Chapter 1

From the outside, the pet shop looked absolutely normal. Nothing strange about it at all. It was a grey squat building wedged between other grey squat buildings; some of the buildings were connected while others were separated by alleys that even a cat might get stuck in. If you’re standing facing the door to the pet shop, on the left there is the sandwich shop, Molded Sandwiches, and on the right there is the Hot and Ready coffee shop. If you look directly up, you’ll see a sign that reads, “Bob’s Pets.” Not that the owner’s name was Bob. As far as David Morgan knew, there had never been anyone named Bob there, ever.

Inside Bob’s Pets was a different story. The cages and terrariums were filled with… things. They seemed to be living things, David guessed. They moved like they were alive, but they certainly didn’t look like any living creature he’d seen before.

The inside of the pet store smelled like generations of animals had died there, which was technically true, but true or not it’s highly undesirable. The glass door remained closed, separating the pungent air from the fresh, smoggy city air and also separating the store from its potential customers. People passing by hardly gave the store a second glance much less opened the door.

David had been working at Bob’s Pets for years. He was nice in that he didn’t go out of his way to be bad. However, he also didn’t go out of his way to be good. In fact, it could be said that David went out of his way to never go out of his way for anything. Not going out of his way was a safe option that kept him off the world’s radar.

“David,” Lawrence. Selzer said. “Have you moved the organic pet snacks to the front, yet?”

The pet snacks were actually 5% organic; the rest of the ingredients were unpronounceable and probably banned in other countries.

“No one will buy those, sir, no matter where we put them.”

Selzer gave David a look that said he expected people to buy what he told them to buy, and he’d tell people to buy them by putting them up front. David was pretty sure supply and demand didn’t work that way, but he was just the employee, and Selzer was the one who signed the checks. That meant Selzer knew what he was doing, even when he didn’t.

David’s shoulders, even though they were already slumped, defied biology by managing to slump some more. He trudged over to the front display and began removing the popular—meaning they sold about one a week—pet toys to make room for the toxic treats. Why you’d reward your pet with something that would burn holes in their insides, David wasn’t sure, but then again, he wasn’t an animal lover.

Some of the toys in the store bore the warning “for novelty purposes only.” It wasn’t that David had never seen this warning on a toy before, it was just that he had never seen it on a pet toy.

Selzer watched David with all the patience of a man standing on hot coals. David only hoped the man couldn’t read his mind, and began wondering if maybe he should learn some bad words in foreign languages.

“Usero yo.”

“Wha—?” David, kneeling on the ground, fell back on his ass in surprise. He nearly dropped the twenty bubble-packed toys in his gangly arms.

“Usero yo”; it’s Japanese for “fuck off.”

David looked around, but the only other person in the store was Selzer, and it certainly wasn’t his voice he’d heard. Selzer looked at him, shook his head in a way that implied he hated employees, and then turned and walked away.

David waited on the floor a moment longer before picking himself back up and walking toward the aisle with the inedible snacks. He wondered if losing his mind would make this job less mindless. Then he wondered if that even made any sense.

He dumped the toys on the floor and began moving the boxes of treats where the customers could more obviously ignore them.

“How was work?”

“It was fine,” David said, with a tone that suggested it was the new worst day of his life so far.

“That’s good,” Amanda said, without any semblance of sarcasm.

David went to his closet, needing a reminder that his life wasn’t as awful as it could be. It could always be worse. Like, he could be in a war. And get shot. And contract malaria. And get shot again.

He dug a wooden box out of the back corner, from underneath some dirty clothes and shoes that were too worn out to wear but could maybe still come in handy some day. He opened it reverently and looked at the items inside.

Last week, David had cleaned and waxed the knives his grandfather left him, so they gleamed beautifully. The first knife was a Western L77 with a long guard and blue blade. The second knife was a Western G46-8” with a bright blade. David looked forward to the day when he’d have a better apartment and somewhere to display the knives. He hated that they were relegated to being buried in his closet.

“Any cute new animals at the store?” Amanda asked, interrupting his thoughts about how life could be worse.

“Cute how?” David said. “They all look like children’s cartoon rejects.”

“The cat with bunny ears and a bunny tail was cute.”

“That thing was a devil on three-and-a-half legs,” David said. “It ate one of our snakes.”

“Well, that’s one less animal you have to sell, then, right?”

