Unlikely Animals

by Annie Hartnett

We see and hear it all in Everton, one of the perks of being dead, omniscience within town limits. It’s a little frustrating how the living come and go, but we always get the full story eventually.

our groundskeeper, the one-handed Mr. Ridley Willett, an army vet.

Ingrid was really going to flip her shit, Clive realized,

When Clive saw his hallucinations of small animals, we could see them, too, if we focused in on his thoughts.

this goat had been named for Doris Jones the Dream Far secretary by the high school students, because Doris Jones always called the cops on any cars she saw parked at Make-Out Point. In return, the teenagers egged her house and named this goat after her.

The lives of the living often get tangled up in unexpected ways, especially in a town as small as ours, even when an eight-foot electrified fence splits it up.

“That was only the imperfect human body having a hard time,” he told Harold Baynes. That line was actually something his wife had said first, to Auggie, as a way of comforting him, one of the times Auggie was trying to get off heroin. He was having bad diarrhea, a common side effect of the detoxing process. Auggie had shit his bed, Ingrid had cleaned it up, and that was exactly the kind of reassuring thing you say to someone you love when they are being an awful burden but you’re trying to convince them that you don’t mind. Not at all. No big deal. For you? Anything.

People talk a lot about first loves, or the love of your life, but people don’t say as much about the friend of your life.

We loathe the cremated sometimes, how freewheeling they can be.

In the morning, the fox jumped up on the table and peed in Emma’s coffee cup, but otherwise, the first twelve hours in the cabin went fine.

Anticipatory grief, it’s called, when you’re sad about something that hasn’t happened yet.

You’re not too messed up at all. You’re just as messed up as you should be.”

Those left unburied can never fully rest. It’s worse than being cremated; much, much worse. We don’t even like to think about it.

That’s why we like living with animals so much; they exhibit their joy so outwardly, remind us how to be better alive.