by Carla Gunn
After I hung up the phone, I still didn’t understand why my parents had to get separated. It just doesn’t make any sense. When two chimps just can’t stop fighting with each other, often another chimp jumps in between them and beats them apart. Sometimes when two mountain gorillas fight, an infant will put himself in the middle and the two gorillas calm down.
Maybe I should have jumped in between Mom and Dad that first time they fought. But I didn’t. And now it may be too late.
Something happened today with Lyle that gave me an idea. The ironic thing is that the idea came out of something Lyle did that was evil – like the kind of evil that made a man and woman put a dead person’s finger in a hamburger in order to get money from the restaurant.
It all started when Ronald McDonald was in our school talking to us about healthy living. I was sitting in a chair between Bird and Gordon and just ahead of Lyle. While Ronald was talking about healthy fruits and vegetables, I all of a sudden really had to go to the bathroom.
When I got back to the gym, I sat down in my chair and leaned back because what had happened in the bathroom sure was a relief. But when I leaned back, I felt something tug the back of my chair and all of a sudden I could feel myself falling back, back, back until wham! – my back and head hit the gym floor. Everything after that happened so fast I didn’t even have time to think about it. It was as though a part of my brain was on automatic and I couldn’t have stopped it even if I had wanted to.
I sat up and screamed something at Lyle that I still can’t believe I thought of. I screamed, ‘Mo chreach!’ and then, ‘Fuck off, you shithead fucking fuckface asshole!’ Everybody turned to look at me – even Ronald stopped doing jumping jacks. Lyle looked surprised for about an instant, and then he laughed hard. He laughed and snorted so hard there was snot bubbling in one of his nostrils.
Bird helped me up and then picked up my quarters and a loonie that had fallen out of my pocket. Then Mrs. Wardman came running over and asked if I was okay, and I said yes even though my head really hurt. She looked at Lyle, who was still laughing with snot bubbling out of his nose.
Mrs. Wardman said, ‘Did you have something to do with this, Lyle?’
Lyle stopped laughing and shook his head no. But then Gordon said, ‘Yes, he did. He pulled on the back of Phin’s chair, and Phin fell back.’ Lyle looked like he wanted to kill Gordon. His face got kind of red and his eyes looked crazy like one of them might all of a sudden pop out of his head on a spring like in a cartoon. This made me worried because I think Lyle was born without the do-not-kill-people gene, like what some scientists think happened to Ted Bundy and Paul Bernardo.
Mrs. Wardman looked at Lyle and said, ‘Is this true, Lyle?’
Lyle said, ‘No – it’s not true!’
That’s when Gordon said, ‘Yes it is! I saw him!’
I’m a little worried about Gordon. I’m thinking that maybe he doesn’t have a self-preservation instinct. He’d have been much better off being a peacock flounder fish, which turns the colour of its background. Gordon’s eyes or brain or something just didn’t seem to be working.
Mrs. Wardman believed Gordon over Lyle. She grabbed Lyle by his arm and marched him out of the gym. Lyle gave Gordon a mean look, and then turned and grinned at me. It wasn’t a friendly grin – it was more like the grin of an insane kid without the do-not-kill-people gene.
Principal Legacie came over to me and took me to his office. He looked worried, but I told him I was all right. My head was still hurting but he looked so worried that I didn’t want him to feel even worse. He told me that he would call my mother to come get me as a precaution.
I saw my mother coming into the school before she saw me. She looked around and then must have had the sense of being stared at because all of a sudden she turned around and looked right at me. She rushed over and hugged me and asked if I was okay. When I told her I was, she got really angry. Her eyebrows pointed down in the centre of her head, and her lips went really thin. Then she used her sandpaper voice, which is always a dead giveaway.
She turned to Principal Legacie and said, ‘How did this happen?’
He told her about what happened, but he didn’t say who did it. He just said one of the children.
My mom’s head whipped over to me and she said, ‘Was it Lyle, Phin?’
I nodded.
My mother’s head then whipped back to Principal Legacie. ‘I want this to stop, and I want it to stop TODAY!’
Even though my mother yelled the word today, Principal Legacie talked in a really calm voice and said that a procedure would be followed, and the child’s parents notified. Then he said, ‘Mrs. Walsh, I am truly sorry this happened to Phin. Please be assured that we’ll handle this. Don’t worry …’
The first mistake Mr. Legacie made was calling my mom Mrs. Walsh. Her last name is MacKeamish. But worst of all were the words don’t worry. When he said those words, it was if they were coming out of his mouth in slow motion. In my mind it sounded like dooonnnnnnnnnn’tttttt wwwoooorrrryyyyyyyy. I knew he was in for it. And he was.
The thing about my mother is that she has everybody who doesn’t know her very well fooled. She has big green eyes – which look even bigger now that her hair is really short – and a big smile, and she laughs a lot. The average person laughs only eighteen times a day, but my mother laughs at least eighty-six times a day. She looks a little like a big, fluffy, smiling, tail-wagging dog. You think you’re safe to pat her on the head, but then next thing you know, she’s got her jaws around your throat.
