Cat Altman

Fluffy

I was in ninth grade when we started dissecting rabbits. It was a natural progression from eighth grade's fetal pigs, Mr. Matthews said, as he hauled out an industrial sized bin from the science room closet. Still, the formaldehyde wafting from so many layers of stiff fluffy ears like some horrible lasagna of death made me want to run away. But Jana Saffro's unsuccessful protests for pigs' rights the previous year had taught me how lonely was the land of resistance. And I didn't want to be unpopular. Lining up for a turn at the bin on the first day of science class, my mind raced for some middle ground between staring death in the face and bolting.

When I reached into the bin, I found some relief. Only the head and the feet had fur. Once my lab partner and I covered those up, the lab rabbit turned from pitiful victim to slab of meat; and we dug right in, giddy with the high of outwitting fear.

"Should we name her?" I asked.

After some deliberation, we decided to christen our specimen Fluffy.

"Good morning Fluffy," we'd say at the start of each science period. "Time to tuck you in and open you up."

One square of paper towel was allotted for the furry feet, and two to cover the vacant face and the ears. Usually, the first incision was made only after we'd acknowledged our own discomfort. Something profoundly disturbing did the trick, like "Okay girl, let's see what you're made of."

Mockery had revealed itself as the home safe I'd been seeking and, once I'd found it, I stayed there.

"Oh my, Fluffy," I might remark, "what a big heart you have."

Flippancy worked tremendously well at school, but less well at home where I had more to do than look out for myself. As the eldest in the family, I felt my job was both to protect my little sister and to provide her survival skills for the big bad world. At age nine, her curly hair was still the texture of an asparagus fern, and it framed her face in a soft frizzy halo. Her disposition was as delicate as her Afro and she seemed to suffer not just the pain of the universe, but all potential pain too. The chocolate bunnies our step-grandmother gave as presents each Easter were stockpiled on the top shelf of her closet where she could assure that their heads would remain safely on their bodies. And eating a Peep? Forget it. In Susie's hands, objects were handled with the same tenderness she showed for any living thing. This may, in part, have had to do with my committed insistence that our stuffed animals were real and conducted lives of their own when we left each day for school. My mother's rule that an old stuffed animal had to be traded in for every new one sent my sister into deeper and deeper panic as her birthday neared each year.

"Nothing stuffed," she'd beg her friends, hoping that she would not have to look at some new pet and turn it away. Sometimes, when we were away at camp, my mother would donate our oldest, most tattered animals to Vista Del Mar-the orphanage up the street-and I'd spend a week explaining where Ping Pong or Mousey had gone and the reason for his abrupt and unceremonious departure.

"Where did it go?" I'd demand of my mother, hands on my hips and hoping against hope that the bear was in the washer.

"It's gone," she'd say.

"On a trip?"

"Cathy," she'd say, her voice rising, "I'm not going to have my house destroyed by piles of worn out animals. When things get old, it's time to get rid of them.

"Kind of like kids," I'd retort before fleeing to my room.

Moments like these taught me that acting as my sister's great defender would never teach her how to survive. If I truly wanted to serve my sister, I'd have to play the role of the bully too. When she stopped playing with animals virtually altogether, instead breathing life into less vulnerable toys, I decided she needed to learn how to run or to fight if she was going to survive. I felt resentful of my burden, but figured that if ruthless insincerity worked effectively at school, I had a responsibility to try it out at home.

Whenever the sliding door to the kitchen was shut, I knew our mother was in there and not in a mood be disturbed. I also knew that some incident prior to my homecoming had turned the house silent and closed all the doors. I'd walk down the hallway toward my sister's room wondering what I'd find. Whether she was playing or sobbing didn't matter; by the time I reached her room, I was angry.

"What are you doing?" I asked the Friday I learned how to disembowel.

She was sitting on the floor making two Hot Wheels cars kiss.

"I'm getting married," she answered with a tiny roll of the eyes. "What are you doing?"

I told her that I'd just finished dissecting my rabbit, Fluffy, but her wide-eyed look of horror made me realize I needed to give her more.

"Do you know how they get all of those lab rabbits for science students like me to dissect?"

She wagged her head back and forth, suspended between terror and suspense. Some cruel but urgent part of me wanted to yank her down to earth.

"I mean, think about it," I said. "There are thirty students in my class and there's a new class every year. Those bunnies couldn't all have died from natural causes or old age."

