I was born with—I still got it. So don’t feed me any of that “same difference” bullshit. You should know that better than anyone.’
“Then she gives me the same line of crap the river rat gave this duck, all, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but if you’re going to use that kind of language…’ ”
The turtle rolled his eyes. “Typical.”
“I should have punched her,” the toad said. “Right in the face—pow.”
“I’m with you, brother!” said the duck.
“Or no,” continued the toad, “I should have gouged out her eyes, blinded her so she had to spend the rest of her life in darkness.”
The turtle had a blind cousin, a cousin he hated, and this made him laugh all the harder.
“Then I should have yanked out her tongue,” the toad said. “See how she liked that!”
“Not so easy giving us shit when she can’t talk,” said the duck.
“After all that, I should have set her on fire,” added the toad. “No, I should have poured acid on her and then set her on fire, the stupid bitch.”
The turtle started saying something, but the toad, excited by a new possibility, interrupted him: “Or wait, no, after cutting off her tongue, I should have smeared an apple with shit, opened up her big fat mouth, and forced it down her throat. Then I should have poured acid on her. Then I should have set her on fire.”
The three of them laughed.
“Better yet, you should have used a cantaloupe,” said the turtle. “Cover that with shit and stuff it down her throat. Ha!”
“Or no,” said the duck. “Instead of a cantaloupe, you should have used a watermelon. Then you—”
And here the merry atmosphere soured. “A watermelon for the black snake,” said the toad. “Now you’re just being a racist.”
“No,” the duck said, “I only meant—”
“I know what you ‘meant,’ ” the toad said, “and I think it stinks.”
“Hear! Hear!” agreed the turtle.
“Yeah, well, to hell with the both of you,” said the duck, and he waddled off, muttering under his breath.
“God, I hate guys like him,” the toad said. “A watermelon. He wouldn’t have said that if she’d been a king snake, and he damn sure wouldn’t have said it if she were a python.”
The pair looked at the retreating duck and shook their heads in disgust. A moment of silence, and then the toad continued, “I should have smeared a honeydew with shit—or no, a honeydew and a cantaloupe. I should have smeared both melons with shit and forced them down her throat. Then I should have poured acid on her, and then I should have set her on fire.”
“Well,” said the turtle, “there’s always the next time.”
The Motherless Bear
In the three hours before her death, the bear’s mother unearthed some acorns buried months earlier by a squirrel. They were damp and worm-eaten, as unappetizing as turds, and, sighing at her rotten luck, she kicked them back into their hole. At around ten she stopped to pull a burr from her left haunch, and then, her daughter would report, “Then she just… died.”
The first few times she said these words, the bear could not believe them. Her mother gone—how could it be! After a day, though, the shock wore off, and she tried to recapture it with an artfully placed pause and an array of amateur theatrical gestures. The faraway look was effective, and eventually she came to master it. “And then,” she would say, her eyes fixed on the distant horizon, “then she just… died.”
Seven times she cried, but as the weeks passed this became more difficult, and so she took to covering her face with her paws and doing a jerky thing with her shoulders. “There, there,” friends would say, and she would imagine them returning to their families. “I saw that poor motherless bear today, and if she doesn’t just break your heart, well, I don’t know what will.”
Her neighbors brought food, more than enough to get her through the winter, so she stayed awake that year and got very fat. In the spring the others awoke from their hibernations and found her finishing the first of the chokecherries. “Eating helps ease the pain,” she explained, the bright juice dripping from her chin. And when they turned away she followed behind them. “Did I mention to you that my mother died? We’d just spent a beautiful morning together, and the next thing I knew—”
“That’s no excuse for eating all our chokecherries,” they said, furious.
A few bears listened without interruption, but she could see