“Don’t chase her; she’ll bite you,” my mother warned.
Sachet was my mother’s striped skunk, and she was waddling in laps around the inside of my screened-in play porch. I ignored that fat little skunk and pressed my tongue to the wire mesh that surrounded me. It tasted like my Flintstone Chewables and left rusty checkerboard bumps behind like pillows. My father hung a pink swing there along the side of the house. This way I could still play outside when the weather was bad. I could smell the wind, the iron and dust. I pressed my face hard against the screen to catch the spray of rain.
“And stop licking that screen; it’s going to give you cancer!” My mother shouted from inside the house.
“I just wanted to pet her,” I hollered back.
Stupid skunk. I really wanted a Siamese cat like Linda and Roy, our upstairs neighbors, had. My mother kept a box of catnip under our kitchen sink just for Pedro. Saturdays brought him down to our kitchen door early, before anyone else was awake. He’d yowl like a junkie, and I’d let him inside to get his fix. I’d lie on my belly and spread the dried weed in a fan across the white linoleum floor. Later the grown-ups would find us both there, dusty, dizzy, and sneezing. By then Pedro’s cobalt eyes were slightly more crossed and out of focus than usual, one velvet ear was tweaked, and he staggered in circles before collapsing into my lap, dazed but satisfied.
Today I was stuck with a skunk that smelled like tires and didn’t even like me, an ungrateful skunk that wouldn’t even sit in my lap and purr while I scratched her ears. I was going to make that skunk see me as her friend. And I was going to make Mommy see that she was wrong about me. I started to sing the friendliest song I could think of.
“Sunny days,
Sweeping the clouds away,
On my way
To where the air is sweet…
I cornered Sachet behind her litter box and grasped her tail. She hissed, baring a set of sharp fangs and a pink tongue. A few black hairs dangled from my fingers. She frantically wobbled through her tin, growling, and sending shards of cat food across the porch. I followed after her again, slowly planting one foot in front of the other soundless, except for my singing.
Come and play,
Everything’s A-OK…
“Goddamn it…I said leave that skunk alone!” My mother watched from the doorway.
“I’m not doing anything!”
My mother bent down, scooped that pathetic, imitation cat up in her arms like a baby and stomped inside. I sat on my swing and rocked back and forth, dejected and angry over the fact that my mother, yet again, did not understand that I was trying to do good. I listened through the open window as my mother cooed to Sachet who was now curled in her lap.
“Son of a BITCH!”
My mother’s shadow ran past the window. I found her in the kitchen, her finger under the cold water. “I told you to leave that goddamned skunk alone!”
“What? What happened?”
“What happened…?” I’d asked a stupid question. She held her finger up close to my nose. A triangular chunk of flesh was missing and blood trickled down her hand and over her wrist, making its way toward her elbow. “You’ve ruined this animal to the point where I can’t even pick her up anymore. I told you to stop teasing her!”
“I wasn’t teasing, I…”
“I had a bad feeling about you being out on that porch this afternoon. I knew something like this would happen.”
