On VETERANARIAN

January 10-11th

On VETERANARIAN
(Memoirs will return. In its place, Veterantarian Hospital)
Veteranarian Hospital
Dr. Hutchison was very handsome, all the female pet owners agreed. But from Patches’ perspective, he was hideous. A hideous man with a well-tended Caesar cut, who jabbed Patches with needles and touched him in odd places and, when it was done, wrapped a pink bandana around his neck. Patches kind of liked the bandana part, but hated how he liked it. It was a good looking bandana, don’t get Patches wrong, but when he wore it at the dog park, it was a public manifestation of the shame he felt for being molested by this tall man with classical features and a sunny disposition. A perversely sunny disposition.
Stranger were some of the other dogs in the vet’s office who had their tongues out and their tails wagging, leering at Patches as he ashamedly walked out of the vet’s office, his hair neatly trimmed. At first he thought the other dogs had never been to the vet before, but as he saw the same dogs again and again, he realized they perversely liked going in the room with the fascist steel table. Patches wondered what kind of sick dogs looked forward to such treatment. They probably had terrible home lives.

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Mr. Hutchison hated his own life, and he didn’t know why. Ever since he was seven years old, he wanted to be a veterinarian. He achieved his goal with minimal effort, finishing in the middle of his class, set up shop in a suburban location, and hired two very attractive vet techs, both of whom he had since slept with, with hardly any complications. Sometimes he thought that maybe he should be a sculptor – he looked at things and saw other shapes beneath the surface, and wanted to chip away at their exteriors until something beautiful, or perhaps beautifully ugly, emerged. He had this feeling most of all when he looked at himself in the mirror, and imagined chipping his own body away until it was a conservatively dressed, fat midget. He threw up a little in his mouth about fifteen times a day, usually when he met a new client and their pet. Maybe a career path based on what he wanted when he was a seven-year-old boy was a bad decision. After all, he never asked seven-year-old boys for advice regarding anything else. Because they were stupid, they were missing a lifetime of experience that told them what was really fun to do.

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The owner of Patches, a pregnant teen named Heidi, exuded a sense of wisdom that was completely unrelated to the amount of wisdom she actually had. Something in the way her features rested on her faces allowed people to trust her when she gave them flowers, or asked for a dog, or said it would be okay to have unprotected sex. Really, Heidi had no idea what she was doing in life, and tried not to think about it. Most of her friends reflected on that all the time, how they thought they had no idea where their life was going, but really, they had a general idea, and what was happening was a minor variation on their plans, and they were reflecting on the slight dissonance on where they thought their life was going, and how it was actually going. Heidi really didn’t know what was going to happen in her life, and when her teachers said she had an equal chance at winning a Nobel Prize, flaming out and dying in another few months, or living an anonymous life as an office worker, it was true. This was terrifying, so Heidi didn’t think about it because it was like trying to direct a storm. Heidi had freckles, and blond pigtails, and when people looked into her eyes, expecting the eyes of a seventeen year old girl with freckles and pigtails, they saw the eyes of an ancient bird of prey crossed with mother earth.