Cameron MacKenzie
Every night after stories we feed the turtles. I drop a handful of pellets into the tank and my son demands no more nor less than four pellets of his own. He places them with great deliberation on the exposed rocks inside the tank by grabbing the rim and pulling himself up to stand on the bottom rung of the table.
The turtles were given to us by the man my wife left me for. Before she left, of course. As was the tank and the filter and the light and so forth. He’d found the animals in a pond on his wife’s family’s property. Or his ex-wife’s family’s property. To be honest, I’m not keeping up. But the turtles are beautiful—a nighttime-jungle green with dramatic yellow stripes that run like ribbons down their necks and legs. They began as little stone-sized toys but have recently grown to a disconcerting size, their shells flanging out in the back, as though they’re in the process of transforming into some sort of wild mesozoic beast. I would love nothing more than to pitch them in the creek behind the house. Perhaps take an ax to the aquarium. But the kid loves the turtles. Or rather, he loves having the turtles in the room. The sound of the filter. The reflection of the water on the ceiling as he goes to sleep.
I clean the whole thing about every month or so. My wife wanted me to clean it more—every time she’d see some turtle crap on the bottom of the tank. Once, when the man was over at the house, she asked his advice. She pointed at a mushy pile in the corner and said, “What is that?” “That’s…” The man rubbed his chin for a moment. “That’s just life,” he said gently.
The other night as the boy and I were feeding the turtles, one attacked the other. Without warning, it simply grabbed its companion’s thumby foot with its beak and began jerking him violently. “Whoa!” I shouted, as the offending turtle began to dive down to the base of the rock pile with its friend clamped between its jaws. I quickly realized I had no clue how to stop this sudden assault. “Bad turtles,” I said, slapping the glass. “Bad turtles!” The boy watched me and then did the same. “Stop turtles, stop!” he said, slapping the glass beside me. We watched as the first turtle yanked itself free, and then the two of them began to thrash in the water just inches in front of us, twisting their expressionless heads this way and that and splaying out their legs and snapping and snapping and it kept going, much longer than it should have, as though neither of them were listening, or didn’t care, or weren’t even sure themselves what was happening and then, just as suddenly, it stopped.
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Cameron MacKenzie’s work has appeared in Plume, Salmagundi, and The Michigan Quarterly Review, among other places. His novel, The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career (MadHat Press) and essay collection, Badiou and American Modernist Poetics (Palgrave Macmillan) were both published in 2018. His short story collection, River Weather (Alternating Current Press) was published in 2021. His collection of flash fiction, Theories of Love, is forthcoming from Alternating Current Press.