My mother said, ‘Mr. Legacie, this has been going on for a long time. If something isn’t done and soon, I’ll do something about it myself.’ She said that in her icy sandpaper voice with acid bursts. That’s her worst-ever voice.
I looked at Mr. Legacie’s face, but he looked calm. I think he’s just a good actor, though, because my mother sounded really scary. If Principal Legacie were a horned toad, he could have squirted blood out of his eyes. If he were a sea cucumber, he could have thrown up his guts at my mother to distract her while he made his escape. My mother, on the other hand, looked like a frilled lizard, which hisses and raises its frill to make itself look even bigger.
Then she turned her back on Mr. Legacie, grabbed me by the hand and we left without saying another word.
When we got home, my mother was a little calmer. She sat with me on the couch and we watched The Nature of Things. It was all about the destruction of the rainforest. I had seen this program before. It was about how the rainforests act as the world’s thermostat because they control temperatures and weather patterns. More than 20 percent of the world’s oxygen is produced by the rainforest and it’s home to 50 percent of the earth’s plants and animals. Half of the earth’s total rainforests have been cleared in just twenty years.
I knew my mother was still thinking about Lyle because she didn’t even notice that we were watching a show about the destruction of the earth. Just to be sure she wasn’t really watching I asked her if she’d rather be a cuckoo bird or a cuckoo bee. She just smiled and put her arm around my shoulders. And the show didn’t even mention cuckoos.
Then all of a sudden my mother said, ‘I think you should write a victim-impact statement.’ I asked her what that was, and she said it’s a letter that describes how you feel when someone does something wrong to you. She said they’re used in courts so that the person who committed a crime can see how much they hurt other people. Then she said, ‘I’m just kidding, Phin. But really, something had better straighten that kid out now before he ends up a murderer or something.’ I think she read my mind.
Even though she was kidding, what my mom said got me thinking. So while she was sitting there not really watching the TV, I went to use her office computer. I typed the words victim impact statement into Google and came up with 178,000 hits. One of the sites said that in the letter you should write about the emotional, physical and financial impacts of the crime. So I got out my pen and paper and wrote a letter to Lyl
e. It said:
Dear Lyle,
I am not sure why you don’t like me. All I know is that sometimes when you are doing mean things to me, I wish I were a shingleback lizard that has a tail that looks like a head so that you won’t attack my brain.
Then today you pulled my chair back in the gym and I fell, and the back of my head hit the floor and it hurt a lot. I figure I’ll have a big bump there for a while.
I didn’t lose any money because of my injury but because you rattled my brain in my skull, I may have forgotten important things for my future job working with animals. This may someday cause me economic and social hardship.
Yours truly,
Phineas Walsh
p.s. And please leave the other kids like Bird and Gordon alone too.
I looked at what I had written. I read it over again. And then again. On the fourth time through, I thought about what Lyle would think as he read it. I tried to imagine him sitting in his desk and reading each word I had written. I tried to imagine what he’d be thinking and what he’d be feeling and then what he’d do. That’s when I saw him laughing so hard the snot thing happened again.
I tore up the letter and threw it in the garbage. It was a stupid idea.
It’s a stupid idea because Lyle will never stop being cruel just because he knows it hurts someone. It’s the hurting-someone part that he likes. My grandmother says she’s never found a person who is purely good or purely evil. But she’s never met Lyle.
After I threw out the letter, I walked to the bathroom thinking about victim-impact statements and how I hate Lyle. But when I got nineteen steps away from mom’s office, another idea popped right out of the insides of the first idea.
Victim-impact statements won’t work with humans like Lyle – but they likely work for normal humans. And normal humans everywhere are harming animals, but mostly without even knowing it. I think most humans would want to help animals if they really knew what was happening.
In fact, helping another species even has a name. It’s called interspecies altruism, and lots of animals do it. For example, pods of dolphins have been seen holding other animals up to the surface so they can breathe as they help them to shore. And some people in Africa heard some whimpering and looked around to see an antelope leading a sick wildebeest, with his eyes swollen shut, to a waterhole. One of the coolest examples of interspecies altrusim I saw on the Green Channel was of a mother cat who adopted seven chicks whose own mother had died. Whenever one wandered too far, she’d gently pick him up and bring him back to where her kittens were.
Humans also show interspecies altruism. For example, a few weeks ago on the news I saw a story about how four white-beaked dolphins were trapped in ocean ice for three days and were close to dying. The humans watching onshore just couldn’t stand to watch them suffer any longer so a bunch of men, including a teenager, piled into a motorboat to weigh it down and spent five hours making a pathway through the ice for the dolphins. The teenager even got into the water to help one of the dolphins get free and, in all, three escaped. Maybe stories like this mean that humans just need to be able to see how animals are suffering.
And along with seeing, maybe humans need a way to hear too. Maybe they need a translator to help them understand animals’ voices. Maybe it’s easier for people not to think of all the ways animals are harmed when they can’t even understand the language of those they kill.
