When we were kids, he used to care for snakes, lizards, and tarantulas, kept them in aquariums in his bedroom with lights on inside, so he could watch them until he fell asleep. After a while, he’d get bored with them and toss them over the wall into the neighbor’s backyard and laugh. He’d wait for the sounds of the neighbor’s scream while she bludgeoned his pets with the flat of a shovel, and he’d laugh at that too.
When I asked him how he could do that to his animals, he laughed at the weakness living inside my question.
John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. He is the editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder.
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