Fitting Ends by Dan Chaon

could hear them behind the closed door, rustling and chirping, the whisper of wings in cages, of clawed feet against wire mesh. It was a sound she had heard behind doors in dreams, a sound that stopped suddenly when in the dream she opened the door and found it empty. Her grandmother took a skeleton key out of her sweater pocket. This is something secret, Arlinda thought, and she held back, letting the two women enter first.
    â€œWhat is it?” she whispered.
    â€œChinchillas,” her grandmother said, and it sounded like a magic word.
    The chinchillas looked like little squirrels. They were all in cages that lined two walls of the room, cages no bigger than a birdcage, stacked high to the ceiling. They were all quiet, staring with their dark, glittering eyes at Arlinda, her mother, and her grandmother, their noses twitching, their whole bodies quivering with the quickness of their breath. In the closet, Arlinda could see a large sack of food pellets, a pitcher of still water.
    â€œChinchillas for coats,” her grandmother said to Arlinda. “Beautiful, warm ladies’ fur coats.”
    â€œUgh,” her mother said. “They look like rats.”
    â€œThese ‘rats’ are going to bring in a lot of money,” her grandmother said. “They’ll all be yours, someday.”
    â€œThey’re filthy,” Arlinda’s mother said. “Mom, they’ll stink up the whole house. Look, they’re pooping all over everything.”
    Her grandmother shrugged, put a cigarette in her mouth. The flame of the cigarette lighter made the grandmother’s eyes glint. The grandmother breathed in deeply, and then the smoke came curling from her nose, wisping through the bars of sunlight that slanted from the windows.
    â€œThey’ve got to be kept at room temperature,” the grandmother said. “Cool in summer, warm in winter.”
    The room they were in had once been a bedroom. Arlinda could recall when she and her mother had slept in a big, quilt-covered bed in this very room. When her mother was a child, this had been her room.
    â€œDo you really think it will smell up the house?” the grandmother asked. “Even if I keep the door shut?”
    â€œIt smells like a barn,” Arlinda’s mother said. “You might as well have a house full of goats.”
    â€œWell, I don’t care. It doesn’t hurt anyone but me. I’m the one who has to live here, and I can’t smell a thing.”
    Arlinda’s mother shook her head. As she always did when she saw someone else smoke, she put a cigarette to her own lips and lit it.
    â€œThey’re so soft,” her grandmother said. “Do you want to hold one? They’re tame as rabbits.”
    Her mother wrinkled her nose, exhaling a stream of smoke.
    â€œArlinda?” the grandmother said softly, as if something magic were about to happen.
    Arlinda looked at her mother, then at the chinchillas with their bright, sharp, waiting eyes. She shook her head.
    â€œI don’t care,” the grandmother said again. “I’m the only one that has to live with them.”
    The grandmother locked the door to the chinchillas’ room, and Arlinda watched as she carefully slipped the silver key into her sweater pocket.
    The grandmother made coffee. Arlinda got to drink some, too, with cream and three sugar cubes. Everything in her grandmother’s house seemed to happen in the kitchen, and her grandmother was almost always there. After the grandfather had died, she had even moved the small couch and the television into the kitchen. Nowadays, when Arlinda and her mother came to the house, the grandmother would be in the kitchen on the couch, with her legs drawn up, her knees almost touching her belly. She was always wearing sweaters or coats in the house, draping herself with blankets.
    The grandmother and the mother talked in secrets. Arlinda could sometimes guess what was being said, though the