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LOVE ADDICTIONS
2. Diane's Hands All Over The Animals
mum took me around to diane's, her father didn't want her mixing with me because we had dogs, he said that his sister had contracted a disease from a dog & had died from it, since that day he had never forgiven dogs, so mum tried to help him by taking rusky around on a leash, to show him that it was okay, diane's father got the gun out, he said 'get out of here!,' so we left, mum giving up on him, for some reason he didn't want diane mixing with me, i thought it was because i was fat & spoilt, but he didn't want diane to mix with anyone else either, she was rarely allowed out of her yard, once she rushed around after school & visited me, we had ten minutes in which to show her all the toys she had missed out on seeing, there were many years of birthdays & christmas's worth stacked up, i wanted diane to know me like i had known her at her house, like when she had pulled out the dozens of shoeboxes full of trinkets stashed beneath her dressing table & bed, mum said 'she's a hoarder', i thought of my rat called puff, a nocturnal sock collector, deeply into his own hygienic business, hoarding & rubbing his pink claws together in an introverted excitement, once inside, diane ran from room to room, shrieking through her decayed teeth & placing her hands on every animal that she could, there she touched my mice through their plastic housing & there her hands in the fishtank, on my cockateil, on my dogs & well into the soft & wrinkly back of snifty, the aviary floor rabbit, & ho across the cold shell of the turtle, & hey into the quails abandoned nest & through the cat fur, it all happened so quickly, i wanted her to stay until dark & then perhaps forever, i wanted more than anything for us to read books on my bed & to 'hold my pet rat in her lap, but she raced home up the street, us both knowing it had been risky & that already she was well on the way to being in trouble, diane's legs pounded down along the grass, then driveway, then grass, her hands with all the animal scents in them held high above her head, after she ran home, i looked around at all the things she had touched, i never felt so lonely in all my life, when diane grew up she kept a hundred cats |
