ODD? by Jeff VanderMeer Page A

its leathery skin and curled around the graham cracker leg of the son’s chair.
    After much consideration, the animal was decided to be a male cat. He was named Bleachy, after the way he smelled. “You’re better than anything we put into the toilet,” the son told Bleachy, scratching the back of his leathery neck.
    When the family took Bleachy on walks around the neighborhood, other families stared and pointed at them. Trash flushing had grown more widespread by then, due to the steep price of garbage tickets, but no other family bragged about it the way this particular family bragged about it. They outlined all the grease stains on their T-shirts with magic marker and group-hugged every time Bleachy coughed up a ball of their old trash. This was something Bleachy did very often, so the family trained him to cough into the toilet when he needed to.
    But Bleachy soon grew to be emotionally needy in ways the family couldn’t satisfy. He ate all their food and cried all night. He constantly napped in the father’s massage chair, which caused the electric bill to go up, because he never remembered to turn the massage function off. He even borrowed the son’s sweaters without asking, which stretched them in strange shapes as he grew larger and longer.
    It was a relief, then, when the son returned home from school one afternoon to find no trace of Bleachy in the front yard. None of his shoes appeared to have been eaten while he was away. Upstairs, his mother swayed from her chair in the restroom. Her face was flushed.
    I’ve done a terrible thing, she wrote. I flushed Bleachy back down.
    “Well, he was very codependent,” said the son, trying to hide his tears. “I guess he was also too big for a cat.”
    It was so strange, the mother wrote. He said he missed his home. He asked me to flush him back down, but now I think the toilet broke.
    The son pressed the flusher and it flipped down carelessly, with no friction or resistance. The X-Tend-O plunger didn’t help, nor did the Ultra Sonic Air Hammer plunger, which the family reserved for emergencies. The son stared at his mother’s reflection in the mirror, wondering how to lie to his father.
    The bathroom smells so bad, the mother wrote when the father came home from work that day.
    “It’s probably toxic,” the son said. “None of us should go in for a few days at least. Also Bleachy got hit by a car. We had a funeral while you were at work.”
    “Well, these things happen,” the father said, trying to hide his tears. “I guess it’s a shame about the bathroom.”
    The father liked his brown vibrating chair and how it felt like small voices against his back, and he had loved Bleachy as much as anyone, but more than either of these he valued his family’s safety. By dinnertime that night, he had locked the restroom door and stuffed towels in the cracks, except where in the corner under the hinges he had inserted a flexible rubber tube, to occasionally check the air inside.
    The door remained locked for eleven days.
    When finally the father agreed to venture into the restroom again, the family’s trash bins were concealed under triangles of trash. Spider webs netted the hallways and maggots took up the fridge’s crisper drawers. The family had dug a small outhouse in their backyard while the restroom was indisposed, a four foot hole covered by the son’s Batman tent. Two neighbors had already moved away because of what the family’s reputation had done to the subdivision’s property value; a third had moved over the past week, seeing the family’s trash pile up so fiercely against the living room window that the glass fractured and leaked out an oily substance.
    The father first strapped dental masks on all three of them. He then opened the door two inches and released a finch tied to his wrist, and shut the door. He counted to twenty and opened the door again, tugging his wrist back. The other end of the string had only the finch’s foot attached to