Dear Wigleaf,

I used to write a lot, but then I got a full-time job that beats me over the head with Things to Write About:

A 75 year-old man lifting a veil with the flourish of a magician, revealing the enormous wooden head of a praying mantis. Wait—let him attach the antennae, long as fishing rods. "The full mantis is thirty feet in size," he says. "North of two hundred pounds." He built it in his garage, wants to install it on the lobby ceiling. We all nod. We do a card exchange.
   
Our skink, Freddie, on a leash, slapping down the hallway past my office.
   
An indoor beehive with a small chute for the bees to get outside, but the polar vortex keeps killing them on their journey. They die right beneath the magnifying glass, big enough for all to see. Their queen, painted with a red dot on her back, is still alive, so the hive fights on.     "Oh, that? That's the queen?" the kids always ask. "Shouldn't she be bigger?"
   
A volunteer with a mane of hair redder than the corn snake, leading a tour of the museum with the corn snake wrapped around her neck, threaded through her hair. People laugh. Some scream. 
 
Children always asking, "Did you kill all these birds?"
   
The executive director's French bulldog, who visits most Mondays, prancing into my office to stare me down. I have learned not to make eye contact or she'll leave a puddle on my carpet.

Outside my window, just behind the sound wall, sits a dog park—the only evidence of this being the shrieking noises of play pushed too far, a wail that carries over the dust and crunch of the art museum they're constructing next door. I see the men down there with their sandwiches, sitting on the corrugated metal stoop of the trailer (inside which the boss sits—I always imagine—eating steak). The men look happy.

"This is a two-headed cow. The condition is called polycephaly," I say. "While you're exploring today, you might find some other two-headed animals." The students are losing it, no longer listening. "Here's a hint," I say, only to myself. "You really have to pay attention."




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Read TB's story.

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