THE ACCIDENT

The Accident
by Michael Kroetch

The doctor tells me I should eat a dried flying lizard for my virility. He doesn’t seem to know how absurd this sounds. Or maybe he just doesn’t care. Either way, he slaps me hard on the back like I’m one of the baby spider monkeys at my sister’s zoo and sends me on my way.
Before going home, I stop in and see my sister. She’s still at the zoo. I know because her purple Vespa is parked where she always parks the scooter right beside the lion cage. She thinks it’s safer there, and I suppose she’s right. Who’d want to swipe a Vespa from a lion? I give the cage (held shut with a frayed bungy cord) a berth of a good twenty feet to make sure the beast doesn’t think I’m the least bit interested in its purple trophy. But even at that distance, its eyes follow me and I can hear its soft growl.
When I tell my sister why I’m there, she just laughs. She laughs so hard I think she’s going to fall out of the chair. Then the bagel she’d been nibbling as I walked in catches in her throat and she starts to choke, seriously. It’s like she could die right there wearing the blue shirt that proudly states “I kissed a chimp today, have you?” Watching her turn the same color as her shirt is awful, but it’s even worse because nobody else is anywhere near her office. This means I have to touch her, which I haven’t done since she was eight years old—a fact we’ve both been happy enough about since we very much DO NOT come from a family of huggers. But I must hug her now, and from the back, and very hard if I’m to do the Heimlich thingy on her. To be honest (and I’m not proud of this) I never did learn how to do the maneuver, at least not the official way (where to put your hands and such). I learned it by watching Bill Cosby do it on a TV show to one of his TV neighbors who’d accidentally swallowed a bullfrog.
“Stop. STOP! You’re going to kill me!”
That’s what my sister moans when she’s finally able to get enough air to push me away.
I lean against the wall near where she has her collection of antique spectacles. The eyewear ranges from different decades over the last hundred years and is rather fragile. I notice my sister seeing me so near them makes her nervous, so I step forward a bit.
“You shouldn’t have those here,” I say, pointing to the rack of spectacles.
“I don’t see what concern they are to you.” She’s still panting for air. Then she smiles again. “Is this true about you needing the corpse of a flying lizard? Why can’t you just take the blue pill like every other normal freak on the street?”
“Shhh.”
“There’s nobody here.”
“Still, I didn’t come here just so you could laugh at me.”

***

That my sister doesn’t like men much is a given. She hasn’t had luck with them and often says animals are not only smarter and more trustworthy, they’re also, in general, more physically appealing. Which would certainly explain why she has her current profession, but not her hobby: the writing of romance novels.
“What I do in my spare time is none of your affair” is her most common response to any and all questions about these prolific writings and the publishing of them under a pseudonym—a name I’m not allowed to disclose here upon punishment of immediate and permanent exile from all future Christmas joy among my siblings.
But right now, as we’re walking out of her office, what she says is, “You look terrible in those pants.” She grabs the middle-most belt loop at the back of my trousers and hefts them up as if feebly attempting to give me a middle-aged wedgy. “You should see them, the way they droop off you. It’s like you got a little boy butt on a big man’s body.”
That it was a mistake coming here in my quest for some dried flying lizard is now apparent not only to me, but also to the smirking llama in the hallway. The animal is tethered to an unmanned 400-pound floor waxing machine with so much dust on it that it doesn’t look like it’s waxed a floor in over ten years. The llama, it appears, has been waiting for my sister for over an hour. They are friends. I find this out when I’m introduced to the creature.
“This is my brother,” she tells it. “He has a problem with his wiener and we’re gonna try and fix it for him.”

***

Although I’m not at liberty to reveal the names of any of my sister’s romance novels or (as I said before) the foofy-sounding name she goes by on their covers, I can tell you this, they’ve been popular—enough so that you might have heard of them. A few years back somebody even made one into a pretty dismal movie on one of the bigger cable networks, starring somebody from a soap commercial (he was popular for awhile but I don’t remember his name now). All this being so, it’s a mystery to me why my sister keeps her work at this rattletrap zoo as her life’s primary focus. But I guess, like much of the rest of our clan, she’s a bit of an oddball. Which means eventually she will want to be buried beside the gleaming body of her one true love, the purple Vespa, just like our great grandmother Bess who was laid to rest alongside her baby grand piano. Happily, other than currently needing a dried flying lizard, I’m a fairly normal and well-adjusted individual. True, at the moment I do not have a job, wife, 2.5 children, any eggs, cheese, meat, baking soda, or raw vegetables in my refrigerator, but by the end of the week I’m hoping to have all of that worked out. That is, if I can get this dried flying lizard to do what it’s supposed to.