Some animals can speak to humans, but not most. I once saw a show about a chimp named Lucy who was raised by a human family in the United States who taught her sign language. She lived there for twelve years, but when she got to be too much trouble (because she threw things around the house and pooped in people’s laps), they sent her to a chimp institute in Africa. All of a sudden she was with other chimps for the first time in her life. She was really scared of a big male chimp who chased her around. When her human family visited, she signed, ‘Please help. Out.’
There have been parrots who have been taught to speak to humans too. One African grey parrot called Alex was taught to speak English. Once when he had to have a medical exam, he cried out to his human companion, ‘I love you. I’m sorry. I want to go back!’
I peeked in on my mother, who was sitting in her rocking chair wrapped up in a blanket, drinking her tea and talking on the phone, likely to her friend Jill. She does that when she’s upset. In fact, she’s been doing a lot of that lately.
I went back into her study to use the computer. I wanted to see if there were any lawyers who might be able to use some victim-impact statements for animals. I typed in lawyers and animals and nature and came up with two million hits. Most of them were for something called environmental law and eco-justice. I clicked on one of the links and couldn’t believe my eyes. There are actually lawyers who sue governments and corporations to get them to stop destroying nature!
Next I typed in the words environmental law and then the name of my city to see if there were any of those people around where I lived. And there were! They were suing a university, the city and the province for paving over wetlands and building big-box stores right near where I live.
I clicked on a link that went to the proposal for the whole project written by a construction company. On the front of the proposal were pictures of a moose, a beaver and a brook. What the heck? Why would they put wildlife on their cover? That doesn’t make logical sense.
Then I read the first page of the proposal and it got even weirder. They want to name their development after the wetlands they’re destroying. That’s like calling a prison Freedom Hall. If I worked in the government and got that proposal, I’d think someone was playing a trick on me like on the show Prank Patrol, and I’d look around for the hidden camera.
And why do they call it development anyway? The wetlands are already perfectly developed. How come it’s not called destroyment?
I wrote down the address of the environmental lawyers and put it in my pocket. I’m going to make victim-impact statements for the animals of those wetlands – like the frogs that live there. I’ll do that for Cuddles.
I’m feeling sick to my stomach. I’ve been sneaking to Mom’s computer and reading about what happens when natural habitats are destroyed. I wanted to read all about it because I want to get my letters just right before I send them to the lawyers.
What I found was even worse than I imagined. I guess that’s because I’ve never thought about what happens when bulldozers clear land. I don’t know why I’ve never thought about it because it’s happening all around me almost all the time. Maybe that’s why.
On one site a man who drove a bulldozer wrote about white-tailed deer running onto a nearby road where they were killed by cars. He also described how lots of animals were buried alive and that he had to keep emptying his bucket of rabbits and squirrels who leapt into it as he plowed through their burrows and nests.
This explained why I’ve been seeing lots of dead animals like raccoons, groundhogs and porcupines on the road next to where big stores are being built. They were likely running for their lives when the machines started chopping down their homes. My mother and I even saw the bodies of a mother skunk and four babies all scattered along the highway. They made it across two lanes but then there was a big cement wall that wouldn’t let them go any further.
Why don’t people come up with better ways of getting land ready for building – ones that don’t cause so much death? People have come up with thousands and thousands of ways to do things that make life better for humans, so why don’t they think of ways to be less destructive when it comes to other lives? Why don’t animals’ lives matter at least enough to do that? Why do people kill just because they can?
Thinking of all those dead animals made a picture in my mind. So I am going to draw pictures for my victim-impact statements too.
Dear humans,
I am an owl. When you came, I was one of the lucky ones because I heard the warning sounds. I flapped my wings really fast to land in a tree that wasn’t knocke
d down by the teeth. I landed in that tree and closed my eyes tight and tried not to listen to the yelps and the screams and the shrieks from below.
When finally there were no noises, I opened my eyes. What I saw gives me bad dreams every night: I saw big open wounds. I saw broken trees and flattened land and the blood of the dead and the almost-dead. And then all of a sudden, something else I’ve never seen before happened – the floor of the earth gave a deep, sad sigh and thousands of bright, glowing lights, some big, some small, floated up, up into the sky, toward the sun.
Truly,
Owl
I drew a picture of what was left of a forest. The ground was red with blood and floating above it all were thousands of bright lights – the souls of all the murdered animals leaving the earth.
Dear humans,
I was a frog. Until you.
Yours sincerely, once upon a time,
Frog
This is where I drew a picture. I drew a picture of bulldozers plowing through a forest and trees falling over and frogs leaping all about. Some of them were run over and flattened, their eyes bulging and frozen in fear.
Dear humans,
I am a deer. When it all began, I flicked up my tail and ran with my fawn as fast as I could away from the sounds of the great toothed beasts and the cries of animals being torn and shredded and buried alive. I can’t even describe how afraid we were. All we could do is run, run as fast as we could – to anywhere but there.
But now my fawn is dead. I heard the sound of her body hit something big and fast and hard. I stopped, looked back and walked as close to her body as I could, but a human was running toward her and I had to run away.