[Eliza Hodgkins 1812]

“Who wants to go to the zoo?”

Babysitters. I hate them. I hate them almost as much as I hate my actual parents, and that’s saying something. Maybe that makes me a heartless little bastard, but I don’t care. Maybe my heart’s just hardened, like the Pharoh’s, and if that’s the case, your beef is with God and not with me. I just live here, and not by choice, if you haven’t already been able to guess that.

My parents work all day and all week and all month and all year and the years pile up until here I am, 9, hostage to a 17 year-old black hole named Kelly, and the only think giving me pleasure is imagining Chompers chomping her to death with his canine incisors. Nobody knows the dog’s real name is Chompers, or that he has a killer’s instinct, just like me. My parents and siblings call him Muffin, but they are just a bunch of stupid losers who can’t see a dog’s true soul. They know nothing of dogs and their greatness. I don’t think any one of them even knows what the Dog Star’s name is. It’s Sirius. Sounds like serious. I like it. I say the name over and over again under my breath and it makes me feel calm and protected. I think of it as my secret name. Sirius and Chompers.

Chompers is domestic, of course, but he’s got a wild free spirit and when we’re alone together he shows it to me. We run with each other, over the wet dewy grass in the early morning on Saturdays, and it’s like there is no great divide between us; boy and dog are one. There’s no better relationship. My older brother, Stuart, says that the best thing in the world is sex. “Just you wait, man,” he says, forgetting that I was only 8 at the time, “when you’re my age you won’t be able to get enough of it. Women are hot. I don’t just mean their looks. When you’re touching them their skin gets hot, and when you feel below, it’s even hotter, like melted caramel.”

“So they’re sticky," I ask.

“Yeah, man. Totally.”

I left his room disgusted. I know lots of kids who like eating all kinds of messy sticky sweet foods, but those guys are revolting. I don’t know how they can stand their sticky mouths and hands. If girls are anything like that then I want nothing to do with girls. Not even when I’m old enough. My dog’s fur is warm and that’s the kind of warmth I like. His fur is coated with dust and it’s the dirt and mud of the ground that I don’t mind at all. We’ll wrestle in the park until we’re covered in the same mess and I feel more close to him than any other living thing. The dirt becomes our coat of arms, identifying us as family.

I was glad when Stuart left for college. Now there's my sister and me, and Jen will be leaving soon, too. Good riddance.

People are okay, I guess, even if I do hate them. They buy me gifts for my birthday and call me “Rascal” which I pretend to hate but kind of like. But they don’t get it. You know. IT. This whole life business. They’re older than me and but only I seem to understand what’s really important. It’s making time for the people and things you love. And since Mom and Dad are always working, that tells me all I need to know. We love work. We love time away from home. We don’t love kids and we don’t love you. We just had you because we are supposed to because it’s what married people do.

Jen once said she overheard our parents say I was an accident. I don't exactly know what she meant by that, but I thought of the time Chompers slammed into a table knocking Mom's favorite vase onto the floor. She cried over a silly vase as if a vase could ever be of any real importance. If I'm an accident, I'm the kind of accident that makes people cry over silly things, even if that makes me the silly thing. That way Chomper and I are even more alike than I realized.

I’ll never get married. I want to become a famous dog trainer but I don’t want my dogs to be in movies. Movies sap out my energy and make my eyes feel dull and dead. I don’t like playing pretend, either.

I wonder what the babysitter loves. Obviously not animals if her idea of a good time is going to see a bunch of sad creatures locked up in cages, ripped from whatever happiness they’d known before. Obviously she doesn’t love me, if she’s stupid enough to think an obvious animal lover like myself would have anything to do with those pour lost souls. My father says my hatred for zoos is unfounded. He called me “supercilious”, which I had to look up. I think it’s supercilious of a teacher in his 40’s to call a 9 year old boy supercilious. I was just being honest. It’s often what kids do best, though we usually get called heartless for it.

But I don’t think I’m heartless, really, just observant, and based on my observations I come to certain conclusions. Lately I’ve come to the conclusion that babysitters are stupid and useless, and they derive their greatest pleasure from forcing their young charges to do things they don’t want to do, like watch talk shows and make origami animals. They don’t even look like real animals. It’s stupid. Chompers destroyed all of Kelly’s oragami pigs and cranes and I laughed a lot - another happy accident - but the babysitter got mad and made me go to my room. That was cool. I read a book on crocodiles. I’d like to go to Florida someday. Maybe they would sense my love for them and allow Chompers and me to swim alongside of them. We would be covered in the same scummy water and eat the same fish, and they’d keep me out of harm’s way. Eventually my teeth could grow sharp and my body green and rough. We would become a family.

Maybe I do like to play pretend.

Now Kelly is feeling guilty and wants to take me to the zoo. I just look at her with a blank expression I’ve spent hours trying to perfect. My jaw is slack and I'm swallowing the air like I'm eating it while Kelly shuffles her feet and turns an ugly shade of red. She can wait until the end of time for my answer for all I care.