by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Hexagon, Issue 9, June 2022
Leslie yanked the toggle on the Build-a-Pet arcade machine with one hand and mashed the big round buttons with the other. On the screen looming above her head, a colorful, twisted ladder bent and spun around, and large friendly letters spelled out words she couldn’t read yet. Though she did recognize the letter L. She knew that one from her own name.
From across the Papa’s Calzone play yard, Leslie’s mom called for her. But if Leslie pretended not to hear, she knew she could play for a few minutes longer. The indoor playground was complete chaos on such a rainy evening, and it would take a while for her mom to find her among all the taller, older kids.
Leslie gave up mashing the buttons and yanked on the toggle with both hands. She knew this game did more than just spell out letters on its screen, because she’d seen an older kid playing it earlier, and that kid had left with a brand new purple and green cuddle dragon nestled on her shoulder! The little dragon had cooed and purred like an owlet crossed with a kitten.
Suddenly, the screen changed — instead of big friendly but inscrutable letters, the whole wide screen filled with a gloppy, gloopy, amorphous, smiling, amoeboid creature. Kind of like an emoji crossed with a macroscopic mitochondria. Leslie let go of the toggle to clap her hands with glee. But then she got her little hands right back on the those controls, because she didn’t want a pet that looked like a tiny bean bag chair. She wanted a flying kitty! Or a tiny unicorn. Or one of those things that had a bird head and a lion body. She was flexible. She’d take a tiny bean bag as long as it was cuddly, and she could sleep with it in her bed at night, and take it with her to kindergarten when that started, because kindergarten sounded really scary, and she was going to need a cuddly bean bag pet to get her through it. Or maybe something scary like a midnight black buffalo crossed with a wolf to protect her. Yeah, that would be good.
As Leslie mashed the keys — faster and faster because she could hear her mother’s calls growing closer — the image on the screen altered, gaining more definite features. The bean bag body extruded out into a head and limbs, first four limbs, then six, up to eight, and back down to six. Two of the limbs flattened and feathered into wings. Next a tail extruded from the animal’s butt and rotated through a variety of styles, settling on a tufted lion’s tail. Meanwhile the head reformed into a series of shapes with longer or shorter muzzles, triangular or rounded ears, and occasionally a big bushy mane.
All the while, the creature’s fur kept changing colors.
Leslie knew the creature was done when it stopped rotating, smiled really big with its goofy koala face, and did a dance with its pudgy hippo legs. Its fur was a beautiful blend of rainbow and giraffe patterning, and next to those big koala ears, a pair of knobby giraffe horns stuck up from its head.
“It’s so cute!!!” Leslie squealed. Which was a mistake. The sound of her high pitched voice allowed her mother to finally find her.
“There you are!!!”
“Mommy, Mommy, we have to get this pet I made!” She tugged on the hem of her mother’s raincoat. Her mother hated that. But this was really important.
Leslie’s mom looked at the dancing animal on the Build-a-Pet machine’s screen. “That’s very nice, honey,” she said in the voice that meant she wasn’t listening and wouldn’t give Leslie what she wanted. “But we need to go.”
“But I made it!” Leslie cried.
Her mother tilted her head and looked more closely at the screen, but it was too late. The design that Leslie had poured so much of her heart and soul into disappeared, and all those pesky unreadable letters returned.
“You didn’t design that,” her mom said. “This machine takes a credit card to work. It’s just playing the demo.”
Heartbroken, Leslie repeated the word, “Demo?”
“Yeah, it’s what the machine does to make it look exciting and trick people into putting money in it.”
“But! My pet!”
Leslie’s mom knelt down and took the little girl’s hands in her much bigger ones. “The pets from these machines…” She bit her lip in the way that meant she had something to say that would be confusing. “Look, they’re not very ethical, and I don’t want to support this company. But–”
Leslie started crying.
“BUT,” her mother repeated. “I wasn’t going to tell you this until closer to your birthday next month, but Daddy’s already picked out a pet for us. See, one of the women he works with has a cat who just had kittens…”
It took a moment for her mother’s words to sink in, but it’s amazing how quickly tears can clear up when a four-year-old realizes she’s about to get a kitten of her very own. Leslie wondered what color it would be.