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very own goldfish. I dreaded this day for many weeks before, sick to my stomach thinking about having to flush a little translucent body down the toilet after I no doubtdid something to kill it. When fish-tank day finally came, I lied and said my parents wouldn’t let me have one. Which probably wasn’t a lie.
    My family’s relationship with animals has been historically lukewarm. When approached by someone’s dog, I attempt to speak with that syrupy talking-to-a-dog inflection. “There’s a big boy!” I’ll say, and pat, with four stiff fingers, the top of its head, never quite sure where it wants to be petted.
    My mom doesn’t even attempt to pet the dog. She instead does a sort of skip-skip-shuffle-step and holds her hands above her head, which everyone knows is the universal canine sign for “Please get up on two legs and jump on me.” At which point, she really panics and proceeds to yelp like a dog that would fit inside a purse.
    Wild animals are no better. My mom practically aims for them on the road. I should rephrase: She does absolutely nothing to avoid them. She’ll defend this by saying, “Well what in the hell’d you want me to do? Swerve and kill us both?”
    I have been woken up many a morning to the sound of my mom spraying the deer in the backyard full of beebees. She’ll be cloaked in her pink, quilted bathrobe and matching spongy slippers with a pellet gun firm against her shoulder, padding through the yard like Elmer Fudd. “I don’t pay for all the teenagers in the neighborhood to come into my kitchen and eat all my food. Why should I be feeding all these deer?” she’ll say, tracking a deer that’s wandered into her garden for a snack. POW . She’ll nail one right in the butt. It’ll sprint away, its ass flailing wildly in the air. (The bullets aren’t strong enough to kill the deer, she’s assured me many times, in the same harangue about them spreading Lyme and being over-populated.) “They’re a menace to society,” she’ll say, then swish up the back steps to get her egg casserole out of the oven.
    We’re not terrible people, I promise. We like humans. We really like humans! Most of the time. And it’s not that we dislike animals; we’re just not quite sure what to do with them.
    Somehow, we used to have a dog. A Welsh corgi named Choo-Choo, because at age two my brother thought she ran like a choo-choo train. We liked Choo-Choo; I swear we did. I even cried when she died. My dad picked me up from my fifth-grade afterschool French class and told me the news. I mustered up some tears because it seemed like the thing to do.
    Here comes the bad part: For her fourteen years with our family, Choo-Choo primarily lived outside. While this was an acceptable arrangement when we lived in Georgia, I’m not so sure how humane it was once we moved to Connecticut. “She has a house of her own,” my mom would say, motioning toward the door-less, insulation-less wooden shack with three feet of snow on either side. My dad would add, sitting slipper-footed by the fire, “Would you want to live inside this hot house with a fur coat on? I don’t think so.” I’d look outside as dusk enveloped the miniature wooden igloo, and then back inside at the roaring fireplace, the tartan-plaid blanket draped across the overstuffed sofa, and think to myself, I’m not so sure .
    It’s terrible, I know. Fortunately, it sounds like my mom has turned a corner. “Oh that was just horrible!” she said one day when I mentioned Choo-Choo’s living in the cold. My dad, on the other hand, didn’t budge. “She had a house!” he said, waving a page of his newspaper wildly. “With blankets!”

    There are some animals, however, that I sincerely love. I love whales. The Voyage of the Mimi was my favorite educational film of all time. It even inspired me to