What I Can't Repress

“Behind our house, after a fence, a copse of pines, and a one-acre enclosure in front of the wealthy gynecologist’s house, stood, sure enough, a zebra. I don’t want to surmise that the gynecologist suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder, but at least once a month he procured and kept, somehow, an exotic animal. This was about two hundred yards away from our back door. Over the years we’d witnessed his obsession with an albino deer, two Shetland ponies, an ostrich, a longhorn steer, and what may or may not have been a pair of Galapagos tortoises. This was occurring in the mid-Eighties. Reagan happened to still be president, and maybe he’d found a way to lift sanctions against purchasing, importing, then quarantining rare and endangered species. There’d been a kangaroo, or wallaby, one or the other. Instead of regular black locust fence posts, the gynecologist hired an outfit to pile drive telephone poles around his yard, then strung barbed wire lines all the way up, more than ten feet, I guess so a kangaroo or albino deer couldn’t hop out. We missed the day he acquired a troop of howler monkeys, who plain climbed the telephone poles and barbed wire, then escaped. To this day, according to my now-aged father, the weekly Bark Barker offers anecdotes about local citizens shooing howler monkeys off their backyard dogwoods, off the ladders of their above-ground swimming pools.”

Got your attention?

That paragraph is from George Singleton’s new novella, What I Can’t Repress, which Porchlight is serializing in five installments for subscribers, beginning with Edition 15 that will go live this week. If you’re intrigued and want to read more, please consider becoming a Porchlight supporter with a paid subscription. Thank you.