by Carla Gunn
I walked over to my mother’s side of the car and put my face up to the glass of her window. That’s when Brent saw me and he jerked his head back as though someone had slapped him. My mom’s head swivelled in my direction. She looked like she did once when I caught her eating my Halloween candies. Then she gave a little wave.
She stepped out of the car. Brent leaned across the seat and said, ‘Hi, Phin. How are you doing?’
‘Fine,’ I said, turning and walking back to the house.
I gave my mother the silent treatment. I pretended not to listen to her when she explained that she had had a few glasses of wine and didn’t want to drive home in her own car after dinner. I didn’t even let her read to me before bed.
My dad called this evening to talk to my mom. I couldn’t hear all of what she was saying because the dishwasher was running, which made it really hard to eavesdrop. I could tell, though, that they were arguing about something. I was hoping it wasn’t about me.
I didn’t ask my mom what she and Dad were fighting about because I didn’t want to make her say something about Dad that I didn’t want to hear. She’s only said a few things bad about him, but I wondered if there were a lot more bad things inside her. I don’t want to hear any of them, especially since I’m part Dad. Because of that and because I can tell it makes her upset, I don’t like to bring up the Dad topic with my mom.
Sometimes I send Dad an email that says, ‘Dad, you’re the best dad in the world. Love, Phin’ – even when it’s not even Father’s Day. Sometimes I also draw pictures of our family and put me in the middle. My mother didn’t like my first one like that after my parents got separated. When she saw it, she sat me down and told me again that she and Dad were separated and blah blah blah – another reason not to bring up the Dad topic. Once she told me that their not getting along had nothing to do with me and that I shouldn’t blame myself. That didn’t make me feel better at all. I wished it was my fault because then maybe I could fix it. After that talk I added horns to my picture of Mom. But then I felt guilty and erased them. Now when I draw pictures of all three of us, I just don’t show them to her.
I hope that when Dad sees the letters and pictures I mail him maybe he’ll think of me – and maybe even remember that he misses me and then come home to stay. But so far it’s not working.
Today something shocked me. When I first heard it, my body got cold and my teeth chattered. It was something I would never have expected – never in a million years. It was a thing worse than the sound of Lyle’s voice, a thing worse than getting sick with lice, a thing worse than having your eyelids held open for a week with toothpicks: MY MOTHER TOLD ME THAT I CAN’T WATCH THE GREEN CHANNEL ANYMORE!
After the shock, I got really really really, really, to-infinity mad, which made my body hotter than normal. Now I’m so mad I’m practically burning up and my brain is buzzing like a whole hive full of bees. And my arms are shaking so much that the only thing that could steady them is to grab hold of something – like Dr. Barrett’s neck. I just know this is all that friggin’ psychologist’s fault because after he talked to me, he talked to my mother and then she told me this HORRIBLE, TERRIBLE, SHOCKING news. That’s no coincidence.
I yelled at my mother that this was not fair. I screamed that she was ruining my life and that I won’t be ready for my job when I grow up if she doesn’t let me watch the Green Channel! I asked her how she would like it if she wasn’t allowed to get ready for her job.
She said, ‘Phin, this is for your own good. There is too much on the Green Channel that is making you worried.’
I yelled, ‘The Green Channel isn’t what’s making me worried! The extinction of animals is making me worried! Everybody should be worried! Why aren’t you worried?’
She said, ‘Phin, I am not going to change my mind on this. I’m your parent and I’ve decided this is what’s best for you. I am not going to talk about it like this. If you’d like to talk about it calmly and listen to my reasons, then we can do that.’
I screamed, ‘I want a different parent! This is not best for me! I need a better parent who makes better decisions!’
She walked away and went to the bathroom. I screamed at her through the bathroom door. Then I went to my bedroom and slammed the door. I cried for a long time. Then my mother came to my door.
She said, ‘Phin, how about we play cards?’
I screamed, ‘No!’
She said, ‘How about we draw?’
I screamed, ‘No!’
