The aardvark’s pale fur glistens in bright light and covers a thick, yellow-pink hide. Its long ears are silky, smooth as copier paper, and the snout, although toughened with age, is still rubbery. You feel under its belly for a seam, or something unusual, but there is nothing unusual. Quite the opposite, as you stroke the aardvark, you admit that it feels quite pleasurable actually, and this surprises you, slightly unsettles you, and you begin to understand why Greg Tampico liked it so much: from a distance, the aardvark is horrible-looking, but up close it’s actually a pretty nice animal and it makes you feel weirdly good all of a sudden: the look on its face with its head all down-turned, askance, is not ugly at all, it’s coy—and you actually smile a little bit as you run your hands between its soft ears, over its forehead, and gaze into its eyes, but when you do this, your hands stop.

You shine the light into the eyes of the aardvark, which are, you wonder—blue?

They are. The eyes are definitely blue, and you have never heard of a blue-eyed aardvark before, nor with it felt the tremor of recognition that you feel now.

It’s déjà vu, like you are seeing something emotionally familiar that is intellectually unfamiliar, and you wonder while standing there downstairs in your dark, hot garage with Toby Castle already disrobing in your bathroom upstairs, brushing her teeth, checking her underwear, her hair, scent and makeup, preening herself for intercourse—how this is possible when most mammals in nature, you recall from Ms. Sline, have brown eyes, so these blue eyes must be some kind of anomaly, but how they do make the aardvark look familiar, you think, as though bearing some kind of consciousness. But what kind?

Alan Brickmann. You were ten, Alan Brickmann was twelve, a neighbor of yours for only nine months before his family moved to some landlocked place called Grand Island, Nebraska. There was a high cotton hammock in his backyard, slung too high by his father so you had to climb the trunk of the tree in bare feet to get there, but once ensconced you were quiet, unseen, and Alan Brickmann, a constellation of zits on his forehead, pushed your toes with his toes. He said you should practice kissing, and as you began, he did not say anything else. Your hands touched his body, moving in circles over his clothes as you kissed like you knew what you were doing, but somehow you did, the knowledge was innate (it was not on TV), though it only lasted a moment before Alan unzipped himself and brought out his dick in his palm, and there, in the soft dusk-light, it looked like he was holding three marshmallows.

You said no, that was gross, and got out of there, you ran home, and now in the darkness of your garage at 2486 Asher Place with paparazzi outside, Toby Castle upstairs, the sadness about Alan Brickmann which the aardvark’s expression has somehow evoked? It surprises you. It’s an old weight, one that you’ve carried for twenty-five years that you thought you’d forgotten about, yet now blooms in your chest like a newly sprung fungus, and all you can do with it is attempt to share it with someone, split it.