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I think this is the first genuinely "furry" story I've ever written. It's imperfect, but I think it's alright.
The apartment door clicked shut behind Seba. Without looking, he slouched against the door, reached his arm across his chest, and turned the deadbolt. He took a deep breath, hoping that the darkness behind his eyelids would turn out to be the ascent from sleep to wakefulness.
He opened his eyes and the apartment, walls and furniture yellowed by nocturnal incandescence, didn’t disappear.
Despertate ya, che.
On the table and in the sink lay the detritus of a meal, half-eaten and half-cleaned up. In Seba’s peripheral vision, he saw his cousin Danny sat slumped in the living room’s sunken-seated couch. The basketball game on the television –some FBA matchup– occupied the other toucan’s attention wholly. Upon hearing the door open and close, Danny turned with his trademark grin.
“Back a little late from groceries, eh?” You could always hear the glisten in his eyes, even over the phone. It was that irrepressible, sometimes exhausting, cheerfulness of his. Well, let’s test its resilience, eh?
Seba didn’t have his cousin’s capacity to project optimism – just strength, and only when he was feeling strong himself. Now was not one of those moments. Danny’s perceptiveness caught on fast. “Um… You look like you just lost a game. What’s up?”
You won’t be able to hide it for long. Get it over with. Of course, the wreck itself wasn’t the worst thing… but nothing to do about that now. Sigh.
“I… had an accident.”
Danny tilted his head, staring at Seba quizzically. “An accident? Your shorts look dry, though!” He let out a low chuckle.
Seba snorted, half from embarrassment when he got the joke and half from hesitation at the worse truth. “No… not that. Ni siquiera! It was an accident … with the car.”
Danny sat up straighter, ditched the grin, and muted the television. “The car? What happened?”
“Well.” Seba crossed the room, tossing his duffel bag off toward his room and dropping his grocery bags onto an area of the table he cleared hastily with the sweep of an arm. Pulling up a chair and falling into it, he faced his cousin. Whose car it was. Who had bought it with his money and permitted Seba to use it when needed. “Someone hit me from behind at a stoplight. The back bumper and the … trunk? … door are bent. It didn’t hurt the rest of the car. You can still drive it. But… it does not look good.” He paused. “They said it would require maybe one, two thousand dollars to fix it…”
Before he selected a spot on the scuffed linoleum as the sole object of his visual attention, Seba saw Danny’s eyes fall and his arm rise to rub the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, it is my fault, I was not doing something right, I have not driven enough here to have adequate practice…” He closed his eyes and rubbed the palms of his hands against his eyelids, as if scrubbing the sight of the damaged car from his corneas would reverse the crash. “I thought about insurance, but it isn’t my car and I don’t want you blamed for my mistakes. It’s my fault, I will pay for it. I have the money, I’ll pay…”
There was a long silence in the dark, punctuated by his own deep breaths, before Seba heard footsteps and felt a hand on his shoulder. “Seba,” he heard Danny’s smooth, unexpectedly measured voice say somewhere above and in front of him, “It’s okay. You can get in wrecks that other people cause. You’re not legally responsible for this one.” Seba flinched away from the touch. He glanced between his fingers up at his cousin’s dramatically foreshortened beak. “And, you know, I can drive a beat-up car for a bit. It’s not even the best car anyway. I can even pay for it.”
It took Seba a while to process what Danny was saying. It was nothing he expected. It wasn’t right; he had been driving; he should pay. Besides, this was something that he could be accountable for, that he should pay for. He had the money, and he would pay. He had to.
He didn’t meet Danny’s eyes, but his words took on an edge they didn’t have before. “No, you can’t pay for it. I’ll pay for it. I have enough.”
“Hey, buddy, you don’t need to. I can pay…”
At least, Seba looked up, eyes hard. “Of course you can pay for it. The American with the steady job, with the savings account and the stocks, with a laugh and a smile and no one depending on you. I don’t have enough reminders of these things. I need one more.”
Danny withdrew his hand, beak falling slackly open. “Hey, just because my parents came here … different circumstances in life, that’s all… it happens…”
Seba stood, over a head taller than his cousin. “Different circumstances that make you not understand what it signifies to lose things. Or to almost lose things all the time. To not have enough for the things you need. And I mean things you need. Not luxuries. Food. Shelter. Transportation. A future.” He paused, rubbing along the upper ridge of his beak with his eyes crammed shut. “I came here so I wouldn’t need charity anymore. That I could stand on my own, and that my family could stand on my shoulders, and I could pass it on to other people. I don’t need your help. I can’t need it. I can … ‘get by.’”