David didn’t have a response for that. She was right, in a really incorrect way. At that point, it was easier to give up; real logic was no match for crazy girlfriend logic.

He wondered what was for dinner. He glanced at Amanda on her laptop, realized he couldn’t smell anything coming from the kitchen, and realized dinner was going to be whatever frozen pizza he stuck in the oven. Or microwave, depending on how impatient he was feeling.

His stomach rumbled with a ferocity that suggested the rest of the earth would soon follow if he didn’t eat soon; yeah, he wasn’t feeling very patient.

David placed the wooden box carefully back in the corner of his closet, and then went to the kitchen and opened the freezer. The choices were cheese, cheese, or something called “Healthy and Light Mushroom and Greens Tsunami.” Cheese it was.

“Honey, can you come over here a moment?” Amanda called from the other room.

“Can I get dinner started, first?”

“No.”

He sighed, put the cheese pizza back where he’d found it, and walked over to his girlfriend, a definite a defined sulk in his steps.

“What do you need help with?”

“Well, Colleen is about to get it on with this guy, and he’s going to pound her into the wall—“

Colleen is the heroine of Amanda’s erotica. She’s a beautiful, blonde twenty-something who works as a magazine editor or columnist or something, David can’t remember. She can’t seem to find the right man, so she has sex with every random guy who looks sideways at her. It’s hard to believe that tactic isn’t netting her Mr. Right. Maybe Colleen needs to throw some more palpable desperation their way; men love that.

“Can’t your erotica wait until after I eat?”

Amanda pouted with extreme prejudice.

“Didn’t we already act this out last week?” David said.

“Yeah, but I can’t just repeat what I already wrote. I need to do something new and fresh.”

“I thought writers were supposed to be imaginative,” David said. He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. He wondered if that high school diploma really had his name on it, or if he was also too stupid to read.

Amanda crossed her arms and her pout became a glare. A very, very one-more-word-and-you’re-sleeping-on-the-couch glare. David debated whether pizza outweighed couch, and decided that couch plus ensuing argument was the clear winner.

“All right,” he said. “Where do you wanna do it?”

“How about against the fridge?”

David’s stomach growled at him. If a panther popped out of his belly and ate his girlfriend, it would be her fault.

She leaned against the fridge and pulled her lacy thong down from under her thigh-skimming skirt.

Yeah, definitely her fault.

“That display looks terrible!”

It took all David’s effort not to let out an exasperated sigh; he could feel the ulcer forming.

“They’re garish green-and-orange boxes,” David said. “There’s no way to make it look good.”

“You could stack them up to look like a dog,” Selzer said.

“I think gravity would disagree with you, there, sir.”

Selzer studied the display for a few more minutes, but then decided he was needed somewhere else, like his office; there was some important bourbon-drinking to attend to.

Every time he spoke, Selzer managed to make David feel worse about his life choices. He had never meant to end up working at a pet store, but life doesn’t always work out. There’s a rule that if you haven’t figured out what to do with your life by the time you reach thirty, you’re a failure and you have to spend the rest of your life feeling guilty about being a failure. You let everyone down, and if you think you can just figure it out when you’re thirty-one, well, forget it. Rules are rules. David was stuck between feeling terrible for working at a pet store and feeling terrible for not having figured out his life.

If the secret to a happy life was having a life you could be proud of, David was a total failure. The secret to a happy life could also be pie. Everybody loves pie. David really hoped it was pie.

Speaking of pie, it was lunch time. He considered going to Pie’d Piper, the bakery a few doors down across the street; they specialized in pies. A peach pie would be great. Or apple. Any pie, really, it didn’t matter. David walked across the street, smelled the dough and cheese wafting from Tossers, and decided to get a pizza, instead. Pizza would be healthier, anyway; it had meat. And dairy.

Tossers used to have people tossing the dough, putting on a show for the customers. Then, it became a sometimes thing. Now, if you wanted to see dough tossers, you had to pay extra and it usually took an additional hour for your pizza to be ready.

David decided to get a couple pieces of triple-cheese pizza and a giant cup of High Fructose Corn Soda (he hated the generic Mr. Syrup stuff). When he was sure he was caffeined up enough, he returned to Bob’s Pets.

David stayed behind the cash register, watching the customer-depleted store. His daily thought of how thankful he was that he didn’t work on commission did a little dance in his head; metaphorical confetti sprinkled his brain.