***

“But she’s dead,” my sister says.
“You don’t have to keep saying that.”
“A letter in her writing doesn’t mean she’s NOT dead.”
We have this conversation after I tell her what happened yesterday—me receiving the message from my old girlfriend, Peg.
“Anyway,” my sister says, “it can’t really be Peg’s handwriting. You should check again. Probably one of those creepy friends of hers.”
“I looked at its lettering carefully against others she’d sent. You know, before…”
“Before the accident?”
This is my sister’s preferred way of describing what happened to Peg. I think calling it this makes it seem as if it were but a small gap in the routine path of events, something that could have been avoided. I don’t tell my sister how fresh the letter’s ink still smelled when I opened the envelope. I don’t want her to think I’m obsessing about Peg. Besides which, I didn’t come here to tell my sister about the letter and never intended to. I’m not here for a metaphysical discussion on the impossibility of the dead to have pen pals, or for even yet more advice about my need to get a better haircut and stop slumping my shoulders if I want women to notice me. I’m only here to get my prescription filled.

***

The llama needs a breath mint. I want to tell my sister this, but she’s busy
re-locking the cheetah cage, which apparently was blown open by the wind. My sister says it’s the third time it’s happened today and if it happens again it could lead to trouble. But I don’t see how. The zoo’s two cheetahs are so old and lazy-looking, they don’t seem like much of a threat. I’d say the llama’s foul breath would more readily be classified as a health hazard—at least from where I now stand, feeding it the postage stamp-sized packs of Sweet-N-Low which my sister routinely steals from coffee shops for this beast. Rotted teeth and rotten breath in animals are of much less concern to her than excessive girth. “The big problem with most zoos,” she so often tells me, “is the residents are all freaking couch potatoes. The animals get fat and die—and why? No exercise.” This is the reason why she’s so often seen around town leading deadly animals down the city’s sidewalks on a leash, puttering along as a chaperone beside them on her purple Vespa.
Obviously several city ordinances prohibit such behavior, but my sister used a sizable hunk of the money from her romance novels to hire a big lawyer she’d seen on a TV talkshow, who was somehow able to get the city council to make a special provision for my sister’s anti-flab campaign. For awhile there was an uproar by local neighborhood groups and various news media against my sister’s antics; but either she paid them all off handsomely enough with her romance novel dollars, or else they just grew accustomed to the daily sight of haggard lions jogging past their playgrounds; because now, as long as my sister cordially scoops up after her aerobic beasts, the neighbors have, for the most part, stopped their scowling and taken down the angry forest of handmade signs that used to fill their yards.
Only one of these angry signs remains.
It’s in the yard of my sister’s nemesis, Henry Stick. Many years ago Mr. Stick played football for one of the region’s football teams and later taught gym at one of the local elementary schools. He and my sister dated for awhile until she found why he’d been fired from the school and the tiny spy cameras he had set up all over his bedroom and in his bathroom.
I ask her now how she and Mr. Stick are getting along.
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she gives me a withering glare and stiffens her shoulders. Then, from out of nowhere, says, “You have to stop obsessing about Peg.”
“I’m not. And I don’t know what gives you the idea that I am.”
“She’s dead, right? What, two years now?”
“Nineteen months.”
“Whatever. Point is, if she’s ‘X’ months gone, you’ve got to get on with your life, stop eating so many meat pot pies, and quit wearing black.”
“I like black.”
“Nobody likes black like you like black,” she says. “It’s not healthy.”
“It’s just a color.”
“That’s what Stick said about his thing for little girls.”
“I’m not Stick.”
“Then tell me this, how is Peg still writing you letters? And if she’s not—which is probably the case and which almost any red-blooded, sober-minded, gum-chewing citizen of the planet I like to call ‘reality’ would probably and emphatically agree that she is not doing—then what is Christ’s name are you doing if not obsessing about her?”
“There was only one letter.”
“If Peg’s dead, there can’t be any letters. Can there?”
“Look, I only came for the dried flying lizard.”
“You only came for the lizard…”
As my sister mumbles these last words, she looks away from me. Her face gets an expression of such disgust that I want to leave right now without so much as even saying goodbye. But I don’t. Instead, I gag on another mouthful of llama-breath and feed the creature one more stolen packet of Sweet-N-Low.