She said, ‘How about we go out for an ice cream?’
I screamed, ‘No!’
She said, ‘How about we look up things on the computer that you want to know?’
I screamed, ‘No, leave me alone!’
I would not talk to her about things she wanted to talk about just like she wouldn’t talk to me about what I wanted to talk about.
Later my mother told me that she was speaking with Dr. Barrett on the phone and that he’d like to speak with me too for a few minutes. I screamed at my mother that I didn’t want to talk to the friggin’ psychologist, but she whispered in an angry voice with her teeth clenched together that if I didn’t speak to him civilly, I would lose something worse than the Green Channel.
‘What? What?’ I screamed. She wouldn’t tell me, she just kept staring at me, looking like the picture of the Maori warrior that my grandfather had hanging in his den. So I picked up the phone. Dr. Barrett asked me if there was anything I wanted to talk about and I said no – he’s the one who wanted to talk to me, not the other way around. And besides, it was talking to him that got me into this friggin’ trouble to begin with.
Dr. Barrett said he understood how frustrated I must feel, but that he and my mother are going to work really hard to help me feel better. He told me that one thing I can do when I’m frustrated is called deep breathing. He told me to breathe in through my nose to the count of seven and then hold it to the count of four and then breathe out through my mouth to the count of seven. Because my mom was watching I tried it, but it made me feel like I was going to pass out. I guess that’s one way to stop being frustrated – just pass out and fall on the floor.
Dr. Barrett said that likely the reason I am getting angry easily is because I’m not getting enough sleep. That’s not true but I let him think it because I figured that would get me off the phone quicker. The real reason I’m angry is that I’m worried. Nobody is listening to me, not even my own mother! Aren’t mothers supposed to listen to their kids? Aren’t they supposed to understand them? When she doesn’t listen to me, it makes me even more worried than I already am about Cuddles and other animals and climate change and stuff. So I guess you could say my mother is the reason I’m not getting enough sleep. And it’s also Dr. Barrett’s fault because he’s making my mother not listen to me even more than she already doesn’t.
When I went to bed, I told my mother that I hadn’t changed my mind about this – it was definitely not right that I can’t watch the Green Channel. I told her that not being able to watch the Green Channel will just make me more worried. I will be more worried because the bad things I can imagine are worse than the bad things that may really be happening – much, much, to-infinity worse.
I didn’t sleep a wink.
Tonight after supper I was really super upset and really wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t my mother. The first person I thought of was my grandmother, but when I called her number, there was no answer. Maybe that was okay because I wouldn’t want to wake her up again. Sometimes even when I talk to her face to face, it’s like there’s no answer. She has this blank look like someone has pressed the Pause button or something. Since Granddad’s been gone, she’s like a goose widow who hangs her head and droops her body after her mate dies. Can you die even before you’re dead? I want Grammie to be like she used to be.
My mother wanted to talk to me, but I didn’t want to. She kept coming into the living room and sitting next to me and taking my hand. But I wouldn’t talk to her.
I just kept rubbing Fiddledee and thinking about how unfair it was that I couldn’t watch the Green Channel. After a while I got up and turned on the TV and watched a different channel, but I was not happy about it.
MythBusters was on. They were testing the myth that you could kill yourself with your own farts. Jamie and Adam and Tory counted the number of farts they had on a normal day, and then they ate only certain foods all day long. Adam ate only beans, Jamie ate meat and Tory drank pop. Adam’s farts went up the most. He farted twice as much – which shows that ‘Beans, beans, good for your heart, the more you eat, the more you fart’ is true. Then they put Adam in a tub that had a tube over it to hold in all his farts, but he didn’t die so they busted that myth. But they did find that there are three deadly gases in farts: methane, carbon dioxide and argon. But it wasn’t enough to kill him. The death-by-fart myth was busted.
How come it’s all right to watch a TV show about myths, but it’s not all right to watch shows about truths?
