Tony

Maisie, our second rabbit, died on Friday, roughly two months after Charlie, our first rabbit. We both felt terrible beyond my ability to describe how we felt. On Saturday we went to a plant nursery. I bought a small pot of rosemary and an esperanza plant with which to mark Maisie's grave. I'd marked the place where I buried Charlie with a chrysanthemum and one of the small wild petunias which grow hereabouts and which he liked to eat - something for him to munch on in the bunny afterlife, I told myself.

I buried Maisie on the north side of our garden because there wasn't much room near Charlie. Taking her little body from the carrier in which she'd come back from the vet and placing it in the ground nearly killed me. As with Charlie, I covered her grave with small stones, like a tiny cairn, so as to discourage anything which might try to dig her up but also to channel water to the roots of the rosemary and the esperanza to some extent. Maisie had liked rosemary when we gave it to her.

This left us with an empty hutch sat in the front room, lifeless and silently reminding us of death. Could we not have done something more for our rabbit? it seemed to ask. We could move the hutch out onto the back porch, but it would still pose the same horrible question; as I had built the thing myself, we weren't chucking it away; but it wasn't going to be a problem.

Someone on facebook had sent Bess a message. The woman had found a baby rabbit and was unable to look after him. She had two large dogs and desperately need to find a home for Tony. We already liked the name she'd given him, so on Sunday we drove out to Westover Hills. The woman came to the door with the bunny in her hands. He was tiny, about three months old and mostly white with black spots, a hotot like Charlie had been; and the patch on his nose resembles the silhouette of a bunny. She had found him at some fast food joint, presumably dumped as they always seem to be.

We could hear a little boy crying elsewhere in the house along with dogs barking.

'He doesn't want to let Tony go,' the woman said as I took this tiny bundle of fluff from her and held him to me. He looked a little bewildered, but not unhappy.

A small tearful boy came to the door, red-faced.

'You can come and visit whenever you like,' I said.

'Mom, can we go and see Tony?' the child pleaded.

'Sure, we can.'

'We like the name too,' I added. 'So he's still going to be Tony.'

'That was his idea,' the woman said smiling at her child. 'It's short for Antonio.'

'Antonio,' I laughed. 'I like it.'

'As in San Antonio,' she explained with a roll of her eyes.

We'd bought a pet carrier but Tony sat on my chest for the entire journey home, seeming neither skittish nor particularly spooked by this whole experience. He settled in fine, and learned to ascend the stepped ramp in his hutch within about four hours where it took Charlie about a week. He learned how to hop up onto the couch almost straight away and has already made friends with most of the cats. Junior sent photos of Tony to all of his friends, one of whom commented that Tony's bunny-shaped nose patch is sort of like me getting a picture of myself tattooed on my face.

We'll never forget Charlie or Maisie and we still miss them every day, but Tony is helping.

Maisie

Maisie was our second rabbit. She turned up in the garden of some friend of my wife. They weren't able to catch her so they called us, because apparently we're bunny experts now. The thing was, they were moving and the new occupants were bringing a couple of large dogs with them. Bess went over and said that Maisie hopped right up to her.

We already had one rabbit, namely Charlie, so we kept Maisie in the growing frame in which we'd kept Charlie while I was building him a hutch. Charlie had been named Maisie until we realised he was a boy, and Bess had liked the name. I'd made the growing frame of wood and chicken wire so it was fairly hutch-like anyway. Charlie was male and hadn't been fixed, and Maisie was female so we had to keep them separate. Occasionally they would snoof each other through the chicken wire, and I imagined a happy future for the two of them playing together outside, hopping about in the run and doing bunny stuff once they had been fixed; but as I wrote in Farewell to Charlie, it wasn't to be.

Charlie's death was devastating, but Maisie helped us through the worst of it. That said, we were worried about her. She had pasteurella, a respiratory condition in rabbits which can either be fatal or never really amount to anything, but is something they're stuck with and which can be passed on if they have it. She suffered sneezing fits and seemed to be putting on weight only very slowly. She was about eight months old when we got her, so the vet had reckoned. Her fur was a testimony to her time spent living rough and the individual vertebrae of her spine could be felt in her back.

