"Patrick O'Leary - Bat Boy" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'leary Patrick)

Bat Boy
a short story by Patrick O'Leary
Until the day the boy brought home the bat, he had never surprised
his father.

The boy hadn't been exactly dumb before. Not exactly. But -- why
not admit it? -- he hadn't sparkled, either. He hadn't shone. He hadn't
punched his way outside his ordinary mind. True, he could sing at will
any number of TV theme songs, and he displayed a scholar's rigor in
the way he examined, plucked, jarred and observed insects. He had
an eye for detail. He might someday make a scientist, his father
hoped.

He hoped.

"Where'd you get the cage? Where'd you get the bat?" he asked the
proud boy.

The bat had been winged, the boy explained. He had found it flopping
on the sidewalk. He had secured a golden cage from a garage sale
down the street. He had trapped the bat. He had brought it home to
show his father -- interrupting as he sat smoking and reading the
important new voice in fiction in the lawn chair in the backyard with
the leaves still unraked.

"What are you going to do with it?" the father asked reluctantly,
sensing obligations.

"Keep it," the boy said determined. "Feed it liver like the polliwog we
grew in the plastic cube."


My life, the man thought, will not work as a story, he thought.
No one would believe it, he thought, remembering how he fed it with a
toothpick, the green frog lunging eagerly at the shit brown flecks of
liver, his face becoming mostly mouth.

See, this was the problem.

Having grown a frog in your kitchen, what do you do with it? What
then? That was the difference, he concluded, between children and
parents. With children there are no third acts. There is Polliwog. There
is frog. And who cares after that? It's time for a commercial. They
don't think about -- ohhh -- entrance exams. Wisdom teeth. Tuition
payments bigger than a mortgage. What happens when sex stops?
When you forget how to love?

What had they done to the frog? He couldn't remember. Had they left
on vacation and forgotten to assign a caretaker? Had the frog leaped
out of his safe cube and perished on the tasteless linoleum? Anything