by Mariya Kurbatova
The two pets I want most are a fish or a rat but I live with two roommates and one has a cat and if I understand right, fish and rats are a cat’s favorite meals (though this particular cat is too old and fat to hunt but maybe orange enough to try) and our landlord used chatgpt to write the lease and she’d asked chatgpt to specify that the lease allows only one (1) cat, and though my hypothetical fish and my hypothetical rat would be contained (aquarium or cage respectively), I don’t know if she’d consider additional pets to be a violation of our chatgpt lease, and by the way our landlord apologized for using chatgpt to write our lease (she knows we’re all writers and it’s probably destroying our jobs but she still used it to write to the lease) and anyway, I don’t think I’m in a good place right now to be taking care of something living, something that needs my money for pellets and gravel and little calcium-fortified blueberry rat treats because I don’t have a lot of spare money right now and I don’t have a lot of spare space right now in this house I share with two roommates and a cat, and I don’t have a lot of spare space right now in this heart, because I’m used to hoarding all my love inside myself like a hamster bubbling its cheeks with grain because even though it (the hypothetical hamster) lives inside a cage inside a house with a human who has a paycheck to spend on grain for a hamster, the hamster doesn’t understand that it’s safe from starvation forever and so its survival instincts make it still hoard, but I’m slowly becoming less hamster and more human because you are so kind to me and my heart and maybe one day we’ll have enough money for our own house and we can fill our house with all the pets we want, and did I ever tell you that when I was little, I had a pet betta fish in a one gallon fish tank that I put on top of my bookshelf one day and just kinda forgot about until the fish slowly starved in its own slime, and also when I was little I begged my parents for a pink hairless rat, a rat hot dog creature that we took home in a petsmart cardboard box, and it died weeks later under my care because our house was kept so air-conditioned that my hairless rat got hypothermia, but you make me want to try again in the future to take care of something small and precious.
Mariya Kurbatova (she/her) is a fiction MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. She’s the Book Reviews Editor for The Arkansas International literary magazine. Her work has previously appeared in HAD and the Tightwires Anthology. Please send her pictures of your dog via Instagram @dogenthusiast.