such a question.”
“I didn’t mean to insult you,” the ewe said. “It’s just that, well, you hear stories…”
“And that means that all crows are filthy, does it? We’ve all got sex on the brain?”
“What I meant is that I’d love to borrow your mantra,” the ewe said. “That is, if I still can.”
The crow looked from the lamb to its mother, marveling that something so cute could grow to be so shapeless and ugly. It was just the opposite with birds, she thought. Nothing was more repellent than a chick, but then again, who needs looks when you’re too young and stupid to use them? Keeping one’s eyes shut would be a valuable skill for someone like the ewe, especially when it came time to mate. She pictured a ram heaving its battered, spindly legs upon her back, and then she shook her head to wash the image away. “I guess I’ll let you use my mantra, but just until you come up with your own,” she said, and she leaned forward to whisper it into the ewe’s ear. “Now I want you to put your head down and repeat that line twenty times. No, better make it thirty, after everything you’ve been through.”
The ewe did as she was instructed, and as she mumbled into the damp grass, the crow moved beside her and plucked out the eyes of the newborn lamb. One she ate right away, for it was delicious, and the other she set into her beak and carried back to her ungrateful children.
As for the ewe, she was still deep in meditation, her eyes clamped shut, repeating the code of thieves and charlatans and those who are good to themselves the world over. “I have to do what I have to do,” she said. “I have to do what I have to do.”
The Sick Rat and the Healthy Rat
The white rat had been sick for as long as he could remember. If it wasn’t a headache, it was an upset stomach, a sore throat, an eye infection. Pus seeped from his gums. His ears rang, and what little he ate went right through him. Now came the news that he had pancreatic cancer, which was actually something of a relief. “Finally I can die,” he moaned to his new roommate. She was a female, also white, and had arrived only that morning.
The tank they shared was made of glass, its walls soiled here and there with bloody paw prints and flecks of vomit. “Well,” she sighed, wincing at the state of her new home, “I’m sorry to say it, but if you have a terminal illness it’s nobody’s fault but your own.”
“I beg your pardon?” said the white rat.
The female approached the water bottle, stuck her paws into the spigot, and began to wash them. “It’s nice to believe that these sicknesses just ‘befall’ us,” she said. “We blame them on our environment and insist that they could happen to anyone, but in truth we bring them on ourselves with hatefulness and negativity.”
The white rat coughed up some phlegm with bits of lung in it. “So this is my fault?”
“Oh, I think that’s been proven,” the female said. “You might not have realized how negative you were being—maybe you were passive-aggressive. Maybe no one cared enough to point it out, but I have to call things like I see them. Just as everyone does to me, only in the opposite direction. ‘How come you’re always so sunny?’ they ask, and ‘Doesn’t your mouth hurt from all that smiling?’ Some interpret it as overexuberance, but to me it’s a kind of vaccine—as long as I’m happy and I love everybody, I can’t get sick.”
“Never?” asked the white rat.
“Oh, I had a flu once, but it was completely my own fault. Someone I mistook for a friend took to criticizing me behind my back—saying things regarding my weight and so forth. I got wind of it, and for all of three minutes I wished her ill. I’m not talking death, just a little discomfort—cramping, mainly. I was just starting to visualize it when I sneezed, which was my body’s way of saying, ‘Whoa,’ you know, ‘that’s not cool.’ Then my nose stopped up and I came down with a fever.”
“And what about your supposed friend, the one who said cruel things behind your back? If you got a flu, what happened to her?” asked the white rat.
“Well, nothing yet,” the female said. “But sometimes the body bides its time.”