Private Animals

Mae Kelleher wants a clean divorce and an adult future with Anika. Instead, the mediator's custody list contains thirty-one animals that only Mae and her former wife, Orla, can see.

Each creature began as a private joke during their thirty years together. Now the jokes have teeth, appetites, molting seasons, and opinions about alternating weekends. The animals sicken when divided. They change shape in separate homes. The fiercest one bites whenever either woman discusses the future.

Their new partners cannot perceive the creatures, but they must live with the cages, the feeding schedules, and the old intimacy required to keep them alive. Then the biter escapes and follows a route to a part of the marriage Mae and Orla survived by laughing instead of speaking.

To release it, they must finally name what their humor carried, without confusing understanding for reunion or treating the life they made together as property either woman can keep.

Some marriages end. What they made does not become nothing.