juniper and matty

matty moved to juniper's town when they were both in the eighth grade. she was kind of nerdy and on the heavy side, and she had some friends when he got there, but a few months later she didn't have any. things like that will happen to a person in the eighth grade. there's no good reason for it and it's tough to convince anyone that it's all right, but there you are. matty was small and delicate and fascinated by magic and natalie merchant and comic book super heroes. he had become friends with some girls who didn't mind juniper, and sometimes they ate lunch together. when juniper's friends not only refused to reaccept her but also began being openly and publicly cruel to her, she stopped eating lunch, and everything else. this, too, will happen, for equally poor reasons and with as little justification, but you continue to be right there. matty didn't know juniper well enough to say much about it, but he did tell her one day that a girl he had gone to school with before had stopped eating anything but lettuce, and she usually threw that up, and after a while her face had gone sort of blue around her mouth, and he figured if that happened to juniper it probably wouldn't help her social standing.

juniper didn't have any sort of comeback for that. in fact, for about a year she and matty didn't really say anything at all. in that time she reconciled with solid food and made some more reliable friends, and she stopped giving a damn about everybody else, and towards the end of ninth grade she was feeling better about things. matty was not. kids, you know... they're mean. especially to delicate boys who wear ankhs and adore michael stipe. things at home weren't always great for matty, either, and one day he came to school with both of his wrists bandaged. there was a lot of whispering and giggling and eye-rolling in their home room. juniper looked around and thought about it, and then she walked over to matty and asked if she could see. he peeled away the gauze and showed her the twin horizontal slices. she asked him what he had used, and he told her. she examined them silently for a minute or two, and then she leaned back and said,

"you did it wrong."
"i did?"
"yeah. to hit all the really important veins you have to cut up your arm, like this."
"oh. okay."

there was a brief, not uncomfortable pause, after which they agreed it had been stupid one way or the other.

alan and arlene

alan's friends invited him to a party where they would be hosting a private performance by a small group of classical musicians. as alan was quite fond of both classical music and these particular friends, he agreed to attend. arlene played clarinet in the ensemble. alan didn't know that her name was arlene on this night; he didn't know anything about her, because he had never seen her before, but he noticed her immediately, and as the performance progressed alan decided that, while all of the musicians were quite talented, she was really the star of the bunch. at some point in the program the group played a mozart quartet, and by the end of it alan was desperately in love with arlene, or, as he knew her, the girl with the clarinet.

but alan was shy, and he and arlene did not speak to one another that day.

maybe alan asked his friends about arlene, or maybe she asked about him. maybe no one said anything to anyone but a few weeks later alan and arlene were sitting across from each other at a dinner party. the hostess had baked a rum cake and placed it on top of her refrigerator, which was a 1950s model, rounded on top and prone to fits of violent tremors during its cooling cycle. over the course of the evening the refrigerator rattled the rum cake closer and closer down the sloping top towards the edge until, from the other room, the guests heard a thud with a slight ringing undertone. the hostess rolled and then closed her eyes, rose from her chair and went into the other room to confirm what she already knew, which, as she informed the others upon her return, was that dessert was now being served on the kitchen floor, and, as it had broken the plate's fall, it was even glass-free. alan and arlene picked up their forks and headed into the kitchen. they sat down on opposite sides of the cake, looked at each other, realized that nobody else was coming in from the other room, and dug in.

juniper and kismet

kittens don't have tails when they're born.

juniper didn't know this until she was nineteen and the stray cat she and her friends had been feeding ran into the friend's closet and gave birth to three helpless fuzzy worms. their eyes and ears were small sealed slits; this she had been prepared for. but the pointed bony nub in place of a normal twitchy tail was so unexpected that, for the first week or so, she didn't even notice it. when she did, though, she found it bewitching, like everything else about the babies. she was so enchanted with them you might have thought she had given birth to them all on her own. they and their actual mama, a monstrous calico with a sticky patch of road rash overlaying what would turn out to be a broken right hip, lived in a large low cardboard box in juniper's bedroom, and every spare second juniper had was spent sitting on the floor in front of this box, watching the kittens squirm and mewl and suckle and yawn and tie their three bodies into a tight twist of celtic knotwork under their mum's outstretched limb.

she had decided to keep mama kitty and one little one. she made the decision right away and didn't think about it again, because thinking about it would mean choosing the one, and it just couldn't be done.

the babies didn't leave the box for their first few weeks of life, but as they got bigger and their eyes and ears opened, their tails still conical stumps that could not yet serve any purpose, they tottered from end to opposite end of it until they wore themselves out. juniper and mama cat would watch them together, each purring proudly in her own way, until the kittens fell together and slept in a corner.

this had gone on one day, and at the end of it, all four cats fat and warm and contentedly snoozing in their big blanketed box, juniper thought again to herself that there was not a way to decide. she didn't want to touch them, being afraid of waking them, but she dangled one hand, her right hand, over the edge of the box closest to her and furthest from them.

one kitten woke up. his eyes, incredibly blue, classic swimming pool blue, rolled towards her as he yawned, his tongue furling and unfurling like a party favor between the beginnings of teeth like large grains of white sand. she saw a perfectly round deep brown freckle in the exact center of the roof of his mouth, identical to the one in his mother's. he stretched clumsily and began to walk in her direction even more clumsily, some two of his four legs crossing over each other and tripping him every few steps. when he fell he looked to her again and stood back up, and the other cats never woke up, and juniper never moved, only looked back at him as he made his arduous twenty-four-inch journey to her hand, which he sat down in front of and reached up with one tiny paw to touch. he tilted his very small head up towards her much larger one, which was holding its breath, and he meowed once, high-pitched and infantile, perfect.

"okay," juniper whispered to her kitten, "you can stay."