A month or so passed and it seemed like she was sneezing less and less, and she started to fill out and seemed happier until, one day I noticed I could no longer feel the knobbly bits of her spine, and her fur was softer, and she seemed livelier and would tear around like crazy in the run outside, sometimes so fast she'd popcorn up into the air, as it's termed. She had about two good weeks, then we heard a sneeze. Her appetite went right down and she seemed listless.

Bess took her to the emergency vet and came back with a course of antibiotics. It was an infection of some description. Another couple of days passed and we found blood in her urine. Bess found another vet specialising in bunnies, because we weren't going back to the fuckers who had killed Charlie.

The vet said it was her heart. It stopped and started, which was unknown. They x-rayed her and found her insides were all messed up, congenital deformities of such severity that it seemed incredible that she could have lasted so long as she did. She was probably never destined to have a long or happy life.

Two months after Charlie, at the close of an unusally shitty year, this really stuck it in and twisted it around.

She helped us though the death of Charlie. She was a delight and had a completely different personality to him, more gentle and she liked to run up my chest and lick my nose with her tongue, which was weird but adorable.

She was our chocolate bunny and she was beautiful.

Brad and Tabitha

Every Tuesday evening we feed feral cat colonies in our part of San Antonio. It's a voluntary thing on behalf of our local Feral Cat Coalition, which is an official body recognised by the city. It has been established that it's better to stabilise feral cat colonies than to just round them up and gas them, as certain joyless cunts seem to think would be preferable. Stable colonies are easier to neuter and prevent incursion by wilder, un-neutered cats. Our local colonies are mostly tended by Susan and Randy, who do a lot for the local feral cats and deserve at least one night off a week, so that's where we come in.

We have seven colonies we visit, leaving food and water at each. It takes about half an hour at most. There's a colony on our route at an apartment complex which we don't touch because a local cat-hating nutcase has occasionally threatened Randy and Susan with a firearm. They didn't feel comfortable about asking us to cover that spot.

Nevertheless, we've had a similar flare up elsewhere, albeit one without any firearms. The colony is usually referred to as the double gates. It's waste ground behind a chain link fence with locked gates. The owner let us have a key so we could get in and feed the cats - one of the larger colonies, ten cats or maybe more. Unfortunately the land has been sold, so now we have to feed the cats on the verge in front of the fence because no-one seems to know what the new owner is doing; but it's a quiet street so it isn't a problem, or it wasn't.

We park on the verge and get out. Bess has milk containers filled with water. I have a bucket of dry cat food and a scoop. We stumble into the bushes to find the usual spot as black cats emerge from all around. We stumble because it's seven in the evening in November and is dark, and America doesn't seem to have gone for street lighting with quite the same enthusiasm as my country of origin.

'You shun't be feeding those cats,' we hear yelled from a house across the road, and yelled loud because he wants us to hear. He sounds drunk. 'Y'all are idiots.'

Bess and I are both shocked. We didn't expect this. I experience a sudden adrenaline rush, getting ready for a fight. 'Oh fuck off,' I call back, because it's cold, dark, and I'm not shouting the entire first paragraph across a street at someone I don't know.

'Y'all are encouraging wild animals and vermin,' he bellows with more feeling. I guess he didn't expect to be told to fuck off. Over the months, we've worked out how much food to dish out so that the cats get fed without leaving any surplus, but it hardly seems worth arguing the point.

Now his wife joins in. 'Y'all should be getting them neutered not feeding them. Y'alls are idiots!'

I can see where the house is but I'm concentrating on dishing out the food and getting out of there. Bess later tells me the two of them are hanging out of a window as they shout at us.

'We do get them neutered!' I call back.

We don't personally, but Randy and Susan handle that side of things fairly regularly. The problem at the moment is the coronavirus outbreak has limited the availability of spaces at animal clinics for those participating in the trap-neuter-return program. Anyway, the point is that the cats are neutered, even if it's not all of them or straight away.

'We do get them neutered!' I called back, in case you had forgotten.