He walked the store, checking on the animals to make sure they weren’t spontaneously combusting. It’d only happened once, but it had been a real mess to clean up. That corner of the store still smelled like burned hair and overcooked fish.

He passed by one of the cages, paused, thought about what constituted normal in this store, and took a few steps backward. Yup, there was definitely something wrong.

“Mr. Selzer?” David called out.

He could hear the sound of a glass landing on a desk, followed by unhurried footsteps. A few minutes later, Selzer was finally standing next to him, in all of his unimpressed and seriously put-out glory.

“What is it?”

“Well, sir,” David said. “This animal is, I mean it’s just a… Sir, why do we have a rabbit?”

It was true. The thing in the cage had no scales, no horns, no chicken feet. It was just a small, white rabbit. You know, something a normal person might actually have as a pet.

Selzer peered closer at the cage. Then, he stood up straight so he could go back to looking down on his employee.

“It’s what Vyo-GenetiX sent us in their shipment,” Selzer said. “Maybe it has Bunny Ebola or something.”

David scratched his head thoughtfully, looking more confused than thoughtful.

“Okay,” he said, and shrugged.

Selzer took a few more moments to look down on David; then, he turned and walked away. It took the boss much less time to return to his office than it did to leave it.

Bunny Ebola? What a jackass.

“Wha—?”

Is that my voice? David wondered. When did I start thinking in a new voice? Do people do that often?

“Are you trying to turn idiocy into an Olympic sport?” the voice said, this time not in David’s head.

David spun around, trying to look in every direction at once and nearly tripping on his own feet doing it.

“You know there are no other people here,” the voice said. “It’s not like this place has customers. How the hell do you stay open?”

“It’s… umm… the lab pays our fees to keep us open…” David said to the visibly empty air. “It… it lets them… errr… dispose…?”

“Yes, yes, I can guess the rest of it,” the voice said.

David finally realized what direction the voice was coming from. He slowly—so slowly snails would feel superior—looked toward the rabbit cage.

“Oh, finally decide to acknowledge me, huh?”

David swallowed hard and worried for a moment that he’d swallowed his own tongue. No, no, it was still sitting in his mouth. And that rabbit had definitely just talked to him. Definitely, mouth moving, words coming out, the whole performance. The rabbit had a pretty normal voice; it could easily belong to a human male. It certainly didn’t sound the way David imagined a rabbit might sound.

“Rodney?” David said, about as uncertain as anyone had ever been. If Rodney was playing a prank on him, it was pretty damn impressive.

“No, sorry, not Rodney,” the rabbit said.

David just stared at it a moment until his voice finished retreating and returned in defeat. “Who are you?”

“You can call me God.”

“Umm… no,” David said. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Fine,” the rabbit (God?) said. “It was worth a try.”

“So… do you even have a name?”

The rabbit, who might be God but probably wasn’t, thought a moment.

“You can call me Mano,” the rabbit said after much deliberation. “Yes, Mano will do nicely.”

“Mono? Like the disease?”

“What? No, not like the disease, you simpleton. Mano is Hawaiian.”

“I’ve never heard that name before,” David said.

“You need to get out more.”

“I—“ but David didn’t even get to the next syllable. Mano was right; venturing into the outside world wasn’t really David’s thing.

David stood there in silence, looking at the talking (but currently silent) rabbit, and the rabbit looked out of its cage back at him. It seemed to be trying to tell him something with its eyes. Something about its habitat?

“For fuck’s sake,” Mano finally said. “Get me the hell out of here. I hate cages.”

“No,” David said, finally certain about something in the conversation. “I don’t like pets.”

“Do I look like a pet?!”

David looked at it.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, you do.”

David wasn’t sure what an angry rabbit looked like, but he was pretty sure that’s what he was seeing right now. He glanced at the clock, saw it was feeding time, and grabbed the rabbit food. He smiled as he poured it into Mano’s food bowl.

Now the rabbit definitely looked pissed off.

After work, David drove his car back to the apartment, and then walked straight from his car to the nearby bar, Blue Devil’s Cut. He considered stopping by one of the neighboring restaurants for dinner. Immediately before the bar was Pete’s Red Meat, and immediately after the bar was See-Food Buffet. He couldn’t decide whether he wanted to injest E. coli or a rhinovirus. In the end, he decided bar pretzels would make for a suitable dinner.

