Fatal Attraction

The View From My Backdoor.

While I tap, tap, tap away on my keyboard, making up stories, I keep the television blaring. That’s how I did my homework and made straight A’s throughout my academic career. It’s a career that has spanned decades and is still spanning. I don’t want to talk about it.

I often watch educational or discovery related channels while I tap, tap, tap. 

Today was no different. I finished another novel and watched a discovery style show called “Fatal Attraction.” The attraction that proved fatal was between humans and the animals they adore.

One lady fed WILD bears off the back of her porch. She tossed apple chunks at them. She gave them cutesy names. She built a fence to keep them from clawing her house down. They ate her face off.

Another woman kept pet tigers. She gave them names. She fed them road kill she scooped off the highway. She spoke of them fondly. She thought of them as children. They ate her face off.

And still another woman kept hybrid wolves. She treated them like family. She gave them a kiddy pool full of fun water. She gave them wolfish names. They ate her face off.

It freaked me out, because—as I type this—my garage is full, full of feral cats, and I feed them, because if I don’t feed them they will eat my chickens, rabbits, song birds, and dog. I’m afraid not to feed them. But after watching “Fatal Attraction” I’m pretty sure they’re going to gang up, drag me off, and stuff me under Mr. Abe’s garden shed. Where they will eat my face off.

What I have going for me:

I refuse to name them.

I never talk of them fondly.

I do not believe they have any human affection for me. 

When they look at me it is not with love. They are measuring the distance between my hairline and my scalp and calculating the number of cat fangs required to hamstring me on my way to the barn.

You know what I think? I think it’s time for another cat roundup. Or as the grandchildren ask, “Hey! Are we too late, for the cat roundup?”

Here’s what I think. Animals are not people or babies or surrogate boyfriends. They are animals. They are not people in fur coats. So stop dropping off your “babies” in front of my house instead of taking them to the animal control up the road, because it’s going to end badly for someone or some thing or everyone.

PS: All the humans died in the above fatal attraction examples, so did all the animals.

Linda (Butterfly Net) Zern

I WONDER . . .

Thirteen years ago, I stood in the library of Wake Tech Community College as a representative of my anthropology class. I was to report back on the news reports about the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

As the first tower fell, I heard someone behind me mutter, “Good. America deserves this. America is in everyone’s business.”

I turned around and looked into the face of a handsome, young, well-dressed, African American man and saw . . . the future.

Over the years, I’ve often thought about that young man and wondered where he is now, what he thinks, and if he ever paid back his student loans.   

Yokel at the Museum

While visiting the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, I saw one of the security guards go into hunting dog, alert mode. His ears pricked up. His spine snapped to attention. His hand moved to his walkie-talkie. The guard looked like a redbone hound dog flushing a covey of bobwhite quail. The molecules in his skin were standing at attention.

Someone, somewhere in the museum was breaking the rules.

“Boy oh boy,” I said to my daughter. “Some out-of-town yokel has really biffed it.” Then I pointed.

We watched the security guard stalk the rule-breaking yokel, while standing in the Greek and Roman statue garden, surrounded by centuries of priceless antiquities. It was possible to become faint from sniffing all the odor of fragile history that swirled about.

My daughter gasped. “That guard’s not after some out-of-town yokel. He’s after Dad.”

This next part happened in that weird slow motion that kicks in when airplanes crash or the grandkids tumble off the furniture.

At the sound of her gasping shock, I turned (slowly) to see my wonderful husband of thirty plus years leaning against the bust of The Goat God of Ithaca.

He had his elbow in the empty eye socket of an irreplaceable piece of irreplaceable Greek goat god statue history. He was talking on his cell phone—my husband, not the goat guy.

“Noooooo! Sherwoooooooood! What are you thinking?” I yelled. My voice echoed through the statue garden like the ghost of an ancient goat.

The security guard honed in for the kill.

I thought about shielding my spouse by throwing my body in front of the lecture on proper museum etiquette that was about to happen. But when I saw him stick his finger in his free ear to block out the sound of Captain Security Guard saying, “Sir, don’t lean on the priceless art,” and “No cell phone calls in the museum,” I reconsidered that ultimate sacrifice.

And while the above is a direct quote, there was subtext. There’s always subtext. I believe that subtext ran something along the lines of, “Listen up, you hillbilly, I don’t care what swamp you crawled out of, but you wouldn’t know a piece of priceless art if it bit you on your hillbilly butt. And if you leave your hillbilly grease on my marble, I’ll shoot you myself.”

Horrified, my daughter and I melted away into the gift shop and pretended to buy a pair of vintage inspired Egyptian earrings. Let the yokel fend for himself. However, before ditching hillbilly Sherwood, I took a snapshot of my husband’s encounter with the security guard. There was a quick flash of light.

“Lady,” another alert security type said, “there’s no flash photography in the museum.”

The picture turned out great.

Then the camera got stolen.

Linda (Tour Guide Down) Zern