Amphibian - Carla Gunn

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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 together after their fight. Fighting is just a part of life. All the animals do it but those in the same social group – like my mom and my dad – mostly make up afterwards.

      After my parents separated, my father started working even more as a foreign correspondent. Now he is hardly ever, ever home. Among primates, the only ones who just get up and leave the social group are the kids who are grown up. They go off to find another group so that they can mate. Parent primates don’t just pick up and leave. If there was anyone who was supposed to be doing the leaving around here, it should be me, when I’m older – not my dad.

      Tonight before bed I couldn’t stop thinking about Cuddles. I thought about him when I was watching the Green Channel, I thought of him as I was eating my bedtime snack, I thought about him when I was brushing my teeth. I just couldn’t get him out of my mind. It was like he was in there hopping through my brain pathways and each time he made a turn, he split into two and went down two more roads and those roads split into two and so did he and so on and so on and so on until there were thousands of Cuddleses hopping all through my brain until it overflowed and frogs started coming out my ears.

      I told my mother this and she got a weird look on her face.

      Her lips twitched a little bit and then she said, ‘Phin, why can’t you stop thinking about that frog? It’s a frog, Phin. A frog! Would you like me to look up some information on the web to show you how little frogs know and experience compared to us? Maybe it would help you to stop worrying about him.’

      I shook my head no. I already knew all about frogs. That was my problem.

      My mother said, ‘You know, Phin, like I said before, you can’t think of a frog as though it’s a person. They’re just not as intelligent.’

      I asked my mother if aliens came down to the planet earth and they were one million times smarter than humans, would it be all right to capture all the humans with nets and put them in solitary cages and feed them once in a while and watch them bang their heads against the glass until the day they died?

      My mother opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. Then she opened it again and closed it. She told me to jump in my bed and then she went downstairs to get me her relaxation CDs. They didn’t work. In fact, they made me feel more scared and worried. One CD was of thunder and lightning storms and all I could think of was being struck by lightning. The next one was of the ocean and it made me think of drowning. The next was called Rainforest. That was the worst of all. If you went to a rain-forest these days likely all you’d hear would be the sounds of power saws and big trucks and animals running and howling and crying because their homes are falling down all around and on top of them. That’s supposed to relax me? What I really want is for my mom to let me have a computer in my room so that I can listen to what’s happening at Pete’s Pond.

      I got up out of bed and walked down the stairs really quietly. I peeked into my mother’s office and when she heard me I ducked and then ran in behind the couch so that she wouldn’t hit me with her mad rays.

      She said, ‘Phin, what are you doing? Why aren’t you in bed? You know I have two hours of work to do after you go to bed, you know that! Why are you doing this again? You’re making me crazy! I have a deadline to meet and I don’t have the time to lie down with you, I just don’t, Phin, I don’t!’

      I said, ‘I know, but I can’t sleep and the CDs aren’t helping a bit.’ She sighed a really loud sigh and slammed her book shut and walked me back up the stairs. I ran up them fast because I couldn’t see her behind me. She’s scary when she’s mad.

      Sometimes I look at my mother and say Mom Mom Mom over and over again and the more I say it and look at her, the more she doesn’t seem like my mother anymore. She seems stranger and stranger to me the more I stare at her and think the word Mom. It’s almost like she becomes an alien or something and if I do this for too long, I get scared and then I have to look at something else. When I look back to her again, she’s back to normal.

      When my mother was mad at me, she wasn’t at all normal. But then she lay down with me and she went back to normal. Especially after she fell asleep.

      I listened to her snore and thought about Cuddles some more. I am starting to think of a plan for getting him free. I am going to talk to Bird about it.

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