From the Mouths of Stuffed Animals

Every animal knows more than you do.

-proverb of the Nez Perce tribe

FREDERICK, and LEOPOLD

We were her first pair, Leo and I. Though her heart was bloated and breaking, she wanted to give him a token. She found Leopold in a toy boutique; a sea turtle, his shell of concentric lime greens and quilted pink belly were flecked with sparkles and pieced together by hand. She gave him to the boy. They tried on several names - Bogard? No. They called him Leopold in the end. She hoped he would think of her when the bright green caught his eye, and want her. She was hopeful then, and cheered when he showed her the fortunes from his and his other’s cookies:

A tantalizing new prospect will come your way, his said.

Prepare yourself for a change of events in your personal life, said his other’s cookie.

But he would not leave his other; he broke her heart.

I came a long year afterwards, in the summertime. He bought me in the Austin airport and presented me to her with a packet of Texas bluebell seeds, a Kelly Willis album, and a postcard picturing an armadillo like me. They tried on the name Bogard again. No.

He told her that he had ordered cobbler and the waitress had asked him, “Do you want that à la mode, or just the plain, unadulterated confection?” and she laughed; they began an affair.

The girl and boy bought house plants; they picked out paints for his studio apartment; they painted the wall behind his headboard teal and hung one of his paintings on it, a red raft afloat blue-green water; she aligned his books by the color of their spines, as a spectrum; they went to a concert and took pictures in the photo booth and came back to the apartment wearing band t-shirts; they drank pitchers of beer while playing pool and came back smelling of smoke; they bantered over sushi and saki; each of them was happy; they were happy together; they decided to call me Frederick. After months, she would not leave her new other; she wrote him a long letter and signed it with an arabesque heart and her first initial.

OCTAVIA, and OCTAVIUS

A different boy brought me to her from the gift store at Monteray Bay aquarium. They called me Octavia, because she had named the octopus she gave to him Octavius. She brought me on nights she slept over in clouds of incense. They laughed because Octavius only had only six tentacles. She took a picture of us, our fourteen tentacles splayed on the wood floor. She left Frederick elsewhere. The girl and the boy were in love.

One night, the girl gave her virginity to the boy; one day, they saved a pigeon who was jammed in the V of the Blockbuster Video sign. They did yoga; they read Salman Rushdie; drank IPA’s; ate Indian food; they watched Tarantino films. The girl picked a line he had tattooed on his wrist - Mundus Vult Decipi, “The world wants to be deceived.” He would hold her and say, It’s so true, Babi.

I went with her to his parents’ penthouse in The City; when she went home a month later, she scribbled her signature arabesque heart on a post-it and entrusted it to Octavius’ arms. We made the trip from Orlando to JFK, to LaGuardia, to Newark, and back many times.

I went with her when she left for a semester in Morocco, and she cried into me on the plane. The morning after, she forgot me in the tangled up sheets at the Hotel Majestic in Rabat.

When she realized what had happened she took a grande taxi to the hotel and asked the concierge, Room 315. Nouz Nouz?

Non, we have not found one he told her.

She came back again with note cards of full sentences in French and Darija. I was returned to her. She thanked their Allah on the walk through the medina, amid the gamy smell of the swinging goats at her sides.

When the call to prayer would wake her at 6am, she reached for her iPod and listened to a Damien Rice demo over and over. The wailing poked through the song, the two musics braided, and she clutched me to her chest and missed him wholeheartedly.

MOXY, and ABIMA

The girl bought Abima in an indie CD store, as one of her birthday presents to the boy. An Ugly Doll, pre-named; she picked him for the poem on his tag. The boy kept Abima with him, wherever he was - in his bed in Tallahassee, in his bed in Lakeland; in his bed in Vero; in her bed in Winter Park; in her bed in Saint Cloud.

They nested in Vero Beach that summer and it rained every day around 5 o’clock. Often the rain complemented the thumping purr of the record player, whose songs had finished, but who continued to whirl in static turns.

Once, snorkeling a mile off the coast, jellyfish polka dotted the water around their boat. He readied his harpoon.

No! she said.

Didn’t you say there was a pan-oceanic jellyfish bloom?

I guess you’re right.

So the jelly was skewed through his harpoon.

Once he made her a bed of roses, but the pollens chased her away; once they held hands at a wedding, not their own.

Once the girl held the boy’s gaze, It’s over, this time I swear it. She left the room.

The boy barged in. You mean it this time? You mean it?

She held his gaze again, Yes.

She did not notice his hands were behind him. The boy sheered Abima’s head off and turned him inside out, stuffing fell in lumps on the terrazzo. She ran after him; she convinced him she didn’t mean it.

He gave me to her the next day, after their summer classes. One Ugly Doll deserves another. I am sea foam, the color he picked for the beach house in Vero, the color she loves.

FREDERICK, and LEOPOLD

One time a dillo ran in front of her car and she felt a twin thump thump. She called him in tears, It’s symbolic, she said.

At her parents’ house, the girl takes out the column of photo booth pictures from that summer; she sleeps with me on these occasions.

Where’s Leo these days? she sometimes asks him.

Roaming, under the sofa, I think.

Don’t let the dust bunnies get him.

He promises, Never.

OCTAVIA, and OCTAVIUS

They were together a year when their conversations lagged. I knew it was done before they said it was so.

I’m in her closet, she doesn’t know where exactly since she’s moved; she hasn’t touched me in months. After all that, I signify a past that doesn’t even ache.

MOXY, and ABIMA

She sleeps with me. I fit well in the crook of her neck - I am a great pillow. Octavia and I stare at each other from across her bedroom, and shrug our shoulders as best we are able.

They make the five-hour drive to each other almost every weekend. When the girl goes, I ride belted into her passenger seat. She enjoys the tour: through horse country and the small towns, whose buildings’ faces are now familiar to her; past the rusting retro signs of their inns that died when I-10 was built. The girl means to stop in some time at one of their restaurants, sit at their counter and eat chocolate chip pancakes, and be an outsider, as in Morocco.

The girl quotes Neruda and e. e. cummings in the letters and postcards she sends to him from Winter Park; she autographs them with her abstract heart.