You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Animals.”
I electrocuted a rat early this morning. It was approximately 2:20 am. There were no eyewitnesses. I heard the electrical noise. It was a sustained bug-zapping sound that went on for a good thirty seconds. I knew immediately what was happening when I was startled awake. I just listened, victorious, with a great feeling that my vigilante justice had been [...]
Le Parker Meridien on West 57th is not the type of hotel where my parents took my siblings and me when we weren't camping or staying with relatives. It wasn't in my budget during the winter of 2000 either. At the time I felt self-conscious of each cold step taken across the hard marble floors. I looked furtively at my [...]
I was sitting on a green bench outside of a cafe on Irving Place, on a hot day with a blaring sun. I was in one of those moods where I was thinking of everything bad that had ever happened to me. I noticed a huge bagel on the edge of the sidewalk. It was one of those modern bagels [...]
My girlfriend Emily recently got a job as personal assistant to a stockbroker who lives on the Upper West Side, on the forty-seventh floor of a building directly adjacent to Lincoln Center. The stockbroker goes to work at eight or so and often doesn’t get home until eight or nine in the evening, at which point she eats and goes [...]
"You can tell when a person's just not ready," the young man in charge of birds at Petland Discounts told me as I pressed my face against the glass atrium to get a good look at the small animals so close to danger. "Have you ever had to say no to anybody?" "There have been occasions." "What have those people [...]
The John Kieran Trail in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx is cut through sturdy black locust and black cherry trees, their crowns bending the day's sunlight. As it veers towards the water, the trail mixes with wet mossy woods with willow branches hanging over the path like Rapunzel’s hair, patches of skunk cabbage and pitcher plants, and a feathery [...]
This very quiet bird, with whom I am hoping to build a relationship, is called Number Two. I received Number Two and his ex-companion, Number One, as a Valentine's day present from a woman I used to go with. Her name was Johanna. Johanna used to work in my office--in fact she used to work for me. I felt a [...]
Approximately 350 dogs reside in London Terrace. For the most part, these hounds aren’t mutts but creatures of high pedigree. Madonna’s stylist owns one. Deborah Harry keeps a critter here. I knew pugs, basset hounds, basenjis, scotties, weimaraners, and schipperkees. The twelve-building complex is in, in fact, a kennel. In September of 1995, I organized a dog show during the [...]
Not until we took custody of Molly, seven years old more or less, more or less cocker spaniel, did I become aware how bountiful were the sidewalks of New York, at least along the several Upper West Side blocks Molly now calls home. It’s no surprise that New Yorkers litter the streets with their candy wrappers and matchbooks and newspapers, [...]
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