Household Poisons

I stand before the Pink Room preschoolers and waggle my wing as Dr. No-No starts his spiel on dangers lurking below your average kitchen sink. One of the kids punches me on the kneecap and squeals with delight and I start scratching at the ground with my legs to pretend it doesn’t hurt The advantage of this getup is they can’t see my face behind the foam beak and permanent smiling plastic eyes. I say Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck into my mask and hope they think I’m clucking.

It helps to think I’m just living this way until I’ve done my hours, but I look over at Dr. No-No and I think about where we’re ending up. I go through an economy Listerine every week and sometimes I don’t even bother to spit when I’m done. Part of me wants to screw the head off my uniform and tell the kids that the woman playing the part of Safety Chicken just fucked Dr. No-No in his wife’s Corolla before setting up the presentation.

He points to a bottle of bleach and asks the kids to name it. They’ve been told to yell Yuck whenever we point to one of the poisons, but they aren’t catching on. I raise my wings up and shake my big chicken head from side to side, but there’s no response. It’s part of the arrangement, that we handle the situation delicately when the kids don’t cooperate. Dr. No-No grapples with anger problems, so I have the go ahead to step in when things look dire, but The Safety Chicken isn’t supposed to speak because it scares the children. So I get behind him and smooth the shoulders of his lab costume with my wingtips and he rearranges the bottles on the table. This calms him and we continue, the kids looking up at their real teachers and the teachers looking out over the kids.

After the session Dr. No-No and I crash the teachers’ lounge because teachers leave food around. We flash our visitors passes and shave slices from an abandoned birthday cake, avoiding conversation. Not that the teachers are dying to introduce themselves anyway. They’ve been notified in advance that I’m completing my alternative sentencing with Dr. No-No’s agency.

He’s certified to work with minor lawbreakers — speeders and drunks mostly — but the way they avoid me you’d think misdemeanors were contagious.

After finishing all three schools on our schedule, Dr. No-No and I go for a drink where someone he knows tends the bar. They let me in even though I’m still wearing the lower half of my chicken suit and I have to stand behind the stools because my tail feathers won’t let me sit. He feeds me drink after drink but we’ve made this mistake before and eventually I tell him to stop, that I’m not going to bed with him. His buddies laugh and turn away and I make him drink both whiskies while I watch.

He has his spots he’ll take me. This one is good because it’s open at the right times and there’s no mixing of worlds. I like the place, the way you can see how everything’s nailed together. The things they have to plug in, you can see the plugs. Like once I pulled the jukebox out from the wall after Dr. No-No put five dollars toward “Satisfaction” over and over.

We get talking about his wife so I give up and decide to start drinking again. It’s the kind of bar they fill your same glass up round after round, so the guy takes my old highball and drops ice into it and around it. He’s careless with the ice and the booze too, so I end up licking free Jack from the back of my wrist.

This is out of control, I say. This is me getting drunk in daylight in a costume.

You could be stabbing trash beside the highway instead, he says. You could go on the lam.

The choices I have left: poison control or litter maintenance.

The choices I have left: where to go?

The guy lets up leave without putting down money because he says he knows pretty well when we’ll be back. He says I know you’re good for it. He wipes the inside of my glass and places it back in front of the others. Then the phone rings and he answers it, so there’s nobody for us to tell goodbye.

On our walk to the car Dr. No-No asks what I’m thinking.

I’m late, I say. There’s going to be a baby.

No there’s not, he says.

But what if?

We don’t even slow down. He pushes his long fingers against the bottoms of his lab pockets, watching orange leaves fly around his feet.

When we reach the Corolla he says, I pick out one boy every session to be my son. I think of things I can teach him. I give him lessons in my head.

He unlocks the passenger door and stays in my way.

It’s unhealthy for us to pretend this together.

A few hours later Dr. No-No calls my place. He’s worried about what I said on our walk, about the baby. He asks me, Are you sure that’s a joke?

He says he’s working on this new thing with his wife and it’s going pretty good, so if it’s no joke we have a problem.

I hold my breath for a beat and then ask, Did you hear that? That was the phone on my belly. That’s little man kicking.

The phone dies.

He calls right back and says, That was close, he thought he heard his wife coming in. It’s hard for him to hide me because she’s found evidence. In the car. On the lab coat. He’s talking soft right into the receiver.

But really, he says, but really.

During the next day’s only session Dr. No-No can’t control the class. The regular teacher’s sick and the substitute lets kids move around teh semi-circle, drawing attention away from the presentation. Our tape of choking noises continues to play but no one’s listening. We can’t even make it through powdered detergent before everything goes crazy. The three of us — the substitute, Dr. No-No, and I — look around in turns waiting for one of us to step up.

The kids see we’re lost and one girl starts to cry loud into her hands. Dr. No-No looks ready to break. I could do my thing with the wings, to smooth him out some, but I let him try to work through it alone. He tugs at his stethoscope and looks back at me like he doesn’t know what to do next.

I let things go like this for a minute.

Then I give him our signal and do the emergency routine around the screaming kids. It’s where I stick my wings out like a plane and weave through the circle. It’s a move he taught me in training, but it’s a last resort, and it means the session’s through.

I look back to see Dr. No-No and the substitute gathering up our bottles. The kids are just scared enough to get quiet and watch me move, but we all know this is evasive action.