Free Sparky! by Jenny Offill

I wanted a pet.

    A bird or a bunny or a trained seal.

    My mother said no to the bird.

    No to the bunny.

    No, no, no to the trained seal.

    I asked her every day for a month, until she finally said, “You can have any pet you want as long as it doesn’t need to be walked or bathed or fed.”
    I made her promise.
    Then I went to see the school librarian.

    Mrs. Kinklebaum (who knows everything in the world) pointed me to Volume S of the Animal Encyclopedia.
    This is what I found:

    My sloth arrived by Express Mail.
    He was about the size of a mediumish dog, with a flat nose and a monkey face.

    My mother wasn’t happy, but a promise is a promise, I said.

    Sparky, I decided. That will be your name.
    I took him outside to his tree.

    Sparky went right to sleep.
    I made a sign and put it under
    the tree:

    It was two days

    before I saw him awake.
    He didn’t know a lot of games, so I taught him some.
    We played King of the Mountain

    and I won.

    We played Hide-and-Seek

    and I won.

    We played Kung Fu Fighter and I won.

    We played Statue and Sparky was very, very good.

    That weekend, Mary Potts came over to investigate.
    Let me show you what Mary Potts is like.
    This is a picture of her room:

    Before she even took off her coat, Mary said, “Let me see your new pet.”
    I had some worries, but I took her out to Sparky’s tree.
    He opened his eyes and looked at us.

    Then he closed them again.
    I rubbed his belly, but it was too late.
    We stood there for a while, watching him sleep. His fur ruffled gently in the breeze.
    “I feel sorry for you,” Mary said. “My cat can dance on her hind legs. And my parrot knows twenty words, including
God
and
ice cream
.

    “Sparky knows tricks too,” I told her. But she didn’t believe me.
    The next day, I made a poster and nailed it to the tree outside Mary Potts’s house.

    All week, we trained in secret.
    Sometimes Sparky slept through practice and I had to poke him awake.

    Sometimes he forgot what he was doing and we had to start over.

    Sometimes he took so long to fetch that I went inside and had dinner while I waited.
    I was starting to think the poster had been a mistake. But a promise is a promise.

    On the day of the Trained Sloth Extravaganza, my mother set up lawn chairs.
    Three people came to see Sparky perform: my mother, Mary Potts, and Mrs. Edwin, the crossing guard.
    (Mrs. Edwin approved of Sparky because he never ran in the street.)

    “Do I look like a ringmaster?” I asked my mother.
    “You look very interesting,” she told me.

    I put a little glitter on Sparky just before the curtain went up.
    I kept wishing I had written
Two Tricks
on the poster, instead of
Countless Tricks
.
    “Play dead, Sparky!” I said, and he did.

    “Roll over,” I said, and he didn’t.
    “Speak!” I commanded.

    We all waited.
    And waited.
    “Speak?” I said.
    Sparky looked at me. The only thing you could hear was the wind in the trees.
    “He has a very pretty coat, doesn’t he?” Mrs. Edwin said finally.

    “You can’t just invent a brand-new pet like that,” Mary told me. “A pet no one’s ever even had!”
    My mother came out with lemonade and cookies, but everyone said they had to be going.

    Sparky and I watched them; then my mother
    made me put the chairs away.

    Afterward, I gave Sparky a cookie, but he ate it so slowly that I took it back again.
    It was getting dark out. I looked at him and he looked at me.
    You could hear all the neighborhood dogs barking.
    I reached over and tagged him on his claw.

    “You’re it, Sparky,” I said.
    And for a long, long time he was.

JENNY OFFILL is the proud owner of a dog named Jetta, who likes to chew up dollar bills. She wrote the picture books
17 Things I’m Not Allowed to Do Anymore
, a
Parenting
Best Book of the Year; and
11 Experiments That Failed
, described by
Kirkus Reviews
, in a starred review, as “a most joyful and clever whimsy.” She is also the author of the adult novels
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