testing the limits of what he could get the boy to do. Pumpkin had not questioned the task or its purpose. Felix had no hair on top of his head but much hair on the sides, and the wind took it wildly as it picked up. Felix also wanted to verify if, as he had heard from a reliable source, Sputnik Monroe was housing a lion on his property.
*
Sputnik exited the Lowe’s pondering what accidental byproduct of creation or evolutionary hiccup had produced a creature so awkwardly put together as a horse, and how it was possible that such a jittery, glass-eyed dinosaur could be so difficult to contain.
Every night, horse Sputnik would somehow escape its pen, find the highest spot on Monroe’s property, and stare into the west, as if it was waiting for something. Why it clopped so far from its on designated area and what it was looking for were not questions that the human Sputnik cared about, he was eating into his profit margin sweeping up the horse’s pen every night and would not rest until he had contained the creature for a full 24 hours. He looked up at a darkening sky.
Sputnik watched as a low, billowy cloud mass moved to envelop the boarding facility, and a sudden wind out of a dive in air pressure blew feathers off of Pumpkin’s chicken. A hard rain drenched both men, followed by hail that pelted them until they released their chickens and lay face down in the mud, covering their heads.
The wind picked up, hurling debris from the outdoor animal cages as well as the smaller animals themselves. Pumpkin himself was lifted up and thrown back against the fence. The wind died down, and a horse sprinted past. Felix understood, when he saw Pumpkin stir, that the boy would not be here if he hadn’t asked him to be. He would be inside somewhere.
Out of the treeline, a shape emerged, deliberate rolling shoulderblades on soft paws, the lion that Felix had wanted to see, big enough to challenge Felix’s conception of bigness itself. Everything about it was too big, especially its head. Felix stared at the lion’s head. The eyes were expressive like a dog’s eyes, but cleverer, not trusting. Felix himself was bruised and bleeding from the hail, the lion seemed unaffected. Felix then could not believe how long it took him to notice this next thing: in its jaws, with a delicacy that seemed unfair for a creature of such profound hugeness, the lion held a lightly wounded and partially featherless chicken.
Meanwhile Sputnik stared in the parking lot at his truck, assessing the damage, and wondered if he could afford to fix any of the things in his life that the storm had almost certainly destroyed. !