Only the Animals
Page 20
* * *
She couldn’t have known, on the day she took one of the last boat jets to Cyprus, that there would be a ceasefire within a month. That morning, she carried my cage onto the balcony and went back inside, trying to pretend she wasn’t packing. I knew what she was doing: wrapping the few shrunken apples and pieces of broccoli she’d hoarded in wax paper, filling a water bottle with leftover seeds, putting my favourite toys into a plastic bag.
Out on the balcony, she found me staring at the sky, my eyelids drooping. I didn’t make a sound when she threw a towel over my cage in a furtive movement. She dragged her suitcase with one hand, clutched my cage with the other, and made her way slowly to the pet shop many blocks away. It was dark inside, locked up, display windows emptied. There was no sign of my first owner.
What choice did she have but to hook my cage to the awning overhead and leave as quietly as she could, before I realised I was alone?
Acknowledgements
Thanks first and foremost to Teresa Dovey for her beautiful illustrations. Heartfelt thanks to Sarah Chalfant and Charles Buchan for their unwavering support over many years (and for not reporting me to the madhouse when I sent them a manuscript filled with talking animals). Special thanks to Eric Chinski for his honest feedback many years ago, and for welcoming me to FSG. Thanks to Jeff Seroy, Sarita Varma, Lottchen Shivers and Peng Shepherd at FSG. Thanks to Boria Sax for first sparking my interest in animals in folklore (and for inspiring the book’s title). Thanks to Jackie Ko, Anna Funder, Kirsten Tranter, Jonathan Darman, Amelia Lester, Jessica Berenbeim, Porochista Khakpour, Meredith Angelson, Lorrayne Ward, Sophie Gee, Lev Grossman, Natalie Frank, Ram Natarajan, Paul Stopforth, Hisham Matar, Faye Ginsburg, Fred Myers, Karan Mahajan, Rachel Kushner, Abha Dawesar, Sharona Coutts, Valerie Steiker, Dana Kupersmith, Sabra Thorner and Mark Greif for encouragement along the way. Thanks to Lindiwe Dovey, Robert Mayes, Chiara Dovey-Mayes, Ken Dovey, Teresa Dovey, Blake Munting and Gethin Dovey-Munting for constant support and love.
A much earlier version of ‘Red Peter’s Little Lady’ was published in Canteen, issue 5 (2009), and of ‘Psittacophile’ in To Hell with Journals B: East & West (2007).
A Note on Sources
Given that these stories pay homage to many authors who have written about animals, I am indebted both directly and indirectly to multiple works of literature. Many of the animal narrators intentionally use words, phrases and sentences taken verbatim from the work of other authors. A complete list of these sources can be found at www.ceridwendovey.com.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ceridwen Dovey’s debut novel, Blood Kin, was published in fifteen countries, short-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and selected for the National Book Foundation’s prestigious “5 Under 35” honors list. The Wall Street Journal named Dovey one of their “artists to watch.” She studied social anthropology at Harvard and New York University, and now lives with her husband and son in Sydney. Only the Animals won the 2014 Readings New Australian Writing Award. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALSO BY CERIDWEN DOVEY
Blood Kin
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
The Bones
Soul of Camel
Died 1892, Australia
Pigeons, a Pony, the Tomcat and I
Soul of Cat
Died 1915, France
Red Peter’s Little Lady
Soul of Chimpanzee
Died 1917, Germany
Hundstage
Soul of Dog
Died 1941, Poland
Somewhere Along the Line the Pearl Would Be Handed to Me
Soul of Mussel
Died 1941, United States of America
Plautus: A Memoir of My Years on Earth and Last Days in Space
Soul of Tortoise
Died 1968, Space
I, the Elephant, Wrote This
Soul of Elephant
Died 1987, Mozambique
Telling Fairy Tales
Soul of Bear
Died 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina
A Letter to Sylvia Plath
Soul of Dolphin
Died 2003, Iraq
Psittacophile
Soul of Parrot
Died 2006, Lebanon
Acknowledgements
A Note About the Author
Also by Ceridwen Dovey
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Ceridwen Dovey
Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Teresa Dovey
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2014 by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books, Australia
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2015
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reproduce the extract in “A Letter to Sylvia Plath” from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, copyright © 1979, reprinted by kind permission of the Estate of Douglas Adams.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dovey, Ceridwen.
[Short stories. Selections]
Only the animals: stories / Ceridwen Dovey. — First American edition.
pages; cm
ISBN 978-0-374-22663-3 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-374-71306-5 (e-book)
1. Animals—Psychological aspects—Fiction. 2. Human–animal relationships—Fiction. 3. Anthropomorphism—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9369.4.D68A6 2015
823'.92—dc23
2014049062
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