Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

Turzillo says: “Like many of my stories, ‘Pride’ comes out of my life as a professor at Trumbull branch of Kent State University. Residents of Trumbull County, Ohio, love their exotic pets. Two sisters in one of my classes told me they had adopted a lion cub which liked to bask in the middle of their residential street, forcing traffic to drive around it. A philosophy professor had to give up his pet python to get custody of his young son. A little girl was mauled by a tiger cub at the county fair. A friend of my son always dreaded the part of his paper route that took him past a caged animal he never saw, but that roared terrifyingly. And of course there was Iron Mike Tyson’s fruitless suit to keep Kenya, his white Bengal tiger, plus other big cats, on his sixty-acre estate in rural Southington, only a few miles from where I lived.

“To understand Jonesy, I’ve watched countless bored, scary big cats in Busch Gardens, the Cleveland Zoo, and other zoological gardens, contemplating their casual menace. Jonesy’s roll-and-strike attack is based on speculations of the way sabertooth cats tore out the throats of their prey, but the truth is, I’ve observed my kitten, Mahasamatman, make the same move play-attacking another cat.”

The hot fur thing under Kevin’s shirt clawed at his chest. Nice going , he thought. First the bum rap for weed, and now if I don’t get caught stealing lab animals, I’ll get rabies from this freak .

Frankenlab, at Franken U, AKA Franklin Agricultural College, was messing with animals, electrodes in their brains, cloning them like Dolly the Sheep, except not regular animals. Dead animals from frozen meat. And they were going to kill the animals.

He couldn’t save them all. Those fuzzy orange-furred mice, most wouldn’t make it. Those guys from Animals Our Brethren had pried open cages, and when the mice wouldn’t come out, they shook them out, and when the mice squeed, cowering under lab tables, they kicked them until they ran into corners, and from there may God have mercy on their itty souls.

Kevin petted the little monster through his shirt, but it writhed around and gummed him. “I’m saving your life, dumb-ox!” He dashed out of the building minutes before alarms brought the fire department.

Kevin had been in trouble before. A year ago, his girl friend’s cousin Ed and he had been cruising around in Ed’s van, which had expired plates. Kevin didn’t know about the baggie of pot under the driver’s seat. When the state patrol started following, Ed asked Kevin to switch places. His license, like the plates, was expired, he said. They switched, veering madly, on a lonely stretch of 422. When they finally stopped and the cops asked to search the van, Kevin shrugged and said okay.

“And whose is this?” Ed said, not me. Kevin was too surprised to look properly surprised, and this was a zero-tolerance state. So Ed got off with a warning, and Kevin, stuck with court-appointed counsel, served thirty days.

Kevin had been looking for a job to pay for college, when local papers broke the story that some thousand-odd animals (mostly, admittedly, mice) would be killed because their experiment was over. What was he thinking of? He wasn’t an animal-rights kind of dude. Still, he felt panicked exultation fleeing the scene of the crime.

He struggled to control his Pinto while driving with the squirming thing scratching inside his shirt. He fumbled the back door key and pounded downstairs to the basement, where he pulled the light cord above the laundry tub and took the furball out of his shirt.

“Oh God, what have they done to you?” It was deformed: big head, chopped-off tail. Cat? Dog? A mix?

He deposited it in the laundry tub. Boggling at the size of its mouth, he realized it needed food. Now.

Forward pointing eyes. Meat-eater. He ran upstairs and grabbed a raw chicken breast from the fridge. He held it out to the cub.

The cub flopped down on its belly in the tub, and tried to howl. All that came out was a squeak.

He tried to stuff the meat into its mouth, but it flinched away and lay looking at him, sides heaving.

Maybe the mother chewed the food up for it. Mother? Not hardly. This thing didn’t have a mother. It was fucking hatched in Frankenlab.

Raised in farm country, Kevin liked animals. He sometimes even petted Rosebud, the town pit bull, when Rosebud wasn’t into tearing people’s arms off. If his parents had been rich, he’d be pre-veterinary at Franken U. Or a cattle rancher, or a discoverer of rare snakes.

He retrieved a knife from upstairs, hacked tidbits off the chicken breast, and put them in the cub’s mouth. The cub sucked on them, famished. It got to its feet and seized his finger with its front paws. Head held sideways, it chomped down on his finger. It did have a few teeth, it seemed.

He jerked away. “Stop it, you little monster!” Then he realized he might wake his mother.

Kevin, it’s a baby. Duh.

Where would he get a baby bottle?

He opened a can of condensed milk from the pantry, dipped a chicken chunk in it, and let the monster suck milk off the meat. Twenty minutes later it either got satisfied, or gave up. Its little belly looked marginally bigger, and the can was empty, mostly spilled on the laundry tub or his shirt.

It stretched and unsheathed claws way too big for a little guy the size of a raccoon.

Kevin thought, It’ll purr now. Instead, it washed its face, running front paws over those deformed big jaws.

And then, just when Kevin decided it was almost cute, it reached out a claw and pricked his arm, not enough to hurt, just to say, More?

“You’re beginning to tick me off,” he said. The cub’s gaze radiated adoration. It licked his hand, nearly rasping his skin off.

Its fur was golden retriever blonde, its eyes the color of river moss. Green-eyed blonde, like Sara. Dappled coat, like freckles on Sara’s sweet shoulders. Sara Jones: they were almost a couple before his arrest; now she acted distant.

The monster leapt out of the tub and landed on the floor. It shook itself, surprised at the fall.

He lay down and stared at it, eye to eye. “You need a name.”

He was furious that they planned to kill it. It was harmless. Uh, maybe not harmless. Planning to get big, judging from those paws, each the size of cheeseburgers. But innocent.

“What the hell have I got myself into?” he asked it.

Its grotesque little face shone with trust.

With the knife he’d used to cut the chicken, and thinking of Sara Jones, he tapped the little monster on each shoulder, and said, “I dub thee Sir Jonesy.”

For a week, he kept Jonesy locked in the root cellar. His mom either didn’t know, or pretended not to. Rosebud, Mr. Trumbull’s pitbull, kept getting off his chain and sneaking over to paw at the basement door. There was an article in the paper about the lab fire, but the lab animals were hardly mentioned.

The scientists downplayed it all. The animals had been slated for “sacrifice,” Dr. Betty Hartley said. Federal regulations required that animals be euthanized at the end of an experiment, she said, plus the money had run out. Cold. “Sacrifice”: nice euphemism. Like “put to sleep.” Like anything ever woke up from that sleep. Sacrifice? What, were they going to dance around an altar and beg God to protect them from weird-ass animal zombies?

Dr. Hartley said she was sad that the animals had all died in the fire, but accidents will happen.

So now he couldn’t let anybody in on his secret. It would be insane to let the scientists find the cub again and kill it. But Jonesy (the cub was female, he discovered) whined and shivered in the root cellar, so he brought it upstairs.