Her little brow furrowed as she considered this. "Maybe at a rabbit farm?" she suggested.

I shook my head and told my sister as if the news were common, "They're people's pets. Lost or runaway rabbits, nabbed by the lab catcher."

Susie's mouth hung open.

"And you know what the cool thing is?" I asked, recognizing the roll I was on. "You can find out the story of your rabbit if you want, who he was, and how he was caught."

She may have been horrified, but I knew my sister. She'd have to hear the whole story. She couldn't protect the rabbits if she didn't. There was no way to stop the hurt without suffering first.

"Do you know?" she asked. "Do you know what happened to your rabbit?"

"Oh sure," I said with a casual shrug. "Fluffy was a domestic pet. He belonged to this little boy named Tommy. For the longest time Tommy begged his parents for a bunny rabbit to love and care for all on his own. But he had to wait until he was seven, and to promise he would feed it, and change its water, and look out for all of its needs. Tommy promised and he saved his allowance, so on his seventh birthday, his parents took him to the pet store and let him buy himself the gift he'd earned.

Susie's smile quivered as I walked from her doorframe and squatted before her to finish the story.

"Then one day, Tommy was doing his homework, and Fluffy hopped out of the house. It wasn't until dinnertime that he realized his bunny was missing. He ran up and down the sidewalk calling for her, but it was too late. The lab catcher had already seen Tommy's pet hopping up the road and had thrown him in the van. After that, it was all over. One quick dose of poison and bam, they shaved her, preserved her, and shipped her to me.

My sister gasped as if she didn't know this story was headed nowhere good.

"I cover up the face and paws each day before I cut her open," I said, "but sometimes, when I have her heart in my hand, I swear I can hear little Tommy calling. "Fluffy!" I made my voice as small and lonely as I could. "Here, Fluffy Fluffy! Fluffy!"

"No," she resisted at first. But, as older sister I had cultivated that special talent for turning any boldfaced lie into a deep, dark, secret truth. So all it took was a tiny nod to convince her. Once I did, any neighbor would have thought Susie was the one being eviscerated.

"No!" she shrieked, her face turning red.

"Yep," I assured. "I try not to think about Tommy too much when I go to class, and just remember that his bunny died for science."

When I closed the door I told myself that I'd done what I did to teach Susie a life lesson in the art of toughening and lightening up. But if that were truly the case, I probably would have walked away and left things alone. I didn't. The next night at dinner, in the space between my mom's day at work and my dad's I set down my fork and in my small lost voice called out, "Fluffy! Here fluffy fluff!" I didn't make it through my second round of names before my sister launched out of her chair and ran, sobbing to her room.

"What did you do?" my parents asked, curious and furious at once. "Cathy? What did you do to your sister?"

My father scooted back his chair and headed down the hall to find out and even as I defended myself to my mother, I wondered what was wrong with me. I couldn't tell if I was truly trying to shield my sister from the cruel cruel world, or if I was cruelty itself. Once my father had stalked back into the kitchen and I had offered my apologies, I felt a lot less concerned about Susie's fate and a lot more concerned about mine.

The next night at dinner, when my father shot me a look, I thought sure he was gearing up to assign my punishment. Instead he mouthed the words "Do it. "I wasn't sure I understood until he said it again this time with a twinkle in his eye. "Do it."

My voice rang with glee when I first called out, but just as I hit my crescendo it cracked. In jading over all of my fears, perhaps I'd buried hope too. When I shouted for Fluffy again, there wasn't a more desperate child searching for a rabbit that never was.

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I tutor and teach research and writing for SASC; and lately I write nonfiction. I never wanted to write nonfiction. I went to school for creative writing and wrote magical realism-short stories mostly. But true-life stories kept falling in my lap and the more I tried to ignore them or fictionalize them, the stranger or more monstrous they grew, blowing themselves up to ridiculous proportions in their demand to be told. So magical realism turned from genre to lifestyle; and strange happenings hover like that thundercloud that hangs over Winnie the Pooh. Because this is how stories come to me, I am pressed to ask myself questions about personal responsibility a lot; it's so much easier to play a character in scripts that have been written than to write the part of action hero and live up to it. But I feel my job as a writer is to remain as aware as possible in an effort to see the magic in everyday realities; the lies in truths both present and past; and the truth in fiction.