Free Strange Mammals by Jason Erik Lundberg

worry about this stuff all the time.” She reaches up and caresses his thumbscrew, her fingers warm and moist on his metal.
    Then don’t, he signs. Let it go. Be a leaf on the wind.
    She smiles, reaches up with her other hand, and turns the thumbscrew a quarter-turn to the right. His body shudders, skin flushing, legs kicking uncontrollably for ten seconds or so. He tingles all over.
    Do it again, he signs.
    She does.

The Time Traveler’s Son
    It was Wade’s seventh birthday. There were cake and ice cream and presents in the backyard, and a colorful piñata shaped like a donkey, and twenty of Wade’s friends from school, and his mom had even hired a clown, a lazy clown, and Wade could smell alcohol when the clown bent down and breathed, “Happy birthday.” Crap at balloon animals, he was winded after blowing one up, and upon failing to twist or turn or knot it into a dog or giraffe or something, he would present the sausage of air and latex with a weak flourish, “It’s a snake!”
    Upstairs, in the house, Wade’s dad finished packing. The lame clown forgotten and left to wheeze on a lawn chair and nip from a cheap silver flask, Wade asked his dad where he was going, why he wasn’t down at the party.
    “Important business, kiddo,” said his dad. “Time traveling business. My first mission.” He closed the suitcase and pointed out the window to the ’84 Chevy Celebrity, bandage brown, rusted through, the fabric inside the roof coming unglued, hanging down, a drapery of obscuration.
    “That’s our car,” Wade said.
    “Oh no, kiddo, it’s my time machine. I can chat with Marie Curie, or punch Hitler in the face, or have tea with an archaeopteryx. I can go anywhere I want, and any when .”
    “All your stuff is packed inside.”
    “It’s a long trip. I may be gone for a while.”
    “But if it’s a time machine, can’t you return to right after when you left?”
    Wade’s dad ruffled his hair and smiled. “My son, the genius.”
    “So why was Mom yelling at you and calling you names?”
    “Oh, that. She’s . . . just upset because I’m leaving, kiddo. She wants me to stay. But I can’t. I’ve got some big responsibilities now, saving-the-world kind of responsibilities, and I don’t want to shirk them.”
    “When will you be back?”
    “Two weeks from today,” said Wade’s mom from the doorway, appearing from nowhere, a better trick than blowing up non-existent balloon animals. “Like it says in the custody agreement.”
    “Right, right.” Wade’s dad distracted, lost in his thoughts. “Well, I suppose I’ll be off then. Dinosaur hugs.”
    Wade gripped his dad’s head, and vice versa, and they clonked foreheads, both saying, “Clonk!” at the same time.
    “Happy birthday, kiddo,” said Wade’s dad, and he grabbed his suitcase. Out the door, in the car, and it sputtered and farted blue smoke, and then it was around the corner and his dad was gone.
    ~
    It was Wade’s twenty-first birthday. He sat in a bar called the Café of the Asphyxiated Borough, a hole-in-the-wall near campus, decorated by a woodcut of two disembodied hands strangling a donkey, he sat on a stool made of cracked leather and got legally drunk for the first time, with his father. Splitting a pitcher of watered-down lager, eating peanuts with way too much salt, they talked about Wade’s future. A television bolted to the wall played a baseball game that everyone ignored.
    “So you’re really going to be a vet, huh?”
    “Yeah,” Wade said. “That’s the goal. Graduate school first, though.”
    “All kinds of animals, even the little ones?”
    “Especially the little ones. Even hamsters. I don’t want to be sticking my hands into cows and horses forever.”
    Wade’s dad began to sing, “A horse is a horse, of course, of course . . .”
    “Oh, Jesus.”
    “What?”
    “You’re doing it again.”
    Wade’s dad smiled and signaled for another pitcher. “Yes, I always seem to be embarrassing you,