Animal's People

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I used to be human once. So I’m told. I don’t remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being.

“So sweet you were, a naughty little angel. You’d stand up on tiptoe, Animal my son, and hunt in the cupboard for food.” This is the sort of thing they say. Only mostly there wasn’t any food plus really it isn’t people just Ma Franci who says this, she doesn’t even say it that way, what she says is tu étais si charmant, comme un petit ange méchant, which is how they talk in her country, plus I’m not really her son nor any kind of angel but it’s true Ma’s known me all my life, which is nearly twenty years. Most people round here don’t know their age, I do, because I was born a few days before that night, which no one in Khaufpur wants to remember, but nobody can forget.

“Such a beautiful little boy you were, when you were three, four, years. Huge eyes you had, black like the Upper Lake at midnight plus a whopping head of curls. How you used to grin. Tu étais un vrai bourreau des coeurs, your smile would break a mother’s heart,” thus she’d talk.

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