based on a true story, in 3 parts.

Pt. 1 (sophie)

Hey, I agree, it was a terrible thing to do. It was awful. But consider my situation.

Seventeen years old, in college, with about four bucks to my name. I had a dead dog, a very LARGE dead dog I might add, and I had to get it across the city to the vet so they could dispose of the body.

Since I didn’t have any money, I had to take the train. And since I had to take the train, I had to put the dog's dead body in something.

Okay, listen. YOU look around your home and tell me what YOU find that can hold a dead great dane.

All I could find was a great big suitcase. So that’s what I used. Thank goodness it had wheels because I know that dog weighed like 70 pounds.

Pt. 2 (nic)

So the first thing I noticed about her was that she was, like, total prime target. She was so freaked out about getting this suitcase up the steps that her purse was flopping around and she wasn’t even paying attention. One of those hippie looking Mexican purses that college girls carry around. Ugly college girls. You know, not the hot ones.

Then I start thinking, maybe there’s more here than just her purse, and I decide to help see what I can find out. I can always grab the purse later. So I carry the suitcase up the steps for her to the train platform – holy Jesus that thing weighed a ton. I asked her what was in there, you know, just making conversation. She looked kind of funny for a minute (I guess she isn’t used to guys talking to her) and then said she was a computer sciences major and it was stuff for school.

Oh shit. Bingo.

So I switch into drive. Headed north, huh? What stop are you getting off at? Oh, me too. Hey maybe I can help you carry it downstairs. No, it’s no problem for a pretty girl like you. You remind me of my sister or some shit like that.

And that is just what I did, my friend. Carried it downstairs, passed through the turnstiles with that ten-ton suitcase loaded up full of computer parts to sell on eBay or unload out west of town. I hit the sidewalk and took off running before she could even start yelling at me to stop. I ran 4 or 5 blocks, then swerved into an alley to open up the suitcase and check out the goods.

Pt. 3 (mark)

I’ll tell you what made me move away from the city. The day I went out back to take out the trash and there was a half-open suitcase –and pardon me, this is a little disgusting- a half-open suitcase lying in the alley with a dead great dane in it. Holy Mary, I thought I was going to throw up. The way people treat their pets in this city. I went back inside, I said Annie, that’s it, we’re moving back to Kentucky, I don’t care. People here, their pets die and they shove ‘em in a suitcase and leave ‘em for the dumpster. We’re done. Start packing.

Thank You Statue

Only the widow caretaker had noticed, and she – just as angry as the statue – didn’t warn anyone.

The temperature of the statue had been rising for several weeks. In early November, it was a perfectly normal 14 degrees, same as the awful icy winds. But soon after, it began a slow, deliberate climb.

By December, the statue’s skin was at 60 degrees, and the flat, ashy mint covering her face, arms, and robes began to take on a richer, more living tone.

As if replaced by chlorophyll.

By Christmas it was in the mid nineties, and the apples of her cheeks were gently flushed.

On the morning of new years eve, the widow caretaker bundled up and trotted numbly through the wind to the weather station on the East side of the statue. She brushed the frost off the row of thermometers, then smiled in malicious anticipation.

The statue’s skin measured a precise 98.7 degrees.

She trotted back to her flat over the gift shop to make a pot of tea. This was going to be good.

Fingertips

Fingertips.

That’s all it was: his fingertips touching mine.

But it was in the dark, and it was secret, and it froze my entire body with shock at my incredible luck. It iced my stomach, chopped up my breath, and when I worked up the courage to turn to him breathlessly for just one second, it was enough to make me pray right then and there.

O God, I thought. I, who don’t pray for little things. O God, I know I’ll get old and I know I’ll forget a million things. Don’t ever, ever let this be one of them. Don’t ever let me forget the way he is looking at me right now.

It would not have meant so much if it were not for the two years spent longing for the man attached to those perfect fingertips. Two years spent swimming in an intense teenage crush that kills your appetite, fills entire notebooks with hopeless poems, and makes you buy strange sweaters on the off chance that you will suddenly become astonishingly attractive.

And the answer to it all is this one young man, except he seems to sense all this and he wisely avoids it, like a deer and human urine. He keeps a wide berth. He maintains a very careful distance at all times.

Except, for some reason, this one night.

And his fingertips and my fingertips, were touching. Secretly. In the dark.

Epilogue

Every day the lion wanted to speak, to tell her who he really was. His tongue (which was, incidentally, the size of her arm) and jaws ached with the information.

He thought once of writing his name in the dirt. He leapt up and breathlessly brushed clean a patch of sand, only to realize that he no longer remembered all the letters and symbols to form the right sounds. He panicked. He concentrated. He made a circle, then a line, but it was no use. The code had vanished from his brain. He collapsed onto the dirt and moaned. He missed tears. Being able to cry had been nice.

Instead, he came to content himself by hugging her small, soft human frame every time she would let him, carefully cradling her head in one of his enormous paws.

She would laugh and wrap her arms around his neck, losing them in his mane. Spectators gaped at this ridiculous embrace: the lady and the lion. News crews came and interviewed her. She always smiled as he delicately sniffed in her face, never once guessing who he was and that, in the end, he was with her every day.