Home > The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals : A Novel

The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals : A Novel
Author: Becky Mandelbaum

 


Mona


It was midnight in Kansas, and the bigots were awake. The brothers’ house was like all the other houses in St. Clare: wind-torn and lonely with a roof that drooped as if tired. Light played against the windows, causing the interior to flicker and grin. Sitting in her ’85 Chevy, Old Baby, Mona imagined the Fuller brothers inside, shirtless and drinking cheap beer, probably watching one of those mean reality shows about someone who’s morbidly obese or has too many children. More likely, they were watching Fox News.

Go to sleep, little racists, she chanted in her head.

When the house finally blinked into darkness, Mona waited fifteen more minutes, just to be safe. It was strange to sit alone in her truck, without any animals. She kept expecting a wet nose to stamp her neck. To reach an arm back and touch fur. To hear the jingle of a collar. After all these years, she was used to feeling lonely, but she was not used to being alone.

When she was certain the brothers were asleep, she took a deep breath and stepped out into the star-heavy night. The air smelled sweet, of dried autumn grass, but also dirty, like cow pies. The night was so quiet Mona imagined all the birds and bugs holding their breath, trying to hear infinity. On nights like these, she imagined the sky as a blacktop road stretching all the way from St. Clare to Lawrence, where her daughter, Ariel, had run off to six years before. On nights like these, she wondered if Ariel was looking at the same sky.

Heart pounding, she made her way to the pasture’s corner, where the reason for the night’s adventure stood facing the road. In the dark, she could hardly make out the sign’s letters, stamped with all the careless glory of a lower-back tattoo. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.

She was not an immoral person and felt a flicker of guilt for stealing, that most basic of human rules, but then she remembered who the brothers were—the same men who’d reported one of their workers, a young man named Joss, to ICE; men who rode around with a bumper sticker on their truck that read, WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN MAKE SANDWICHES. Every time she saw their truck, she wanted to scratch the sticker with her pocketknife, but she had learned, over the years, not to make trouble, because trouble for her meant trouble for the animals, and trouble for the animals was not something she cared to risk. Until now.

This was October, the presidential election just around the corner, and she wanted to do something bold. With the animal sanctuary up for sale, she needed new ways to feel powerful, lest she drop dead the moment she signed over the Bright Side. She’d made a couple of calls to her representatives, but the whole thing felt silly. (“You’re a mouse complaining to the humans about the glue traps,” her ranch hand, Gideon, had put it.) This was Kansas, after all. So here she was. Maybe she was acting a touch crazy, but so was everyone else. At least her crazy felt right.

The sign had looked smaller from the road, like something you could pick up and toss so long as you had enough adrenaline going. Now, face-to-face with it, she realized the sign was not only taller than her but also longer across than her arms could reach.

Damn it, she thought. She would need help.

Hers had always been the kind of life in which she had only a couple of people to call. She was unlike the buttoned-up, mosquito-brained women of St. Clare, with their potlucks and Bible studies and cadres of children and grandchildren. Women who went to church and showered every day, whose husbands referred to them as “darling” or “doll.” Even if she’d wanted to (which she did not), the women of St. Clare wouldn’t have let her run in their circles anyway, not even if she showed up with her hair flat-ironed, nails painted pink. Not that she owned a flat iron. Or nail polish. She had a hair dryer, but that was for the dogs after their baths.

She knew her role. She was the crazy Jewish lady who kept hundreds of animals but not a single piece of china. Does she even own a comb? she’d once heard Millie Hunter ask Deb Canright at the swap meet, to which Deb had said: I hear she doesn’t even use toilet paper. She just goes on the lawn with the dogs. She’d grown used to the looks people gave her in town, to the feeling of being watched and monitored like an active volcano. She knew she smelled like shit and looked wild with her unwashed hair and dirty clothes. But she didn’t care. To her, the dirtier she looked, the harder it meant she was working.

It was true she had only a few friends, but they were good people. Her people. And so, she called the one person she knew would always answer, not only because he was steady as a clock but also because she wrote his paychecks. He picked up on the second ring.

“Mona?” Gideon asked, voice gravelly with sleep.

“Come on out to the Fuller place. I need your help.”

“What are you doing out there?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.”

“You’re not tipping cows, are you?”

“Gideon, just hurry.”

 

* * *

 


She blinked her headlamp three times, to signal her location. Eventually he found the stepladder and joined her on the other side of the Fullers’ fence. He was in his usual uniform: blue jeans and the red-and-green-checkered Pendleton Ariel had gifted him years before. It was the only relic of Ariel he refused to retire after she ran away, not for any sentimental reason, Mona knew, but because it was a good coat. What Gideon didn’t know was that it had originally belonged to Mona’s ex-husband, Daniel, and that whenever Gideon wore it, Mona was reminded both of the husband who had left her and the daughter who had run away.

“You didn’t kill anyone, did you?” Gideon asked, the smile audible in his voice.

She clicked off her headlamp, the world dissolving into darkness. “Not this time.”

When she told him the plan, he did not disapprove as she worried he might. He did not even seem surprised. “Let’s be quick then,” he said briskly. “If anyone drives by, it’s game over.”

They managed to get the sign from the ground, the stakes sliding out like candles from a birthday cake. It really was no problem, once you had enough hands on it. Now the trouble was getting it over the barbed wire. Gideon went first so Mona could pass the sign from the other side. He must have snagged himself on a barb because he jumped back, the sign hitting the fence post and ringing out like a gong from a mountaintop. From the distant barn, one of the Fullers’ cows mooed, then another, until a game of cow telephone filled the night.

When a light in the brothers’ house flashed on, Mona felt an anvil of terror fall through her body. “Shit,” she said.

They waited, frozen, fingers aching from the cold. When the light finally went off again, Mona exhaled, felt the anvil begin to lift. “All right,” she said, “let’s hurry.”

They moved in total silence. Soon they were over the fence and en route to the truck, where they set the sign into the bed. When it was done, they quietly high-fived and then took a moment to look around them, at the sky and the moon and the miles of dark prairie and twinkly star stuff holding them in place. Their home. Only then did Gideon ask, “So why did we just do that?”

“Because,” Mona said. “We’re resisting.”

“You mean stealing?”

“I said resisting, and that’s what I meant.”

 

* * *

 

Hot Books
» House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1)
» A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire
» From Blood and Ash (Blood And Ash #1)
» A Million Kisses in Your Lifetime
» Deviant King (Royal Elite #1)
» Den of Vipers
» House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City #2)
» Sweet Temptation
» The Sweetest Oblivion (Made #1)
» Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels #6)
» Wreck & Ruin
» Steel Princess (Royal Elite #2)
» Twisted Hate (Twisted #3)
» The Play (Briar U Book 3)
» The War of Two Queens (Blood and Ash #4)