By Charles M. Sumid     Copyright 2025     Written 2017

Saturday afternoon.
The pet store’s quiet except for the parakeets
gossiping in the back.
Even the tarantulas seem judgmental today,
all those eyes avoiding the clearance section
where beauty goes to be negotiable.

The hairless cat presses against the pet store glass,
her skin a roadmap of pink veins, gray patches,
every heartbeat visible beneath the surface.
The sign says “Sphynx – $2000”
but someone has written “Half Price?”
in dust on her enclosure.

Next door, through shared glass,
the naked mole rat builds
another tunnel to nowhere.
His teeth, those terrible yellow truths
jutting past his lips,
click against the partition
in what might be morse code,
might be loneliness.

She stretches, and he freezes mid-dig.
Through the glass, she sees him seeing her:
wrinkled to wrinkled, peculiar to peculiar.
His nose, that pink finger of flesh,
twitches a greeting.
She slow-blinks back,
the universal cat sign for
“I won’t eat you, probably.”

Days pass. They develop a routine:
she bathes in the heat lamp while he watches,
mesmerized by how her skin ripples,
every fold a sunrise.
He shows her his underground architecture,
the tunnels spelling her name in darkness.
Well, almost her name,
spelling’s hard without proper schooling.

The teenager working weekends takes pity,
or maybe just grows tired
of cleaning two enclosures.
During her shift, she slides
the partition up three inches.
“Oops,” she says to no one,
returning to her phone.

He ventures through first,
dragging his belly across foreign bedding.
She could destroy him with one swipe,
even hairless, she’s an apex predator
to his prey genetics.
Instead, she grooms his terrible head
with her sandpaper tongue,
tasting salt and honesty.

He purrs, or maybe that’s just
his teeth chattering with joy.
Together they curl into an impossible parenthesis,
skin to skin, peculiar to peculiar—
proof that grace comes
in ungraceful packages.