Teacup

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As so many future headaches do, the struggle was sparked by a moment of amusement. 

 

It was a brilliant April day. Sharon and Richard were among five or six fellow couples at the dog park, tossing tennis balls for their beloved Alsatian, Wallace. The park was Sharon’s great achievement as HOA Secretary: limned by a whitewashed wooden fence, a clean run of grass, three canisters for animal waste and several large but tasteful signs reminding residents of the fines they would incur for neglecting any cleanup, punctuated with citations for the relevant neighborhood ordinances. 

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Wallace had just executed a balletic leap to catch a pop fly and everyone was cooing over him when Richard turned and pointed to a figure across the street with something, Some Thing, on a leash. 

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“What kind of dog is that?”  

 

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Portly, compact, it waddled down the sidewalk before its nominal master. 

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“His name is Tolstoy,” Joanie said, deeply serious, when Sharon asked for an introduction. How different from the young dog-moms with their new acquisitions, the way they beamed with joy and invited you over to say hello. Joanie seemed to handle the little pig like a US Marshall escorting a dangerous convict across state lines; sober, professional, don’t get too close, he’s wanted in four states. 

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Sharon was speechless. What was there to say? What words were possible, in the face of such a blatant violation? 

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So she turned to a more familiar medium. A steady stream of somber letters, stamped in Association letterhead (which she’d had redesigned by a talented calligrapher friend to lend a little gravitas) arrived on Joanie’s leaf-strewn porch. 

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Hope this finds you well….a gentle reminder…for resident’s safety and peace of mind…a copy of the list of prohibited….please feel free to reach out with any further questions or concerns…

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Sharon even worked up the nerve to deliver one or two of them in person,  knocking at the door, but Joanie only took the notices from Sharon’s clammy palm and set them in the crowded foyer basket, already overflowing with unread mail.  

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In the long meanwhile, a terrible transformation took place. Tolstoy, contrary to her own expectation, was not content to remain the squat little eyesore he already was. 

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First, he grew fur. Not sparse, coarse hair, as one might expect for his species. A lush bronze-and-copper gleam overtook him like a brush fire crawling across prairie. Impossible for even the most short-sighted among them to ignore, he flashed in the sun as Joanie frog-marched him down the street. Sometimes, unaccompanied, Sharon watched him streak like a blazing meteor down the sidewalk, haunches working furiously, only to turn right around at the bend in the cul-de-sac and sprint home. 

 

Whatever Joanie was feeding him soon had further effect. Tolstoy grew. He did not merely grow long, or grow fat. He grew in power. His shoulders bulged out, his neck grew thick and strong, his posture became proud and erect. His gaze was unavoidable; dynamic and aware; he had a knack of holding eye contact with you as long as he possibly could, like a therapist who read a garbled version of the 38 Questions and ended all her appointments with prolonged staring sessions in desperate hope someone might fall madly in love with her. It had never worked so far. 

 

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Sharon was undeterred by Joanie’s obstinance. She had come to expect it. And stubbornness was a thing she could well understand. It was a quality they shared. 

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If anything, Joanie was deserving of her pity. So much was missing from her life that was present in Sharon’s own. Anyone who let their leaves go so long unraked or their snowy walkway unshoveled must be suffering most acutely from something, even if Sharon couldn’t pretend to know what. 

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Paperwork and bylaws and hearings were only a small part of her mission. She hadn’t been voted to such a position of responsibility in order to sit at home wringing her hands. Her neighbors had chosen her because of her capacity to act. So she would act. 

 

—

 

Joanie woke to find her home had been transformed. The grass had been cut. The dead pansies rotting in her meager landscaping had been torn out and replaced with fresh specimens. Even her driveway, the cracked concrete slowly returning to gravel, now steamed with a stinking layer of road pitch, a smooth jet stream that ran from curb to garage. 

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This, Sharon found, was always more effective than open hostilities. Residents, besieged by kindness and deep in a debt of good deeds, invariably folded to her demands. 

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It was a defensive war she was waging against the evils of the world. Every action she took was melted and reforged in her brain according to the mold of this philosophy (like a caterpillar, which by means as yet unknown to science was able to liquify itself and reorganize this fluid into a solid final form – Sharon believed it was by an act of pure will that the caterpillar accomplished this.) 

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This was how her work took its sometimes topsy-turvy shape, and raking leaves became an act of unspeakable hostility. Trapping and killing the bird-guzzling cats, an act of love. And her dispatch of Tolstoy would, by this same process, be transmuted into an act of sterling mercy. 

 

—

 

There had been another life before this one, for Sharon. There had been a farm, a half-hour’s dirt road drive from Loretto, Kentucky. There had been a line of  long low hog houses, which seeped a reek of ammonia into the air for miles around, until one by one their neighbors packed up and sold out. 

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She learned the business young. She learned how to tell a sow was ready for farrowing by the way it dripped colostrum into puddles beneath its burgeoning body. She learned the proper proportions of antibiotics to feed, and which feeds, and how much to pour out in the great stainless steel troughs. She learned how to clip the ears of new piglets so her father could tell, at a glance, the animal’s sex, which sow it came from, which place it held in the litter. Sometimes the sows, swollen to such a great size, lost track of their own limits and rolled over their own young. Sharon learned how to clean up the aftermath of these events. 

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Her neighbors (her constituents, as she often thought about them), did not know these things about Sharon. They were content to enjoy the benefits of her experience, to live in the tidy world she had created for them. And they would all, they assured her, feel more at ease with Tolstoy gone. 

 

—

 

She doesn’t overthink it, but goes about things just as she was taught. She finds a high place from which to glass the animal, using her brother’s borrowed binoculars, his borrowed gun. Her perch is the flat ledge of roof on her next-door neighbor's detached garage, with a loft tucked above it to lend elevation. She takes her position in the late summer dusk, to take advantage of the pig’s mediocre eyesight. She pays close attention to the wind. She waits. 

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Tolstoy streaks out of Joanie’s house just as all the color is washed out of the neighborhood, wreathing homes and yards and gardens in a wash of uniform blue. He is a bolt of bright fire in the twilight, an unmissable target. And Sharon does not miss. She catches him, throwing him back on his rear hooves for a tantalizing moment…but her shot loses itself somewhere in the masses of muscle that compose his great shoulders. 

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She expects a squeal and cry to wake the neighborhood (hogs, maybe more than any other animal, know when death is coming for them, and know the best way to lodge their protest) but Tolstoy makes no sound at all. It is as though he can’t even feel what she’s done to him. Gradually, gently, he slows his pace, cantering to a graceful stop. He pauses, appearing to scent the air. And then he begins to trot, easy as anything, towards Sharon’s house. 

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From her place on the roof of her neighbor’s garage, she sees him very clearly. Taking his time, he does something with his great yellow teeth, and the gate latch on her backyard fence lifts to admit him. He walks one slow circuit around the boundaries of her lawn, then another, marking his progress with a slow seep of black blood. 

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In the northeast corner of her yard, Tolstoy stops, sniffs the air. He tests the give of the ground with one delicate hoof. And then, in one actinic moment of crackling fear, he looks at her; lifts his head, cocks his posture, and meets her gaze. His eyes pulse with a lambent glow she has never noticed before. He starts digging. 

 

—

 

The total, as calculated by the official sent in by the county animal control, was six cats, two dogs, and something that might have been a ferret or a polecat, the official can’t quite tell for sure. Conveniently, most of the remains came complete with collars and tags, so the owners were easy to notify. 

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