After MythBusters I watched a show on the Travel Channel called The World’s Ten Most Dangerous Animals. The animals from ten to two were:
10. Bears – kill about 6 people each year
9. Sharks – kill about 8 people a year
8. Hyenas – kill about 50 people a year
7. Jellyfish – kill about 55 people a year
6. Big cats like leopards, lions and tigers – kill about 80 people a year
5. Elephants – kill about 130 people a year
4. Scorpions – kill about 500 people a year
3. Crocodiles – kill about 2,000 people a year
2. Bees and wasps – kill about 10,000 people a year
I was sure I knew what number one was going to be. I watched about fifteen commercials waiting for the final animal. I was absolutely sure I knew what they were going to say, but I had nothing better to watch. But when finally they got to the big moment, it wasn’t at all what I thought it was going to be. The man on the Travel Channel said, ‘The world’s most dangerous animal is …’ There was a pause and then a drum roll and then he shouted, ‘The snake!’
I almost fell out of my chair. The snake? What kind of dumb show was this anyway? The snake kills only 100,000 people each year. What I was sure was the world’s most dangerous animal didn’t even make the list!
Just to make sure I was right and the Travel Channel was wrong, I went to my mother’s computer and typed in murders. On Wikipedia it said there were about 500,000 people murdered in the year 2000. That makes humans five times more dangerous than the snake! If you count the murdering of other animals too – which should count because the Travel Channel included interspecies killings – the human kills billions each year. Do you know how big a billion is? It would take a person sixty-seven years to count to a billion if he counted two numbers every second. The human is the most dangerous animal in the world! Stupid, bleeping, crappy channel.
This just made me even angrier. I wasn’t getting good information anymore. If I kept watching channels like that, I was going to get stupider and stupider, and then how was I going to know everything I need to know to save animals from extinction? To make it even worse, on one of the channels I was allowed to watch, there was an advertisement about a program that will be on the Green Channel tomorrow. It’ll be all about symbiotic relationships in the animal kingdom. But I can’t watch it. The only thing that made me feel a teensy bit better is that I already know a lot about symbiotic relationships.
A symbiotic relationship is when one animal gets something from another animal and that animal gets something back from it. An example of that is the oxpecker and the ox. There are two species of oxpeckers, the red-billed and the yellow-billed. They live in the African savannah and have strong feet to hold on to the backs of mammals like oxen. They eat the ticks and parasites on animal skins. So in return for the oxpecker’s meal, the ox gets rid of the insects that make him itchy and sore.
I once saw on the Green Channel that all over the earth, animals and birds and insects are all in what is called a dynamic symbiotic relationship with all the other animals and birds and insects. This means that if one is taken out of the food chain, many other animals could suffer or die out.
But if humans went extinct, all of the other species on the earth would stay alive and mostly get healthier and increase in number. That’s because humans are at the top of the food chain and there is no mammal species on earth that needs humans to survive, except maybe the little dogs that humans have bred to need them. Besides them, the only living things that need humans are the parasites that live only on them, like the crab louse and certain types of viruses, like human chicken pox and tuberculosis. This makes the human relationship with the other species mostly a parasitic one.
What I think is weird is what humans are doing: killing off their hosts. That doesn’t make any kind of sense for a parasite.
When I thought of all this, I had to tell my mother. I knew it was a risk but I really needed to share it with someone. Those facts were like a flood in my mind swirling around really fast and I knew that if I told someone about them, that would relieve the pressure. There would still be a flood, but a calmer one.
When I first started telling her, she listened and made jokes about how it would be neat if everyone had their very own oxpecker. But then she started to get a really weird look on her face and by the time I got to the part about humans being parasites, the really weird look turned into her really worried look. And I knew I was in big trouble.
She said, ‘This, Phineas William Walsh, is why you are not watching the Green Channel.’
I said, ‘What do you mean? What did I say that was bad?’
And she said, ‘Phineas, the ideas you see on the Green Channel really worry me. Do you know that some environmentalists actually hope humans go extinct – that we’re all wiped out by a virus or a meteor?’
