Nude Men

to me over the noise of the vacuum cleaner, “I think people who are dying have a right to do very crazy things, and that does not mean they’re crazy. It means they’re dying, and upset. In fact, it means they’re sane.”) The ram is placed on her mattress and watched while it flaps to death; the dwarf gourami is cut open lengthwise and its skeleton admired; the angelfish is held by its top and bottom fins and pulled in opposite directions (I’ve always wanted to do that, I think to myself, even though it’s not true); the white long-finned tetra is soaked in concentrated blue bath herb essence for three minutes while we talk about whether the color will stick when we take it out, which it does a little, but it was not fatal so she lets the fish flap to death on her bed like the other one. (I tell her, to lighten the atmosphere, that she should have thought of something she hadn’t done before, so she offers to eat it, which I prevent her from doing for fear that the blue bath herb essence will make her sicker than she already is, though to her face I just say “sick,” not “sicker than you already are.”) The baby discus, with its beautiful facial expression, she throws out the window, making me particularly sad; and the last fish, the fat goldfish, she can’t think of anything to do with because the last one has to be the best and this high standard is giving her killer’s block so I’m supposed to think of something which is too much to ask of me because I’m not dying and don’t have this need to see what death is like but it finally doesn’t matter because she comes up with her own idea. She tries to feed the goldfish to the parrot. He won’t eat it. He doesn’t like goldfish. Jeremy? No, thank you; I don’t eat that kind of fish either. “Okay, then I’ll eat it,” she says. I cringe. I can’t tell her not to, because it has not been soaked in concentrated blue bath herb essence. She licks a fin and stops. She doesn’t want to eat it anymore so thinks of something even better. She throws it against the wall. The idea is to throw it until it does not move. She does it again. It is fun and slippery. Sometimes she just throws it in the air and catches it, just to enjoy the fun challengingly slippery feel of it. Finally, it does not move. She goes to the kitchen, comes back with the big kitchen knife, and heads for her parrot. She grabs it around the shoulders and points the tip of the knife at its throat.
    I catch my breath. I am shocked. The fishes were one thing, but the ten-thousand-dollar parrot? And it’s not at all the price I’m talking about. It’s the animal. It’s a big animal, which talks. And as though to prove my thought, “Death and dying,” says the parrot, the blade pointed at its sky-blue neck. But after all, a dying little girl is allowed to kill a parrot. She’s allowed to kill practically anything.
    Sara suddenly drops the knife and charges at me. I look at the knife on the floor again, just to make sure I did not imagine that she dropped it. She punches me, repeatedly, as hard and as quickly as she can, and I welcome it I understand it it should have come sooner it makes me feel better than I’ve felt in a long time as though purifying me of my crime liberating me from it it is equal I guess to serving a prison sentence and feeling you paid for your wickedness afterward.
    But then the parrot joins in, shrieking, and knocks on my head with his beak, like a woodpecker, while Sara continues punching me. He is perched on the side of my face, I’m not sure exactly where, probably on my ear with one foot and on my shoulder with the other. It hurts incredibly, so much that I can’t even feel Sara’s blows. It bleeds, I can feel, but I don’t dare say no, because maybe I deserve this also. And if I said no, she might think I meant her, which I don’t. I look down, sort of sadly, but I don’t cry because I don’t have the right to cry. Then she stops. But the bird does not. “Stop it,” she tells it. “Death and dying,” it answers, and stops.
    I need to wipe off the blood running down my forehead before it reaches my eyes, or I will have trouble blinking. I look around for a tissuelike thing but see nothing, so I remove the parrot from my ear and shoulder and wipe my forehead on its sky-blue and white feathers, enhancing their beauty to red and purple.
    “Jeremy?” says Sara.
    “What?”
    “There’s something I want you to do with me.”
    “What’s