The Wrong Family

In my memories, the house I grew up in appears pet-free, but in truth, we had shared our space with many animals over the years: two dogs, one of whom (Urs, a German shepherd) was too aggressive to keep and had to be sent away, and the other (Snow, the most beautiful Samoyed you ever saw), whom we’d found on the street and whom I loved like my own brother, was claimed by his rightful owners after a week; a pair of turtles named (no joke) Leonardo and Raphael, who lasted with us for three years before being sent back to the pet shop on suspicion of sinister powers (you might scoff, but for us Eastern Europeans it’s not that shocking); a fish, never named—a fifteenth birthday gift to me from a group of friends—which died (I assume, though for all I know, the fish could still be alive and sipping margaritas on a beach in the Caribbean) after falling down the drain the day my grandmother decided its glass bowl needed its first cleaning, during which process she dropped the bowl in the sink, shattering it; and finally, a hamster called Grace, though she came later, after I went off to college, and she died after only two years, in the middle of a routine examination by her vet. 

My parents explained this chain of events simply as “bad luck when it comes to pets,” and didn’t want to get another dog after the heartbreak of losing Snow, though eventually they did, a white Pomeranian whose name is Yoshi and who, like all of his species, is possessed in equal measure of cuteness and batshit craziness and has bitten each member of the family to bleeding, and as I sit with them on the phone, stroking the cat I adopted last year and trying to hear my mother over Yoshi’s barking in the background, I ask myself why people never seem to learn. 

Andrei Atanasov is a writer and lawyer from Constanța, Romania. His prose has appeared in Eunoia Review, Corvus Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Every Day Fiction, Drunk Monkeys, and The B’K. Online, you can find him at atanasov.ro. He currently resides in Piatra-Neamț, Romania, where he’s working hard on his first book.

This essay is a Short Reads original.