When I was ten, I asked my parents if I could have a dog. They refused. I begged them for weeks and they kept saying no. They told me I wasn’t responsible enough. They said I was just a child. They told me that they dog needs constant care and attention and that every other animal they have every given me has died because they both work two jobs each and I was an incompetently little zoomer child with no notion of responsibility or empathy for other living things. They proceeded to tell me about the fish I didn’t feed. The fish that were eaten by the frog I bought. The frog I killed with a sun lamp. The list of plants they gave was too long to put here but let it be known that I do not have a green thumb apparently, whatever that means.

When I was 27 my last grandmother died. It was very sad. I remember visiting her as a child, but she moved when I was a teenager, so I lost contact with her. It turns out she lived in a gated community near the beach but had developed severe skin cancer and a strange disease that made her allergic to sand. Anyway, after grandpa died she said fuck it and went all out. Built a jungle bubble dome around her house against the wishes of the HOA, but she hired some lawyers who argued her constitutional rights or some shit and they didn’t want to litigate something this stupid for so long the entire facility keeled over. That’s what my dad told me.

He also said that the will she left mentioned me. I asked if it was money, which it wasn’t. I wish it had been money. I’ve been pretty short on cash recently. I have a master’s in mathematics but ever since the government passed a maximum wage on teaching 38 years ago, it’s difficult to make any money doing what you love, so at this point I sell hot dogs and have a little cart. With the money I make from that I’ve used my knowledge in mathematics to become an expert coupon counter. It’s like card counting, but for grocery stores. But that’s a story for another day.

I asked my dad what she left me in her will. He kept hesitating and wouldn’t answer. I called him every day for the next week until he caved and told me to come down to her old house where they were doing the estate inventory.

When I finally got to the dome home (heh, dome home) I saw my dad in the front door talking to some guy in a three piece suit.

“Sup pop, what the fuck is going on here?”

“Bojangles, I need you to listen very carefully” my dad said and was interputed by the lawyer looking motherfucker.

“What your father is trying to say is that your grandmother was absolutely insane, it was pure gross negligence that your father didn’t set up some sort of care system or guardianship for her, the walls of this home are covered in grotesque paintings of Greek Gods eating and mating. When the home isn’t a haunted house it’s completely covered in foliage and small woodland animals that were let in by a complex system of doggie doors. Your grandmother had outrageous amounts of money but left almost all of it to the Chunky Cheese Skin Cancer And Sand Allergy Society. She left just enough for you to live here and take care of Steve.” Said the lawyer while flipping through a yellow legal pad and texting on his phone simultaneously.

“Who’s Steve? That was my grandad’s name, but he’s dead.”

“Steve is the obese capybara your grandmother illegally purchased and built this home for. This goes back to the whole, your grandmother was insane bit, I was telling you about earlier. It appears she believed your grandfather’s soul was transferred into this fat rat when he died, as he was born at the moment your grandfather died. She proceeded to treat him exactly as she did your grandfather, except, you know, the whole bit where it’s a fat ass fucking giant rat who makes friends with other animals. So she had this house built in such a way that Steve the giant rat would be happy and that he would have other friends come and visit, just like your grandfather apparently had all his sailor buddies and their prostitutes come visit the old house in the Hills, just instead it’s more squirrels and crocodiles and other shit that just walks in.”

“What the fuck, dad?”