***

Before being buried with her fabulous piano, my great grandmother Bess went to China in search of a doctor she’d read about who she was sure could cure her of her troublesome epilepsy. Remarkably, despite the fact that when she got over there she couldn’t remember his name, she was able to track the man down. All she remembered was that he had a rather elaborate butterfly tattooed onto the back of his neck which he would sometimes stroke gently as part of his healing rituals. And although the doctor spoke no English and my great grandmother spoke not even a speck of Chinese, the two apparently got along quite smashingly. So much so, in fact, that old Bess was about to marry the man when she was inadvertently carried out of this world upside down by a world class stallion belonging to her doctor’s affluent neighbor and which my great grandmother, at her advanced age, had absolutely no business riding. In her lengthy and elaborately detailed will she made sure all of her kith and kin (that’s what she called us in the document) were amply provided for. What this meant varied from individual to individual, with some of us getting portions of her vast real estate holdings and some receiving important pieces of her prestigious art collection or a selection of the antique treasures she’d tucked away during her many whirlwind flittings round the globe.
What her gifts indicated was not how much the grand dame cared about the one on whom she bestowed the benevolence, but rather how much she worried about them and their various abilities (or lack thereof) to “make do in the world.” It was obvious to all at the reading of the will how little my great grandmother worried about my sister and me, because to my sister, Old Bess bequeathed a tiny collection (3) of domino-sized bamboo brothel tags purportedly to have originated in the Hunan Province during the Ming Dynasty (estimated value: $200)—and to me she endowed a delicately bound satchel of preserved millipedes (estimated value: ?). When I opened the parcel I had absolutely no idea at all what the millipedes were. At first I thought they might be thin strips of petrified bacon, the bark of a tree, or some kind weird candy the Eskimos might make. In a brief note from Bess I found wound among the rigid insects were words wishing me well and instructions on how to prepare the millipedes for consumption. They were, apparently, a central part of her doctor’s remedy for epilepsy which she’d put aside for me in the off chance that I, too, might be stricken with the affliction. That I hadn’t been by the time the will was read made me feel strange. It seemed I was letting my great grandmother down.
After she was buried I would sometimes visit her and the piano to let them know I was still okay. While I was there, I always made sure to assure them I was on constant watch for the onset of my epilepsy. When visiting the gravesite I also made sure to bring along not only a bottle of Stoli Vodka for Bess and the piano (which I poured gingerly over their grave), but, in addition, the packet of stiff millipedes. I brought the millipedes as a kind of visible proof, I suppose, to show how vigilant I was about waiting for my predicted seizures. However, because the seizures never arrived (or were, at best, tardy in the extreme) as the years passed I didn’t know what to do with these heirloom millipedes. In truth, I grew increasingly anxious about them. There seemed no way to free myself from them. I certainly couldn’t just throw them away. I thought about burying them in my neighbor’s rose bushes, but was afraid I might get caught. At one point I even considered giving them away to a local church when one of their bucktoothed young flock came by asking for donations of canned food. In the end, however, I kept my millipedes—kept them and kept and kept them through many different housing situations, presidents, and several girlfriends, up until my last one, Peg, found them and mistakenly consumed them on top of a frozen pizza, assuming, I suppose, that they were dried anchovies.

***

My sister may call the occurrence an accident, but I cannot. Odd and cataclysmic, yes, in a heartbeat I will admit this much. But an accident? There’s something about the whole business that has too much of an air of pre-ordained fate and maybe worse, the ominous possibility Old Bess may have been planning all along to keep me a bachelor.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I look over. My sister and the llama are both eyeballing me in disdain. “You’re crazier than a teapot.”
“What ’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s just an expression,” she says.
“No, it isn’t. I’ve never heard anybody else say it.”
“I think it’s from Alice in Wonderland.”
“No, it isn’t. Teapots are not--”
“What difference does it make?!?”
After my sister says this, there’s a silence. It’s interrupted by the llama, which makes a low glottal noise that’s a cross between the sound a dog makes when barking and a human belch. My sister responds by tenderly patting the llama on the back of its head and glaring at me again.
“You actually think Granny Bess plotted from the grave to kill Peg with your inherited millipedes?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“What did you say?”

***

The virility problem is what Peg’s strange letter from yesterday addressed directly. The letter urged me to confront the issue by seeing a doctor. It said it was time to bite the bullet. However it did not then bother to explain what it meant by this phrase or exactly how it fit into my virility issue. I was not sure biting the bullet was such a good idea, especially considering the source of this medical advice was already dead. Nonetheless, I relented and went and bit down. But I can’t tell any of this to my sister. She has a way of making everything that comes out of my mouth sound like it’s coming from a crazy person.
“Here we are,” she says suddenly as she creaks open a green steel door.
“Where?” I look at her. She has no expression, but her llama’s lips are stretched wide in an ear-to-ear grin.
“It’s the flying lizard cage. Go on, go in there and kill one.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“You didn’t think I had a dead one here waiting for you, drying over the central heating system, did you?”
She pushes me in through the door and shuts it, locking it. This is when I realize there’s no walkway or hallway, that I’m actually already inside the cage of the flying lizards. It’s very hot and moist and reeks of urine. Every motion seems amplified by a thunder of dull echoes.
“Wait. Wait. This isn’t what I wanted.”
No response from outside. All I hear is the crunch of distant gravel, receding footsteps, muffled laughter.
“WAIT! How am I going to kill one of these things? I don’t have a weapon!”
“Guess you’ll have to use your hands.”
These words come from as far away as a romance novel. After they fade, I look upward and see the residents of the cage, the greenish yellow reptiles I’ve come for. There’s three. Each is about a foot long. They perch on dead tree limbs up near the thickly barred ceiling and their lungs billow softly. Their oddly slitted oval eyes look down at me. It’s as if they know why I’m here, but in their eyes there isn’t any fear of execution. Instead, it’s rather a sense of gratefulness—as if they’ve been waiting for me for a long while and I’m here to perform a favor.