He and his friend (his best friend, really, though the term sounded too girly for him to say aloud) Rodney spent as many nights as possible hanging out at Blue Devil’s Cut. David did it partially to get away from Amanda, partially because he liked hanging out with Rodney, but mostly because he liked to drink.

“So, what’s Amanda writing about, now?”

“Shut up,” David said. He took another long drink from his mug of beer, but it didn’t seem to be enough to knock him unconscious yet.

Rodney’s smile got bigger.

“Shut up,” David said again.

“When she needs to write about a threesome, you let me know, okay?”

“Sure thing,” David said, meaning “Not on your fucking life.” It was easy to get those two confused.

“Are we getting another round?” Rodney asked, holding up his empty cup.

David looked down into his beer mug, saw the glass bottom looking back up at him, and said, “Yes, definitely.”

Neither of them worried about the fact that they had work tomorrow. If Rodney ever even got hangovers, he hid them with ease, and David, being Selzer’s only employee, had job security. That meant the beer would keep coming as long as they remained conscious enough to pay the waitress, and sometimes even that didn’t hinder them. It helped that the waitress knew them both by name and wasn’t shy about paying herself from their wallets. On those nights, they tipped really well.

“Did you ever find out why the bird-mice were disappearing?” Rodney said.

“Oh, yeah,” David said. “It was the purple snake. Turns out, the damn thing can make itself invisible.”

Rodney laughed. “Shit,” he said. “What are you going to do with it, then?”

“Well… We’re still waiting for it to reappear,” David said. “I mean, we’re pretty sure it’s still in its cage…”

The look on David’s face suggested this was a lie, and that he worried the snake was hiding in his car. Not that he actually believed that. David certainly didn’t think the snake was going to one day strangle him at a drive-thru and then eat his burger and fries. That would be silly.

“Well, Vid,” Rodney said. “You certainly have a more interesting job than I do.” He knocked back half of his beer in one impressive swig.

Vid was the nickname David’s friends had come up with in high school, when he made the mistake of telling them he didn’t like to be called Dave. Like the good friends they were, they continued to call him Vid because they knew it pissed him off. Rodney was his best friend, so it was his duty to piss off David as much as humanly possible.

“Nothing interesting happening at the radio station?” David said.

Rodney was a DJ, the kind of DJ who played music that was popular when he was a teenager. The station put up with it because the other people who worked there were just like Rodney: lazy assholes who hadn’t stopped acting like teenagers. David thought it was unfair they got paid to stay like that. Selzer paid him to be an adult, and even though David didn’t necessarily fulfill that requirement, the expectation was still there.

Rodney smiled coyly. “Well… We are hiring a new intern.”

“Oh? Picked someone out, yet?”

“There are a few good candidates,” Rodney said. “But we’re still arguing about it. Can’t decide if we should go for tits or ass.”

As if to specify which side of the argument he was on, Rodney’s eyes followed the passing waitress’s cleavage. He didn’t bother to hide his lechery, and somehow he was still charming enough that the waitress smiled at him. If that waitress went home with Rodney tonight, David would respond with the same quiet, seething resentment that could only result from extreme envy. Maybe if the waitress’s cleavage had been a little less ample, but no, David couldn’t help imaging a lot of really inappropriate things, and yes, that was definitely envy.

He wished his skirt-chasing friend weren’t so successful at it.

“Nooo…” David said. Or maybe that was just a moan; it was hard to tell.

“Come on, I need you for this,” Amanda said. Her puppy dog eyes might have worked if David weren’t so drunk, but in his current state her expression was just a few dark blurs on a bigger blur that might or might not have been a face.

“I dun… thin… ittull… werk…” David said.

“You say that every time,” Amanda said. “And every time, I prove you wrong. It likes me.”

If David’s brain was working, he might’ve thought up something to distract her. Maybe he would’ve told her how beautiful she is, or how strong the power of love is. Or maybe he would’ve just made an offensive dick joke to throw her off. As it was, he just sort of moaned in a way that suggested disagreement. The blur in front of him didn’t look dissuaded.

Amanda grabbed his hand and led him to the bedroom; he did better than normal by only falling on his face twice. He stumbled through the bedroom doorway and grabbed the frame to steady himself.

“Come on,” she said, pulling him in the direction of the bed. “Please, do this for me.”

It didn’t seem that his consent was as voluntary as she made it sound, though, as she already had the candles, whipped cream, and rope on the nightstand by their bed.