“You can get by, sure. But get by with what? Weren’t your savings to go back to Argentina and explore draft prospects this summer? Where would paying for the car leave you?”
“You don’t have to rub it in. Like I said, sometimes you lose. Life’s a game, and sometimes the other team wins.” He let that hang, a frozen silence. “I’ll take it to the shop tomorrow.”
With that, Seba snatched his bag and tramped into his bedroom, shutting the door with uncharacteristic force. Danny stood bewildered in the kitchen. After a moment, he adjusted the now-vacated chair and began to empty the forgotten grocery bags.
---
This time when Seba closed the apartment door he was blocking out slants of afternoon sunlight. His shoulders hung in a resigned slump from his neck. The couch was unoccupied and the table still a mess. He had left the house to work out early that morning and had not yet seen Danny, who must have still been at work, which he sometimes had on Saturdays. He hadn’t yet responded to the text Seba sent after leaving the car with the mechanic who had given him the best quote for repairs. Apparently, Danny had biked to work.
Seba then saw that the table had a clear spot on it near where he had been sitting last night. He realized with a start that he could not remember taking care of his groceries and quickly ran over to his cabinet and the refrigerator. Everything was there. His fruit was carefully arranged in a bowl atop the counter. He must have had a lapse in memory. It had not been a good night.
But he couldn’t spend too much time moping. If he was going to see his family in person anytime soon –not over Skype, with them calling from some telecabina– he would need a second job for the summer. And perhaps a third. Not to mention the travel and hotel expenses involved in visiting teams all over the country, hoping that someone might be interested in a relatively good basketball player. He wasn’t going to count on that, though. Basketball had given him all he’d ever planned so far and more: a means to attend an American college as well as cathartic emotional cleansing and some close camaraderie. A little voice suggested that perhaps his team would or could help out; but no, countered his mental legislator, begging for assistance is taking advantage of friendship.
He opened his laptop and was about to sit down at his desk when he noticed an aberration in his otherwise well-ordered room. A paper sat on his bed. He had not put that there, and the handwriting on it was none but Danny’s blocky, irregular (American) handwriting. He stepped over and picked it up.
Hey Seba.
Sorry about last night. I stayed up thinking about what you said long after you went to bed. I saw you were getting into one of your sulky moods, I wanted to nip that in the bud! So I decided to write you this letter, if only because you can’t argue with a letter.
I think I realized a few things about you. One, and this is a good thing: you hate avoiding any of your responsibilities. But two, you sometimes think that you’re more responsible for things than you are, and three, you try to punish yourself for failing.
You don’t need to do that. Life’s hard enough as it is. You know that better than me. But sometimes we all just need a little bit of help. Trying to be independently responsible for everything can just leave us lonely. Wasn’t it you last Sunday who was going on about the Trinitarian God being a model of “relationality” or whatever? Don’t forget that you’re not alone, and that independence doesn’t mean that you have no friends.
You have a great family. Even I know a little bit of what they mean to you. You shouldn’t miss seeing them this summer for something as small as a scratched bumper. You’re also a great ball player. You know, if you get drafted, this bumper, your airfares to Argentina, and even your student loans will disappear overnight. And even if it’s a pipe dream for most furs, a pro career isn’t impossible for you. Don’t give up your chance at stardom because you want to pay your own way, all the way. (And even if you don’t get drafted, you’ll be a great doctor. It’ll just take a little longer to pay stuff back.)
So I’ll let you pay for the bumper. But I’ll pay for your travel expenses. I have the funds. You can put them to better use. I did a little research, and the envelope contains a check that should cover what you need for the summer.
Thanks for being awesome.
Danny
There had been an envelope underneath the paper; Seba hadn’t noticed until the letter mentioned it. He glanced inside. It was… more than enough.
“You got back later than I expected.”
