Amelia Gray: Museum of the Weird

“Do try something,” she said.

Dave shook his head. He was still smiling, but his gaze had dropped to her lips, meaning either that he wanted to kiss her— she had read about this technique in magazines — or that he wanted her to take a healthy chunk of hair with her fork and choke it down with a swallow of red wine, forcing the clogged mass down her throat like an obstruction through the pipes of a bathtub.

Beth couldn’t take her eyes away from the plate of hair. The soup fell into the background, harboring her forgotten spoon. It was auburn hair, and piled up with a volume that made it seem as if the chef had snipped off a massive tangle and laid it there without presentation.

“Would you like to leave?” Dave asked.

It was as if he had plucked the thought from her mind, but when she looked at him, she knew it was not a sincere proposal. He had pulled some strings for their reservation, after all, getting the two of them a table at the last moment, no doubt at some expense to his professional standing. Men didn’t enjoy asking for things, Beth knew from the magazines.

She shook her head at him cheerily, too quickly. She would

have to eat the hair, she knew — that or ruin the date, and everything that went along with it. He was watching. He knew it, too.

The domestic hostage situation had been underway for three and a half hours, and the pack of wild animals heading up the negotiation project was making little progress. There were five javelinas and they looked intimidating enough all together, weighing as they did between fifty and eighty pounds each and brandishing tusks, trotters, and snouts. Their mottled brown hair shone with drying mud from a nearby drainage ditch. It was a warm day, with a slight breeze in the air, and the javelinas were ready for a nap.

That morning, someone at the district office made a clerical error of impressive proportions, transferring the badge status and its related responsibilities from Officer Clint Javarez to the wild javelinas. The javelinas had been found eating the fruit off a prickly pear cactus in the city park, and had spent the afternoon waiting patiently in the back of a squad car for the Animal Control van to arrive. Once the order came through, they were driven by a rookie to the site of the hostage situation, dropped at the scene with a large cardboard box of supplies, and abandoned.

Some commotion inside the building startled the javelinas from their rest. One roused himself from their makeshift nest and trampled branches, sniffing the air. Another nosed the box, tipping its contents out in the process. From the box and into the muddy ditch rolled flares, a set of cell phones, a bullhorn, a bulletproof vest, a packet of sunflower seeds, pads of notepaper, a box of facial tissues, tear gas, five grenades, a set of walkie-talkies, and what looked to be a semi-automatic weapon. The javelinas couldn’t be sure. One made a snuffling noise and trotted into the ditch to investigate.

Fifty feet away, the home’s front door opened and a man’s gloved hand reached out. The javelinas looked up with mild curiosity when they heard the man’s voice.

“I’m losing patience in here!” the man yelled. “When I lose patience, people start getting shot in the head!” The javelinas heard screaming in the house behind the man. One of the javelinas rolled over in the nest and chewed at a knot of hair on her trotter.

The man, who was mostly obscured by the surrounding wall, held a gun in one hand and leaned the other against the door frame. “I’m trying to be reasonable!” he shouted. He switched the pistol to his other hand, knocking the barrel nervously on the door. After hearing no response, he added: “Heads will roll!”

From the ditch, the curious javelina found the sunflower seeds in their plastic packet. The javelina lay one trotter delicately at the edge of the packet, lowered his snout to the ground, and took the edge of the plastic between his teeth.

At the door, the man wiped the back of his neck with a paper towel. The silent tactic , he thought, remembering back to a freshman psychology book he had stolen at a yard sale and kept by his toilet. Reverse psychology . In the back room, his hostages were screaming again. “Shut up,” he called back, “or I’ll put eight rounds into your forearms!” I could really learn something here , he thought.

The sunflower seeds remained trapped in their packet, the slippery plastic elusive to the animal’s teeth. The javelina made a trumpeting noise and drove his trotter down, first crushing a cell phone, then one of the walkie-talkies. The other beasts were alarmed and excited by the noise and tumbled down the hill in a mass. In their excitement they crushed the flares, smeared the paper into the earth, broke the sight off the rifle and bent the outer rim of the bullhorn.

The man heard the metallic crunching noises. They’re destroying their own equipment , he thought, but why? He shut the door and walked into the back room, scratching the back of his head with the butt of his gun. His hostages, five fraternity brothers who the man had tied to chairs with knots he learned in the Boy Scouts, began crying and begging for their lives when they saw him.

The man raised his hand for silence. “I think we’ve all learned a lesson today,” the man said. He raised his pistol and killed his hostages before killing himself.

Outside, the javelinas discovered that the packet of sunflower seeds had opened under the commotion of their trotters. The javelinas fell to happy fighting over the salty treats.

We have all learned a lesson today.

“I think I’d call us strange bedfellows,” the armadillo said.

The penguin barely heard her. He was, at that moment, attempting to hold a straw between his flippers.

The armadillo centered her shell on the barstool. She was drinking a Miller High Life.

“Strange bedfellows indeed,” she said.

The penguin gave up on holding the straw and stood on his stool to reach the lip of the glass. He could barely wet his tongue with a little gin. “What’s that?” he asked.

“You are a penguin, and I am an armadillo,” the armadillo said. “My name is Betsy.”

“That’s a beautiful name,” murmured the penguin, who was more interested in the condensation on his glass. “I fought the darkness.”

“You did not.”

The penguin swiveled his head to look at Betsy. He had very beady eyes.

“What’s your name?” she said. “Ray,” said the penguin. “That’s a nice name.”

“I fought the fucking darkness.”

“Neat,” Betsy said. She let her long tongue dip into the bottle, lapping the surface of her beer. “What was that like?”

“Well Betsy,” Ray said, “it was evil incarnate.”

“Oh.”

“Imagine the worst evil ever done to you in your life.”

Betsy thought of the time she was locked in a shed.

“Got it,” she said.

Ray pecked at his highball glass in anger. “Well,” he said, “imagine that, except fifteen times worse. That’s what the darkness was like.”

“That sounds terrible,” Betsy said. She was trying to be noncommittal about the whole darkness thing in the hopes that Ray would drop it. Before coming to the bar, she had used vegetable oil to shine her shell to a high sheen. In her peripheral vision, she could see the lights above the bar playing off her shoulders.

“What do you think of my shell?” she asked.

Ray leaned back a little to appraise the situation. “It’s nice,” he said.

“I like your coat.”

“This old thing,” Ray said, patting his feathers. “It’ll smell like the bar for weeks. You can’t get this smell out.”