“You look adorable!” Lacey gleefully returns to the bin filled with fabric and
removes what appears to be a blue pillowcase sprinkled with tiny bits of red,
purple, orange, yellow, and green. A very colorful mixture for a very black bird.
Once again, she begins to cut through the cloth, this time cutting a slightly bigger
round. When she has completed her project, she wraps the fabric around the bird.
“The cloak will keep you warm if you ever get chilly. Now wait here, I’ll get
everybody!” Lacey leans the bird against its box and runs to the closet. When she
opens the door, shoe boxes line the floor and sit on top of every shelf. She grabs a
large, square box sitting in an old cat bed she’d found in a dumpster in the bot-
tom right corner of the closet. She carries it to the table. When she removes the
lid, a brown tuft of hair encrusted with dirt is visible and she lifts out the stiffened
creature. A cloud of dust rises beneath the animal.
“This is Jamal. He’s a groundhog I found in Central Park a few months ago.
He use to be really fat, but I put him on a pretty strict diet and now he looks great,
doesn’t he?” She sits Jamal in front of the starling. The groundhog is wearing a
green tie with white polka dots and a fanny pack.
The bird slips against the smooth outside of the box
and lands on its left wing.
“Inside the box is a tiny cane Lacey
“What do you think we should name her?” Lacey says
to the groundhog. “I was thinking Camilla or Deborah. We
fashioned for the bunny. Next to this is a
could call her Debbie for short.”
small pipe, so Arthur can enjoy a smoke
A piece of fabric dotted with ladybugs falls to the floor,
landing on the groundhog’s head. Specks of dust dislodge
whenever he pleases.”
themselves from the rough fur of the creature.
“Debbie it is!” Lacey runs back to the closet and re-
moves a much smaller box.
“This is Arthur, Debbie. He’s a cute baby bunny I found
across the street in the neighbor’s grass.” The small white
rabbit is dirty with splotches of brown gunk caked into the
fur. The rabbit is wearing a top hat that is fitted skillfully
between its floppy ears. Inside the box is a tiny cane Lacey
fashioned for the bunny. Next to this is a small pipe, so Ar-
thur can enjoy a smoke whenever he pleases. Lacey sets the
rabbit on Jamal’s back and makes another trip to the closet.
Lacey thinks back to a few months ago. Finding friends used to be a lot harder
before Jamal strolled into her life. She had been kicked out of her second apart-
ment, losing all of the friends she had staying with her. She had to start over for
the third time. The first was when her mother had found a wooden crate stuffed
with animals beneath Lacey’s bed. She wouldn’t stop screaming about road kill
and vermin, but Lacey didn’t know what she meant. The next time, Lacey was
twenty-three and crashing in the basement of her boss’s house. Now she works as
the gatekeeper at Prospect Park. She was traipsing around the park one day when
she came across a fuzzy and fat ball of brown fur. The groundhog introduced him-
self as Jamal and followed her home. She put him in the wagon she was wheeling
behind her and they trundled away. Jamal remains special because of his size and
his compassion towards all her little friends.
Lacey stares admiringly at the collection of her friends on the table. She
still has boxes of them in the closet, but now she has to prepare them all for bed
so she can take a shower. She places Debbie in the shoe box and decorates it
with ornate tissue paper she bought from Papyrus with her last paycheck. Lacey
thinks of these projects of hers as slightly eccentric dioramas, similar to the ones
she used to make in third grade for projects on Judy Blume books. What makes
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