Startled, Seba looked up to see Danny, subtle smile on his face, leaning on the door jamb. He felt somewhat violated. He didn’t even know how to feel about all… this, and here his unrelenting benefactor appeared in his moment of vulnerability. “No tenés que… You do not have to…”
“Of course I don’t have to,” Danny laughed. “But I want to. And I will not let you pay me back!”
Seba opened his beak to protest, but stopped. Looking at his cousin, Seba felt something shift inside. If he met this determined resistance on the court, he would try to push right past it. Even the most tenacious defender can be overpowered or out-dodged. But maybe his opponent here was not an opponent. Maybe the basket was not on the other side of Danny, just beyond him. Maybe Danny was trying to pass him the ball. Maybe there was something between dependence and independence, credit and debt, home and visitor: togetherness, assists, mutual defense, encouragement…
The light coming in through the window, previously stark with rigid beams of dust motes, slowly shifted to an embracing warmth. He sat down in his chair and managed to look up at his cousin, forcing out a few words. Forcing them not out of obligation, but because they had to push through the thick walls he had built around his innermost feelings.
“Thank… thank you.” Somehow, he also managed a sliver of a smile.
Danny smiled. “No hay por qué!” He began to exit the room but stopped mid-step. Turning around with a bemused smile, he asked, “So, do you want to know the moral of the story?”
“The moral of the story?” Seba asked, confused at this non sequitur.
“Yup! The moral of the story. Ready? Brace yourself.”
Seba nodded to humor him and satisfy his curiosity. Danny straightened his back, cleared his throat, and put on his most pretentiously professorial tone and expression, lifting a finger as if he were pointing out the truths of the ages.
“What one can’t, two can.”
After a glance at Seba maintaining his feigned airs, Danny broke into a giant grin and jazz hands.
Seba let out an exaggerated sound of derision and threw a pillow at Danny. But he couldn’t suppress a smile.
Postlude:
Danny popped his head around the threshold of Seba's room a few minutes later with a knowing grin. "Oh, and by the way, you might want to check the news."
And that was how Seba found he'd been admitted into the 2014 FBA draft pool.
The apartment door clicked shut behind Seba. Without looking, he slouched against the door, reached his arm across his chest, and turned the deadbolt. He took a deep breath, hoping that the darkness behind his eyelids would turn out to be the ascent from sleep to wakefulness.
He opened his eyes and the apartment, walls and furniture yellowed by nocturnal incandescence, didn’t disappear.
Despertate ya, che.
On the table and in the sink lay the detritus of a meal, half-eaten and half-cleaned up. In Seba’s peripheral vision, he saw his cousin Danny sat slumped in the living room’s sunken-seated couch. The basketball game on the television –some FBA matchup– occupied the other toucan’s attention wholly. Upon hearing the door open and close, Danny turned with his trademark grin.
“Back a little late from groceries, eh?” You could always hear the glisten in his eyes, even over the phone. It was that irrepressible, sometimes exhausting, cheerfulness of his. Well, let’s test its resilience, eh?
Seba didn’t have his cousin’s capacity to project optimism – just strength, and only when he was feeling strong himself. Now was not one of those moments. Danny’s perceptiveness caught on fast. “Um… You look like you just lost a game. What’s up?”
You won’t be able to hide it for long. Get it over with. Of course, the wreck itself wasn’t the worst thing… but nothing to do about that now. Sigh.
“I… had an accident.”
Danny tilted his head, staring at Seba quizzically. “An accident? Your shorts look dry, though!” He let out a low chuckle.
Seba snorted, half from embarrassment when he got the joke and half from hesitation at the worse truth. “No… not that. Ni siquiera! It was an accident … with the car.”
Danny sat up straighter, ditched the grin, and muted the television. “The car? What happened?”
