Amphibian by Carla Gunn

she wrote a story about a man who ran into the very tree that he took the protective foam off to use for his sled. Mom said that is an example of irony of fate.
    â€˜How about another muffin? Thank goodness for the word
muffin
or else we’d be eating a lot of cake,’ joked my mother.
    I sat down and ate a raisin bran muffin. As I chewed, I thought about how I haven’t seen my father for nineteen days. Last time he was home, it was only for four days. I stayed with him in his apartment. There’s only one bedroom in it so I slept in his bed and he slept on the pull-out couch. We did lots of things together like play chess and go to the theatre and carve Ivory soap into little animals. But now he’s gone again, and I don’t even know when he’ll be home next.
    Sometimes I wonder why my mother and father got separated. I remember when it happened, though. It was just a few days after they had a big fight, which was just after Dad got home from South America. On that day we were all in their bedroom and my mother was helping Dad unpack, and I was somersaulting across their big bed. I had just learned how to do a backwards somersault, and I was feeling happy because of it, and because Dad was home.
    I remember that Mom and Dad were talking and Mom was putting away Dad’s clothes, and then she stopped talking. And then my dad stopped talking too, and I stopped somersaulting because it was really quiet all of a sudden. I sat up and looked at them. My mother was holding a piece of paper, and they both looked really weird. Then Dad asked me to go downstairs to watch TV for a while.
    I don’t know what they said when they had the big fight, but I could hear that their voices were louder than normal, and I could hear what sounded like my mother crying. When she came downstairs later, her eyes were red and her hands were shaking. She sat down beside me and didn’t say anything, she just hugged me and I could feel her whole, entire body shaking, and I was really worried, but I didn’t say anything either.
    Then, after a while, my father came downstairs carrying the suitcases he had just brought home. He came into the room and my mother got up and left, and my father sat down and told me that he was going to stay with my uncle Roger for a few days and that he would give me a call later to say goodnight.
    A few days later, when my mother and I were out getting groceries, my father came and got his things, like all of his books from the study and his desk that used to be his father’s and the big picture of a sandpiper that he got in the Magdalene Islands. Then later my mother sat me down and told me that she and Dad were separating. She said that it was because some people just can’t live very well together. That didn’t make much sense to me. I asked why they can’t get along, and she said they have personalities that are too different from each other.
    The thing is, my mother and father seem to have pretty much the same personalities. And they both like the same sorts of things. And they also have almost the same kinds of jobs. And they also both have me. So why couldn’t they just fight and then make up like other animals?
    In the animal kingdom, when there is a fight among animals that depend on co-operation to live, they make up. For example, when two chimpanzees fight, sometimes one of the others butts in to help the chimp who is losing. When everything quiets down, sometimes the chimp who won the fight goes over to the other chimp and reaches out a hand to him and hugs him and kisses him and grooms him. This is called
reconciliation
by primatologists.
    Once a teenaged female chimp called Amber went too close to another chimp’s baby and the mother got upset and hit her. But when the mother calmed down, she went over to Amber and kissed her on the nose and let her get close to her baby again.
    I don’t understand why my mother and father couldn’t live