Essay by Nick Zelle

“Life at Home”
             By Nick Zelle

As a child, I had a habit of poaching small animals from around the neighborhood and bringing them inside the house. First was a frog that sprung loose from the enclosure of my cupped hands and into my parents’ bedroom when I arrived one morning to show off what I’d managed to capture. Next, a baby rabbit that squirmed in my seven-year-old grip, its high-pitched shrieks loud enough to make glass hum in the kitchen.

For a day, I was best friends with the foot-long fish I caught on a family trip up North. I named him Freddie and imagined a bright future for him in my bathtub once we got home. We had already made it halfway through the drive back down to Minneapolis – Freddie condemned to a five-gallon bucket of lake water, which sloshed about in the shower of the Winnebago – when my mom convinced me that our life together was unreasonable, and that I needed to release that poor fish in the nearest lake.

And let us not forget the gelatin body of a baby sparrow, crushed by its plummet to the sidewalk, which fit neatly in my palm, its limp neck curled around my index finger. Alone, I performed a funeral service, complete with flower petals at the scene of its demise. In lieu of a burial, I placed the body in a cardboard box and stashed it in the back of my bookshelf.

In each case, my parents pushed past their horror to make room for reluctant amusement. I don’t remember who finally recaptured the frog, but I do remember the havoc it wrecked, all the furniture we overturned in its pursuit. I remember sitting on the back steps with my mom after she’d rushed me outside with the bunny, thinking it was a rat, all the while screaming like the creature screamed and ordering that I let go. It dashed into the nearby shrubs, never to be seen again.

“But it was a friend,” I told her after. I thought she would be impressed by the deftness of my hands, or else eager, as I had been, to examine another life from such close range, one that is normally so evasive when we approach it directly. She was holding my forearms, turning them over to scan for bite marks. “So long as you’re OK,” she said.

Finally, the stench of death emanating from my bedroom demanded explanation. When confronted, I pulled the carcass from its spot among the first books I learned to read, wondering whether I should be ashamed. My mom, a Chaplin who spent some of her time ushering children into death at a pediatric hospice center in St. Paul, might have wondered whether I was following her example, just as my sister and I had in our regular games of deathbed. I would “die” while my sister sat vigil, buried me in blankets, then eulogized. We’d switch roles, and I would mock-cry, sometimes hysterically enough that our mom would run in to check on us.

“You know,” my friend told me on the school bus, “the bunny will be abandoned by its mother.” The trace my sweaty hands had left on its coat, they explained, was a deterrence for any further affection or nourishment, even after I had returned it to the yard. My friend only knew this because of a different rabbit they had tried to rescue earlier that year from under a tall bush in a corner of the schoolyard at recess.

“That’s different,” I said. It had already been abandoned. And it was so small, so helpless, already too weak to resist their human hands. That bunny remained silent when held. They had brought it home in a cardboard box on the school bus the same day of the discovery. The next morning my friend’s parents brought the rabbit to the Humane Society, where a vet assured them the animal would soon be dead. We gathered back in the schoolyard corner during the next recess for my friend’s remarks in honor of the life of the rabbit. It was then, at that makeshift event, that my friend announced their vegetarianism.

“Me too,” I said. Although in earnest it would be more than a decade before I finally did quit meat. But still, I felt the trueness of what my friend felt: that these animals are our friends, and that friends don’t eat friends. It hardly mattered to us that most animals are not suited to live among us in our houses, nor do they enjoy the attention of overenthusiastic children. Children like attention, though. That’s partly why I did all this. And they are usually wiser than their parents, my mom told me, at least when it comes to death. Or more comfortable, even though they don’t fully understand it. Death had to be more than lying perfectly still, uttering carefully chosen final words surrounded by stuffed animals as mourners.

“What do you tell them?” I asked her. I didn’t know what a real death looked like and imagined Freddie writhing on the floor of the pontoon boat, my grandpa hurrying to detach the hook from its face as fast as possible at my urging.

“I don’t need to tell them a lot. They just ask questions,” my mom replied. “Good questions, too, like you. It’s the parents who struggle most.”

Later, when I was older, she would tell me what that looked like, too. About the mother she sat with at one child’s end. How, after the child had slipped away, the mother climbed onto the hospital bed to cover the cooling body with her own, as if to protect her young from the doctors who would take it away to the morgue. She stayed that way for hours, her hands gripping the guardrails on either side, until nurses finally pried her off and she fell into my own mom’s arms, screaming. It is the parents, not the children, who feel as if they have been abandoned.
“Did I kill the bunny?”
“No.”
“Will its mother love it still?”
“Yes.”
“Can we get a cage, just in case I’m lucky enough to catch one again?” She smiled and nodded. And here I knew she was lying. We never did get that cage, and even if we had, I knew we couldn’t keep it.

- Nick Zelle lives in NYC where he works as a political organizer and occasionally as a circus artist. His poetry has been nominated for the Best of the Web award.

Copyright©2025 by Nick Zelle. All Rights Reserved.