I said, ‘No, I haven’t heard that on the Green Channel.’
And she said in a quite loud voice, ‘Well, there are such people! They call themselves the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. I interviewed them once and they’re crazy, Phin!’ Then my mother got really quiet and said in a very low voice, ‘Phin, human life is very important.’
I said, ‘But I didn’t say it wasn’t! All I said is the facts! How come nobody wants to know the facts?’
She said, ‘Phin, I know that you’re leading up to asking me if you can watch the Green Channel and the answer is no. No, final answer. And you know why – I have explained it to you and tomorrow Dr. Barrett will again explain it to you, and your little monologue just now makes me even surer of that decision. You may watch the Discovery Channel or the Learning Channel or PBS or CBC or YTV or Spike TV or Playboy or whatever else – I don’t care what! But not the Green Channel. Do you understand?’
That’s when I started screaming. I screamed that she was not being fair. I screamed that she was being stupid – more stupid than an acanthonus armatus, which is the vertebrate with the smallest brain weight compared to spinal-cord weight. The acanthonus armatus didn’t have to evolve to be very smart because it lives at the bottom of the ocean and is not very active and doesn’t have many predators.
My mother didn’t like being called an acanthonus armatus, and she likely didn’t even know what it was, which proved my point! She gave me her dragon-lady look and told me to go find something to do. She turned to the counter and tried to ignore me by opening a can of cat food for Fiddledee.
But I didn’t go away. I stood behind her and screamed that she was not being a good mother. By the look on her face right then, if she were a crocodile carrying me in her mouth to the water, she would have swallowed me.
My mother held the can of cat food in one hand and took some peanuts to eat with the other hand. My mother often puts stuff in her mouth to eat when she is upset. The more upset she is, the more she eats. And she was eating a lot of peanuts really fast.
I followed her to Fiddledee’s dish and screamed at her to li
sten to me. And she said, ‘Phin, I will not talk about this.’ Her voice and face were very mad. Then I yelled some more about how nobody wants the facts, everybody just wants the lies, and I followed her back to the kitchen counter.
My mother must have been really upset because then she did something that all of a sudden made me stop yelling and start laughing, and I really didn’t want to do that, but I couldn’t help it: she meant to put more peanuts in her mouth, but she put the cat-food spoon in by mistake!
She ran to the sink and started spitting and gagging, and I laughed harder and harder. I had tears running down my face. She kept saying, ‘Phin, this is not funny,’ but she was laughing a little bit too.
Then I told her that she shouldn’t worry too much because even though cat food is made out of animal parts like intestines, bones and ligaments, Fiddledee hasn’t died yet, so she would likely be okay from eating just that little bit on the spoon. She was bigger than Fiddledee, after all, and so it would take a lot of cat food to poison her.
Then I didn’t feel mad anymore. I don’t think you can be mad and laugh at the same time. I really don’t think that is possible.
I told my mother that she wasn’t as stupid as acanthonus armatus and she said, ‘Why not? I ate cat food, didn’t I?’ And that made me laugh some more.
I asked my mother if it tasted good and she just made a face at me. I said, ‘Well, Mom, you never know. There’s only one thing that all cultures of the world won’t eat and that’s human poop. Everything else is eaten by someone somewhere.’
When my mom went to do some work in her study, I went upstairs and wrote about Reull and drew some pictures of them. I drew the Jingleworm, who is red and white and has a part on the end of its body that jingles like a bell wherever it goes. The Jingleworm’s predator is the Three-clawed Wren and it jingles so much that the Wren doesn’t have any problem finding it to eat.
But then the Jingleworm started to hide in the coat of the Green-tailed Squirrel, which didn’t mind because the loud jingling noise of the Jingleworm scared away its predator, the Electric Cat. The Electric Cat’s ears are very sensitive to the jingling noise. To it the Jingleworm sounds like somebody scraping their nails on a chalkboard sounds to us. So the Jingleworm and the Green-tailed Squirrel have a symbiotic relationship.