Invisible Beasts by Sharona Muir Read Free Book Online Page B

what I made with your invisible thread. Isn’t it nice?”
    And in truth, it was.

6

    C ities are growing all the time, and animals evolve with them. Rats chew through lead and cement; songbirds add the sounds of car alarms and construction equipment to their repertoires. Cliff swallows are evolving shorter wings for faster takeoffs from roadways to their nests in overpasses. The evolution of urban nonhumans is so closely tied to our habits that it may yet overturn Gertrude Stein’s famous dictum, “The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.” The Wild Rubber Jack has evolved for the urban niche of business districts. He may not have a credit rating yet, but he follows the money .

    The Wild Rubber Jack

    T HE W ILD R UBBER J ACK is commonly found in cities and likes to keep company with humans, having a sociable nature. The Jack (for brevity’s sake) is an invisible American ass. It is, in fact, an invisible offshoot of the revolutionary breed that George Washington created in this country, with the aid of the famous stud “King of Malta,” a gift of the Marquis de Lafayette, at a time when our nation’s development depended on the hard work of powerful jackasses. Thanks to Washington’s improvements, American Mammoth Jacks can stand as tall as a man. To this day, we lead the world in the enormous size of our asses.
    The Wild Rubber Jack, though in every other way a perfect ass—with his wise, gentle eyes, cream velvet nose, and patient demeanor—carries no burdens. It would not be smart to try and ride him. (I use the male pronoun here for the same reason, whatever it might be, that the breed called Mammoth Jack is not called Mammoth Jenny.)
    His joints are the distinguishing characteristic of theJack: in them, nature displays one of her oddest combinations, giving a mammal the advantages of an insect. Grasshoppers, fleas, mosquitoes, and other insects possess a material in their joints that zoologists call “animal rubber.” Its real name is resilin , a very stretchy and elastic protein. Resilin allows fleas to make prodigious jumps—like having bungee cords in your joints. It allows locusts to save a third of the energy of the wing downstroke for the upstroke, and mosquitoes to expand their abdomens for a large meal, then return to a smaller size. The Wild Rubber Jack has resilin in his croup, hocks, and fetlocks, allowing him to kick much farther than the ordinary ass. Thanks to his rubberized hindquarters, the Jack can kick out his heels some eight to ten feet from where he stands, in an arc of 180 degrees, and keep kicking as long as he feels the need to. The hindquarters of a Wild Rubber Jack are like an invisible cross between Elastic Man and Bruce Lee.
    His favorite haunts are among lunching executives, oblivious to their pockets and handbags, in which he grazes for antacids, breath mints, tobacco, nicotine gum, diet candy, and raw almonds in Ziploc bags. That’s why, at lunchtime, the Jack becomes a social menace. If one party makes a deal-breaking remark and the other party sits up abruptly, chafing the Jack’s sensitive nose in a trouser pocket, or displacing it from a handbag, the Jack reacts with a back-kick that causes choking, turning purple, and the somersaulting of forks. Worse, and not infrequently, the Jack causes cardiac failure among workers who rushalong corridors carrying lunch back to their desks. Drawn to the smell of food in their sacks, and exasperated by their speed, the Jack lashes out at their chests just to slow them down, and succeeds only too well. It’s important not to blame the animal, but to remember that his skittish responses are the heritage of all wild creatures that depend on the global business environment.
    Neither my profession nor my tax bracket brings me into the Jack’s company very often, but one Jack did make a bad date memorable. I will never forget being taken to dinner by a corporate