“Well.” Seba crossed the room, tossing his duffel bag off toward his room and dropping his grocery bags onto an area of the table he cleared hastily with the sweep of an arm. Pulling up a chair and falling into it, he faced his cousin. Whose car it was. Who had bought it with his money and permitted Seba to use it when needed. “Someone hit me from behind at a stoplight. The back bumper and the … trunk? … door are bent. It didn’t hurt the rest of the car. You can still drive it. But… it does not look good.” He paused. “They said it would require maybe one, two thousand dollars to fix it…”
Before he selected a spot on the scuffed linoleum as the sole object of his visual attention, Seba saw Danny’s eyes fall and his arm rise to rub the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, it is my fault, I was not doing something right, I have not driven enough here to have adequate practice…” He closed his eyes and rubbed the palms of his hands against his eyelids, as if scrubbing the sight of the damaged car from his corneas would reverse the crash. “I thought about insurance, but it isn’t my car and I don’t want you blamed for my mistakes. It’s my fault, I will pay for it. I have the money, I’ll pay…”
There was a long silence in the dark, punctuated by his own deep breaths, before Seba heard footsteps and felt a hand on his shoulder. “Seba,” he heard Danny’s smooth, unexpectedly measured voice say somewhere above and in front of him, “It’s okay. You can get in wrecks that other people cause. You’re not legally responsible for this one.” Seba flinched away from the touch. He glanced between his fingers up at his cousin’s dramatically foreshortened beak. “And, you know, I can drive a beat-up car for a bit. It’s not even the best car anyway. I can even pay for it.”
It took Seba a while to process what Danny was saying. It was nothing he expected. It wasn’t right; he had been driving; he should pay. Besides, this was something that he could be accountable for, that he should pay for. He had the money, and he would pay. He had to.
He didn’t meet Danny’s eyes, but his words took on an edge they didn’t have before. “No, you can’t pay for it. I’ll pay for it. I have enough.”
“Hey, buddy, you don’t need to. I can pay…”
At least, Seba looked up, eyes hard. “Of course you can pay for it. The American with the steady job, with the savings account and the stocks, with a laugh and a smile and no one depending on you. I don’t have enough reminders of these things. I need one more.”
Danny withdrew his hand, beak falling slackly open. “Hey, just because my parents came here … different circumstances in life, that’s all… it happens…”
Seba stood, over a head taller than his cousin. “Different circumstances that make you not understand what it signifies to lose things. Or to almost lose things all the time. To not have enough for the things you need. And I mean things you need. Not luxuries. Food. Shelter. Transportation. A future.” He paused, rubbing along the upper ridge of his beak with his eyes crammed shut. “I came here so I wouldn’t need charity anymore. That I could stand on my own, and that my family could stand on my shoulders, and I could pass it on to other people. I don’t need your help. I can’t need it. I can … ‘get by.’”
“You can get by, sure. But get by with what? Weren’t your savings to go back to Argentina and explore draft prospects this summer? Where would paying for the car leave you?”
“You don’t have to rub it in. Like I said, sometimes you lose. Life’s a game, and sometimes the other team wins.” He let that hang, a frozen silence. “I’ll take it to the shop tomorrow.”
With that, Seba snatched his bag and tramped into his bedroom, shutting the door with uncharacteristic force. Danny stood bewildered in the kitchen. After a moment, he adjusted the now-vacated chair and began to empty the forgotten grocery bags.
---
This time when Seba closed the apartment door he was blocking out slants of afternoon sunlight. His shoulders hung in a resigned slump from his neck. The couch was unoccupied and the table still a mess. He had left the house to work out early that morning and had not yet seen Danny, who must have still been at work, which he sometimes had on Saturdays. He hadn’t yet responded to the text Seba sent after leaving the car with the mechanic who had given him the best quote for repairs. Apparently, Danny had biked to work.
Seba then saw that the table had a clear spot on it near where he had been sitting last night. He realized with a start that he could not remember taking care of his groceries and quickly ran over to his cabinet and the refrigerator. Everything was there. His fruit was carefully arranged in a bowl atop the counter. He must have had a lapse in memory. It had not been a good night.
But he couldn’t spend too much time moping. If he was going to see his family in person anytime soon –not over Skype, with them calling from some telecabina– he would need a second job for the summer. And perhaps a third. Not to mention the travel and hotel expenses involved in visiting teams all over the country, hoping that someone might be interested in a relatively good basketball player. He wasn’t going to count on that, though. Basketball had given him all he’d ever planned so far and more: a means to attend an American college as well as cathartic emotional cleansing and some close camaraderie. A little voice suggested that perhaps his team would or could help out; but no, countered his mental legislator, begging for assistance is taking advantage of friendship.
He opened his laptop and was about to sit down at his desk when he noticed an aberration in his otherwise well-ordered room. A paper sat on his bed. He had not put that there, and the handwriting on it was none but Danny’s blocky, irregular (American) handwriting. He stepped over and picked it up.
