Besides his appreciation of confinement, Casey the cat had another puzzling instinct: at times he needed to kill the very thing that kept him alive – us. Leah believes this was a bonafide disorder, calling it a failure in “aggression control.” Marielle goes with “aggression misplacement,” noting that Casey was “the runt of the litter.” Both variants, however, suggest an inherent, even natural, tendency toward violence. The animal in pets is the problem we want domestication to solve, when, really, taming has only succeeded in burying it at varying depths, none sufficient to prevent resurfacing.
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I grew up eating blood pudding and head cheese, kolbász and ham. My mother and father came out of the Holocaust having lost everyone and everything. In the void left by the deaths of the beloved parents to whom kashruth had been sacrosanct, they saw no point in depriving themselves of the great taboo: pork. Until then they lusted after the succulent forbidden pleasure, even while feasting on all the sanctioned delights of kosher foie gras, sólet with smoked goose, duck cracklings, and the many Hungarian dishes that creative Jewish cooks had modified over the generations.
One of my earliest memories of my father-in-law is watching him eat chicken feet at Li Wah in downtown Cleveland. It was at once brutal and beautiful, the way he used his teeth and his lips and his fingertips to get the scant meet off the bones, the sweet red sauce like a kiss on his cheek. He told me I could eat the cartilage, but to be careful of the bones. Six years later, when the lymphoma was almost finished carving the blood cells from his bone marrow, he would tell me what his mother once told him: that when you no longer want to eat, that’s when you die.
Youngblood scores an unbelievable shorthanded goal about halfway through the second and celebrates pretty hard afterwards. As he skates past the Nipigon bench he looks at them and winks and they all swear at him and say they’re going to kick his fucking ass.
If Ben could fly, I’m sure he would be awesome. But he’s a boy. Less like a bird than a ferocious lab monkey, or a study in alchemy. He is driven by an energy that transforms endlessly throughout the day, from molasses to mercury and back again. It can take him twenty minutes to get his clothes on in the morning.
Shallow breathing, crouched low. I am stone. I am invisible. I am not here. One foot then the other, sneaking along the big red dog house. If the dog sees me before I get there, she wins. If the old man sees me from the house, I lose.