FREE STORIES 2012(109)

Notch was easily identifiable by the missing part of his ear. He waved at Jack. "Domo arigatougozaimashita, inu—sama! Kouun! Sayonara!"





"Let me get this straight." Renard was perched on the highest point of the garage after the creature had attempted to pick him up by his tail. "The mice gave you this—this—thing and you brought it home."

"It doesn't seem dangerous." Jack had managed to stay free after they arrived by distracting the creature with his chew toy. For some reason, though, the creature kept flinging it across the room. Jack needed to retrieve it over and over again, but it made the creature laugh every time he dropped the toy at its feet. "It doesn't bite…"

"Yes it does," Renard snapped.

"Very hard," Jack amended.

"I suppose we could keep it as emergency food rations," Renard stated.

"Don't ever say that again." Jack warned with a growl that he was serious.

"What? It doesn't talk. That's your criteria for food, right?"

"Don't!" Jack barked.

"Hm, both of you are acting weird for something that you just found." Renard leapt to a slightly lower perch that gave him access to the door. "I'm going to look it up. Find out what it is."





"It's a human." Renard returned to the perch a short period time later. "Judging by the shape of the eyes, the color and straightness of the mane, its breed is most likely East Asian descent. Male of the species."

"How do you get male?" Jack cocked his head at it.

"It's wearing fabric clothing. The white isn't really part of its skin."

Jack reached out and lifted the front hem. "Oh! Yeah, male."

"Human are omnivores. They eat everything, including ponies, dogs and cats."

"Still don't think he's dangerous."

"It will grow." Renard warned. "It will get bigger just like Alfie. Remember how little he was compared to now?"

"So you're saying it's just a baby now?"

Renard breathed out in disgust. "This is going to be like one of those damn baby birds? They always die, you know."

"If it dies, it dies." Jack said.

Renard slunk away.





He'd learned the trick to keep baby birds alive the longest was to keep them warm. Last winter while desperately foraging for food to keep Alfie alive, he'd found a big plastic bin labeled Non—structured Carbohydrates. They carefully rationed it out to Alfie all winter as they'd learn that he'd eat himself sick if given a chance. Jack rinsed the bin out and pushed it to the most protected corner of Alfie's garage. With the stacks of cut hay, the garage was now much warmer than the overlook.

He set up the heat lamp that he used with the baby birds, trying to nail it solid to the wall since so far the baby had upended almost everything in the garage. The hardest part was getting the baby into the bin and asleep.

"Maybe we should take it back," Alfie whispered when the garage was finally quiet and still.

Jack caught himself growling. "There is no place to take it back to! Don't you see? The proof is all around us. The birds are how it should be. When we were small and helpless, we should have had someone taking care of us. Someone alive. Someone who loved us enough that they wouldn't stop caring for us until they knew we could take care of ourselves. But we had machines just like the lawnmowers and the hairdressers. They knew what they were supposed to do and what they weren't supposed to do. They fed us and kept us warm and cleaned up after us. And like the lawnmower that stops trying to cut the grass at dusk, the machines stopped taking care of us because – because – I don't know – we'd gotten big enough to fly."

"Since when can we fly?" Alfie asked.

"It’s a metaphor," Renard muttered from the doorway. Seeing that the baby was safely asleep, he stalked across the garage, tail twitching with annoyance. "The baby birds leave the nest once they're ready to fly."

"Exactly," Jack said. "I don't think your milk dispenser dried up and the door broke, I think whatever machines were feeding you decided it wasn't supposed to take care of you anymore."

Like the baby, Jack had been locked in a kennel with toys and running water but no food. Starving and nearly driven mad by the silence, he'd managed to climb up and use a piece of wire to short the lock to get out of his cage. This baby, though, wasn't as capable as he had been when he was abandoned by the system.

"It seems to me a stupid way of doing things," Alfie said. "Even birds know better. They might be stupid as shit, but they take care of their chicks, day and night, until they're ready to be on their own. This randomly spit out babies and hoping someone takes care of them; sheer stupidity."