'No y'alls don't!' bellows the male voice. It's hardly what you'd call a coherent refutation.

'Okay,' I say.

Stupidity makes me angry, because there's been too much of it on display this year, and often somehow presented as a mark of character. I shout back. My voice probably wavers and cracks but I'm past caring. 'We feed the cats. We trap then when we're able. We neuter them but it doesn't happen all at once,' I yell, or something to that effect, then add, 'it's not that fucking hard to understand, you stupid wanker.'

This is how I remember the exchange, but the moment was heated. In any case, by this point we're done. We get back into the car and head for the next colony. Later we pass the house and take their license plate. Bess engages in her usual detective work.

Their names are Brad and Tabitha. They're renting. One of them was born in 1985 but I can't remember which one. They're both sort of young, or younger than we are. Cops were recently called to a disturbance. They were both drunk, Brad sat on the porch, Tabitha out in the yard yelling about how she has the best vagina in all San Antonio - or words to that effect - and somebody had better come and get some of it, an address delivered as the kid, or possibly kids, looked on with their father. They've been yelling at Randy and Susan too, it turns out.

I'm dreading our next encounter, but the house is dark and silent the following Tuesday, and the same the one after that. They've also left Randy and Susan alone.

Maybe it's not that fucking hard to understand shamed them into behaving themselves, although it seems unlikely.

Peter Roger's Alien

'What? You want me to go in there?' Albert Twiddle's nostrils flared behind his visor as he pointed ahead with a gloved hand. 'You must be joking!' Beyond the alien arch lay a murky interior, fog shrouding a floor space covered in something fungal, something grown - row upon row of fleshy spheres looming up from the mist in neatly ordered lines.

Sergeant Rumpo rolled his eyes and took another puff on his fag. 'Oh for Pete's sake,' he expectorated as his domed helmet once again filled with a pearl grey cloud, obscuring his vision. There was a whir of servomotors as the suits systems sucked out the smoke, revealing him now blinking and red-eyed. 'I don't know what you think we're paying you for, Twiddle, because it certainly ain't your sunny disposition. Now do your job and get in there and have a butcher's for us like a good boy.' He grinned a wrinkled grin and patted Twiddle on the head.

'I'll thank you to keep your filthy hands off my helmet. I shall be speaking to my union rep about this.'

'Oh blimey.' The Sergeant shook his head, and pressed the stud upon his chest unit which redirected his radio communications. 'Bernard, I believe one of your colleagues would like a word, if you can spare a moment.'

A third man trudged up from behind, from where the rest of the team were milling around the loading ramp of the drop ship. He stood almost seven feet tall, dark piercing eyes in a great bald dome of a head glaring down from behind his visor. 'What?'

Twiddle pulled himself up to his full height, which failed to make much of a difference. 'He wants me to go traipsing around in that, that,' - he flapped his hands towards the arch - 'whatever that is.'

'So?'

'There might be something horrible lurking in there. I don't like the look of it. Something might get hold of me.'

'You should be so flipping lucky!' The Sergeant dispensed laughter, hyak hyak hyak, which seemed to hang in the air - or at least the ambient methane-hydrogen mix - like an expensive cheese.

The seven-foot man turned to Rumpo. 'I thought you was going to tell me he had a complaint about the tea in the canteen.' He went back to Twiddle, his giant face suddenly taling on the appearance of an anxious child. 'Here - you ain't got a problem with the tea, have you?'

'The tea is perfectly adequate,' Twiddle reported with a trace of acid. 'What concerns me more is the possibility of extraterrestrial ghoulies.'

'Don't they like the tea in the canteen?' Bernard turned as though to address those behind him, although they were all still back at the ship, several hundred yards away. 'Brothers, it is with great regret—'

'Oh put a sock in it!' The Sergeant pressed another stud on his chest unit, this time cutting radio communications to the taller man, whose mouth now opened and closed in silence as he continued to hector an oblivious audience like a huge pink goldfish in a bowl he'd long since outgrown.

Rumpo rounded on Twiddle once again, the face behind the visor wrinkling with resolve. 'Now you get in there and do your job like you're paid to do, or it won't be the extraterrestrial ghoulies you have to worry about.'

