An Animal's Guide to Earthly Salvation by Jack R. Johnson

“Ricky forgets things, is all. I was at my mom’s, and he didn’t remember that I had told him. He worries so much.”

“He freaked out.”

“He’s just tense. It’s the pills.”

“You know, in India they chain people like him to posts and keep them chained until the demons leave.”

“Ricky doesn’t have demons. He’s manic-depressive. When he’s manic, he sometimes jumps to conclusions.”

“Like that time he threatened to beat you?”

Vicki has a way of looking inward when she’s irritated at a conversation. The look says simply: “I’d prefer not to talk about that.”

“I think he might be a little dangerous,” I added.

“Everyone can be dangerous,” she said. “Everyone. Ricky just happens to express what no one says.”

I thought about that. I thought about how many times I had violent images involving a close family member or friend. When I was fourteen years old, I wanted to shoot Uncle Raymond. Not shoot to kill, exactly, but maim him so that he would consider the possibility of sudden violence from me before opening his mouth. That never happened, but as it turned out, my father ended up shooting Uncle Raymond. The reason, apparently, was my mother. This morning, I learned she was diagnosed with cancer. Vicki insists the real reason had nothing to do with my mother or her cancer. The real reason, she says, is the animal nature of our world.

I received the phone call at nine that morning: “Jeffrey,” my sister said breathlessly, “Mother is sick.”

“How sick?”

“Jeffrey!”

I was suspicious. Mother had once held the family hostage in a motel room for four days in Flagstaff, Arizona, having doctors check out symptoms she was certain were the onset of Black Plague or Ebola.

Turns out, she was suffering the first signs of menopause. We never made the Grand Canyon that summer and drove back through the desert