Hey Seba.
Sorry about last night. I stayed up thinking about what you said long after you went to bed. I saw you were getting into one of your sulky moods, I wanted to nip that in the bud! So I decided to write you this letter, if only because you can’t argue with a letter.
I think I realized a few things about you. One, and this is a good thing: you hate avoiding any of your responsibilities. But two, you sometimes think that you’re more responsible for things than you are, and three, you try to punish yourself for failing.
You don’t need to do that. Life’s hard enough as it is. You know that better than me. But sometimes we all just need a little bit of help. Trying to be independently responsible for everything can just leave us lonely. Wasn’t it you last Sunday who was going on about the Trinitarian God being a model of “relationality” or whatever? Don’t forget that you’re not alone, and that independence doesn’t mean that you have no friends.
You have a great family. Even I know a little bit of what they mean to you. You shouldn’t miss seeing them this summer for something as small as a scratched bumper. You’re also a great ball player. You know, if you get drafted, this bumper, your airfares to Argentina, and even your student loans will disappear overnight. And even if it’s a pipe dream for most furs, a pro career isn’t impossible for you. Don’t give up your chance at stardom because you want to pay your own way, all the way. (And even if you don’t get drafted, you’ll be a great doctor. It’ll just take a little longer to pay stuff back.)
So I’ll let you pay for the bumper. But I’ll pay for your travel expenses. I have the funds. You can put them to better use. I did a little research, and the envelope contains a check that should cover what you need for the summer.
Thanks for being awesome.
Danny
There had been an envelope underneath the paper; Seba hadn’t noticed until the letter mentioned it. He glanced inside. It was… more than enough.
“You got back later than I expected.”
Startled, Seba looked up to see Danny, subtle smile on his face, leaning on the door jamb. He felt somewhat violated. He didn’t even know how to feel about all… this, and here his unrelenting benefactor appeared in his moment of vulnerability. “No tenés que… You do not have to…”
“Of course I don’t have to,” Danny laughed. “But I want to. And I will not let you pay me back!”
Seba opened his beak to protest, but stopped. Looking at his cousin, Seba felt something shift inside. If he met this determined resistance on the court, he would try to push right past it. Even the most tenacious defender can be overpowered or out-dodged. But maybe his opponent here was not an opponent. Maybe the basket was not on the other side of Danny, just beyond him. Maybe Danny was trying to pass him the ball. Maybe there was something between dependence and independence, credit and debt, home and visitor: togetherness, assists, mutual defense, encouragement…
The light coming in through the window, previously stark with rigid beams of dust motes, slowly shifted to an embracing warmth. He sat down in his chair and managed to look up at his cousin, forcing out a few words. Forcing them not out of obligation, but because they had to push through the thick walls he had built around his innermost feelings.
“Thank… thank you.” Somehow, he also managed a sliver of a smile.
Danny smiled. “No hay por qué!” He began to exit the room but stopped mid-step. Turning around with a bemused smile, he asked, “So, do you want to know the moral of the story?”
“The moral of the story?” Seba asked, confused at this non sequitur.
“Yup! The moral of the story. Ready? Brace yourself.”
Seba nodded to humor him and satisfy his curiosity. Danny straightened his back, cleared his throat, and put on his most pretentiously professorial tone and expression, lifting a finger as if he were pointing out the truths of the ages.
“What one can’t, two can.”
After a glance at Seba maintaining his feigned airs, Danny broke into a giant grin and jazz hands.
Seba let out an exaggerated sound of derision and threw a pillow at Danny. But he couldn’t suppress a smile.
Postlude:
Danny popped his head around the threshold of Seba's room a few minutes later with a knowing grin. "Oh, and by the way, you might want to check the news."
And that was how Seba found he'd been admitted into the 2014 FBA draft pool.
Category Story / All
Species Avian (Other)
Size 120 x 120px
File Size 23.9 kB
Listed in Folders
After hearing that Seba got into the draft pool, and reading a bit more about the FBA, I now have this plan (and this is totally crazy, I know), to start an FBA fantasy basketball league for next season. It'll be run just like a standard NBA rotisserie fantasy basketball league, but using the FBA players and per-game stats instead. I won't be able to do live scoring, of course, but pretty much everything else will work like normal. So, have I completely lost my mind yet?
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