Large Animals in Everyday Life by Wendy Brenner Page A

oysters awaited him.
    â€¢ • •
    The oysters felt different, but it was difficult for them to say how. They felt as though something had been added or something taken away. They felt vaguely the urge to produce pearls, but they could not produce them. Clearly, they were leaving something behind, moving with smooth speed away from something of great importance, but what this thing was they could not remember. They felt frustrated, distracted. Where were they going? they wondered. What would happen to them? What were they supposed to do? Oh, they were only oysters! Who was there to tell their story, and who was there to listen?

the child
    The child was scared of everything. She was scared of being left alone but scared of baby-sitters, especially the young ones who wore black eyeliner. The child’s mother owned a tube of black eyeliner which the child could go look at anytime, sitting unassumingly in its basket on the bathroom counter, but the child wasn’t scared of that. She was scared of the violent sound of her own bathwater running. When it was time for her bath, her mother would run the water and she would stay in her room with the door closed until the tub was full. But even in her room, she was scared the walls of the house would fall down. First the pictures would fall off the walls and then, a second later, the walls themselves would go, breaking apart at the corners and crashing down to the ground. She could see it so clearly, sometimes she ran fretfully from room to room, desperate for relief. Her stomach hurt when she was scared, so now shewas scared of her own stomach, of its mysterious acid whims. It could start up at any moment.
    â€œShe just has a fast metabolism,” the child’s blasé grandmother said. The child had a blasé grandmother and a passionate grandmother. The two grandmothers sat on adjacent identical striped sofas in the living room of the child’s house, watching the child practice headstands using the tripod method. They did not care for each other, though they both certainly adored the child. They lived only blocks apart, so whenever they were coming to visit the child, the blasé grandmother picked up the passionate grandmother, who didn’t drive. When they arrived at the child’s house, they often did not come inside immediately but could be seen sitting for minutes parked in the driveway, arguing silently behind the windshield of the blasé grandmother’s sky-blue Chevy Nova.
    â€œThere’s nothing wrong with the child’s metabolism,” the passionate grandmother told the blasé grandmother. But in her head she was not so sure. It was a fact that the child could not eat enough, could not seem to keep up her weight. What if it were true? the passionate grandmother thought. She often lay awake at night worrying about the child, and as the child grew, the grandmother’s visions grew more vivid. Metabolism, my God! she thought. The child was digesting herself out of existence, evaporating by invisible increments every minute, even now, right here in front of them! The passionate grandmother stood abruptly and left the room, her eyes wild.
    â€œGrandmother, wait, look,” the child cried, in a muffled, upside-down voice.
    â€œBack in a sec, duckie,” the passionate grandmother called tremulously from the powder room. She shut herself in and sat on the fluffy blue toilet seat cover, clutching an embroidered guest towel to her stomach and imagining outrageous things. She imagined the child years from now, lost to the world, out in the dark city without grandmothers to guide her. The childwould suffer flat tires, unemployment, hepatitis. In an effort to escape her parents, she would suffer any number of things. She would live in the back room of a run-down theater, eating off a hot plate and sleeping alone on a giant foam rubber pea-pod costume. The passionate grandmother could see it so clearly, she could barely catch