The Whole Animal by Corinna Chong

Author:Corinna Chong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press

Siberpoo

EUGENIE COULDN’T STOP MULLING OVER THE WINEGLASS. Though the dinner had been eaten and the plates cleared and the conversation had long ago shifted to Maxine’s miniature poodle and his habitual late-night liaisons with a neighbouring cocker spaniel, still Eugenie ruminated on the way Maxine had carelessly poured the champagne with her glass raised way up, winking in the hot sun, while Leonard was bent at her feet, mopping up the spill from the bottle, which had only stopped frothing moments before. The crack of the wineglass shattering on the porch had brought the chaos of the scene to its pinnacle: Leonard doubling over, performing a gratuitous somersault into the smoking barbecue, yelping like a hyena, and Maxine hollering “Opa!” as she plucked shards of glass from the puddle with blue-nailed fingers. Eugenie had bustled around them like a little tornado, sweeping up the glass and Dustbusting the stray shards and wiping Leonard’s splattered pantleg and rolling the barbecue into the corner before returning, without a glass for herself, to join the toast to Charlie’s tenure appointment at the university. The frantic energy Maxine and Leonard created when they were together was a kind of monstrous alchemy; even now, as they sat across the patio table from one another, Maxine umbrellaed by the wide brim of her black French hat and Leonard shielded behind sunset-orange mirrored sunglasses, an unrelenting intensity hung in the air between them, an eyeless stare that each was aiming at the other.

“Don’t they call that a cockapoo?” Charlie offered, smiling his lopsided smile.

The wineglass had been a gift from Eugenie’s sister. After hearing Charlie chaff about Eugenie’s penchant for breaking wineglasses, Paula had insisted that the thinner and more delicate the crystal, the bowlier the goblet, the narrower the stem, the more careful attention Eugenie would pay to it, handling it with only the nimblest touch. Indeed, all six of the fragile wineglasses Paula had bought at great expense had remained intact, polished to spotlessness after each use and displayed on the open shelf where Charlie could see them—until today.

“But really,” Maxine went on, “who are we to deny them their carnal pleasures? It’s castration, after all. We don’t use that term except in the context of torture.”

“You think you’re torturing him by keeping him tied up in the yard,” Leonard said.

“Keeping him tied up in the yard!” Maxine said, not to Leonard but to Margot, and raising her hands in hyperbolic indignation. “Would you do that to a human and call it anything other than torture?” she said, and Margot laughed and shrugged in a polite, docile way.

Eugenie had suggested glass tumblers for the champagne, apologizing for the absence of flutes, and pointed out that champagne was best served in a narrow vessel so that the bubbles would have a longer path to travel up to the surface, making a more pleasing spectacle for the drinker. Maxine, however, had only laughed and accused her of being “too cute,” then forked the delicate stems of two wineglasses between the fingers of each hand, necking them against one another.

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