'No need to be like that.' Twiddle stepped back a few paces, shocked by the vehemence of the command.

'And tie your blooming laces,' Rumpo added. 'If there's ghoulies, you might at least try to make a good impression!'

Twiddle turned and stood staring at the arch, then stepped forward with a shrug. He'd been down the Bayswater Road on a Saturday evening, and whatever lay ahead could hardly be worse. As he walked beneath the arch, his booted feet entered the low level mist into which he began to sink as he went down a slight incline towards the rows of spherical growths. Another step and his foot caught on something. He stumbled then quickly righted himself.

'Oh fiddlesticks!'

Remembering his untied lace, he gazed down into the mist now swirling about his knees. Just behind, one of the fleshy orbs projected its wrinkled peak. There was something horribly familiar about the folded skin - and Twiddle realised he was now thinking of it as skin, or at least something akin to a reptilian hide. It seemed almost to glow and pulse from within, but it was difficult to be sure, peering through the visor with one's own fizzog reflected back like in the hall of mirrors at a funfair.

He shrugged, sat down, and sank his gloved hands into the mist, feeling for the errant lace. He could hear voices raised in the communications relay within his helmet, something about readings, signs of life, and Lieutenant Dimple complaining about his blooming waterworks as usual. The man really was dreadful. Heaven knows what use they thought he'd be out here so far from Earth.

As Twiddle felt the lace through the tech-sensitised fingers of his space gloves, he failed to notice tremors running through that upon which he was sat, mainly due to the thick padding in the rear of his space suit. Then suddenly, all within the margin of a split second, he found himself unseated and propelled violently forward as something horribly biological resembling a crab forcibly set up shop inside his bottom.

'Oh my word!' he expectorated violently, mouth twisting and eyes bulging as though trying to escape the confines of his head.

***

Bernard looked up from his spotted dick as applause rippled around the canteen. Twiddle came in, helped by Nurse Jeffries. He was walking a bit funny, which was hardly surprising under the circumstances, but he seemed to be wearing a faint smile.

'Blimey! We all thought you was a goner!' Bernard hooted, getting up to pull back a chair so that his colleague could sit. 'You should have seen that thing, it was right up—'

'It wouldn't be the first time, believe me.' Twiddle batted the air with a dismissive hand. He sat, still evidently fragile. 'What a palaver. I could eat a horse!'

'I think it's sausage and chips today.'

'How are you, boy?' Sergeant Rumpo came up behind to deliver a hearty slap on the back. 'All ship shape, I hope?'

'Please,' said Twiddle. 'I'd rather not think about anything nautical just now if it's all the same.'

'Here you are, love.' Nurse Jeffries set a tray down before her patient. 'Eat it all now, got to keep your strength up.'

'I'd rather not think about anything being kept up, either,' Twiddle groaned. 'Thank you, Joan. Very kind, I'm sure.'

Bernard watched his colleague tucking in. 'The grub's very good today,' he said happily. 'Miss Rhubarb certainly knows her way around a sausage.'

'That's what I've heard too,' Sergeant Rumpo added with a chuckle, sending a wrinkled wink across the room to where the Chef was clearing away a serving tray of toad in the hole.

Twiddle submitted a demure belch to the conversation, such as it was, with a slightly pained look upon his face. 'Oh dear. I don't like the sound of that.'

'Manners,' said Rumpo.

Twiddle clutched his stomach with a look of horror. 'Oh my goodness. It must be something I've eaten.'

'Well, you been in bed with a space lobster stuck to your harris since Tuesday,' explained Bernard helpfully, although not so helpful as he clearly imagined. 'Nurse Jeffries brought you stew and dumplings last night but I don't fink you had none of it.'

'Nothing wrong with Miss Rhubarb's dumplings,' added Rumpo.

'What's that about my dumplings?' called the Chef from across the canteen, a frown having made its way onto her brow.

'Nothing,' the Sergeant called back. 'We was just saying how nice they are.'

'Oh crikey,' wailed Twiddle as an extraterrestrial ghoulie effected its entrance by means of his exit.