David’s eyes burned. The sun would take pity on his eyes if a big flaming ball in space could feel pity. He had been able to see his reflection in the mirror this morning, so he knew just how bloodshot they looked.

“Your eyes are bloodshot.” Selzer had an amazing ability to state the obvious.

“I’m hungover, sir.”

“No shit.” Selzer walked away and returned to his office.

Job security was a wonderful thing.

I didn’t think it was possible, but your hair looks even more uncombed than usual.

David ignored the voice in that he didn’t respond to it. His eyes did however glance upward in the direction of his hair. He liked his scruffy brown hair. Start combing your hair, and suddenly people will start expecting you to be responsible and wear something other than ten-year-old jeans. David was having none of that.

I can smell the beer from my cage. Do you even shower?

“Shut up!” David’s eyes squeezed shut, and his hands pressed at his temples. The rabbit’s thoughts were really loud, and they were turning his bad headache into a national state of emergency.

“Ignore me again, and you’ll find out what it’s like to have an air-raid siren blaring in your skull.”

David remembered what an air-raid siren sounded like, and it occurred to him that at this moment one might actually, literally kill him. It didn’t seem like a bad choice; death had to be less painful than this headache.

“But if you die, how will Amanda finish writing her novel?”

David looked in the direction of the rabbit. “Really? You’re going there?”

There was no response from the cage.

“I really wish you wouldn’t invade my privacy like that,” David said.

“It’s really boring in this cage,” the rabbit said. “When you’re not here, my best option is the iguana-cat’s mind, and its thoughts are even less sophisticated than yours.”

“It’s called an ‘Iguacat,’” David said. It was lame, but it was the best response his pulverized brain could come up with.

“Yes, your boss is a creative genius,” the rabbit said sarcastically. “It’s a mystery why this store never gets any customers.”

“Yeah, like your name is so great, Mambo.”

“It’s Mano, you inebriated lout,” said Mano, whose name David would probably forget again by tomorrow. It’s hard remembering things when your brain is sloshed in cheap beer.

When lunch came around, David decided that food was not an option. Directly to the west of Bob’s Pets was Hot and Ready, and directly to the west of that was Gourmet Grinders. Both were coffee shops, but Gourmet Grinders catered to people with too much money who thought twenty dollars for one cup was worth it, and Hot and Ready catered to people who didn’t give a damn. David went to Hot and Ready and ordered a regular regular, black (never order their house special, Motor Oil; it is exactly what it sounds like). Each cup bore the notice, “CAUTION: Cups not labeled with warnings. Drink at your own risk.” It was cheap and tasted cheap, but he just wanted the caffeine.

He returned to Bob’s Pets feeling hangovery and jittery.

“David!” Selzer shouted unnecessarily and with some malicious pleasure. “Have you cleaned out the cages yet?”

“Doing”—ow—“it”—ow—“right”—ow—“now.”—ow. David shouted back, and his head pounded with each word. It was like a drum beat, but instead of music it was made of pain and hellfire.

Just what I need, he thought. Two loud assholes constantly bugging me.

David looked quickly in Mano’s direction, expecting the rabbit to respond with torturous, stabbing words. Instead, there was only silence.

David couldn’t actually see the rabbit from behind the cash register, but he could feel the bastard smiling at him. It was a rabbit, stuck in a cage in a soul-crushing pet store, and it was being smug.

He looked at the stack of newspapers and removed the one on top. It was covered in important stories about world events, politicians getting paid a lot to do very little, and scientific discoveries that might change the course of human history. David glanced at it without reading a word; the newspaper had more important duties to fulfill, like catching detritus.

He had to hold his breath while cleaning out the cages, or else he might throw up the breakfast he didn’t eat. He hoped Rodney was free to get drunk tonight; he really needed to get rid of this hangover.

“Hey, if you’re going to waste more money on that poison,” Mano said, “maybe you can spend some my way and buy me.”

“Fuck off,” David said, his gloved hands knuckle-deep in Devil Dog poop. “The last thing I need is you hopping around my apartment being… umm… rabbity.”

“Afraid Amanda will like me more than she likes you?”

“What are you—“

What if Amanda spends more time with the pet? David’s thoughts interrupted his mouth. It would mean she’d spend less time hassling me. She’s always wanted a pet.

Girls love cute fluffy rabbits.

“Stop doing that!”