My parents had given me four baby ducklings which they had gotten as a gift from our neighbors. I'm not sure if at some point we were going to eat them, but I know that when the Incident occurred, I was treating them in a pet capacity. I remember that it was midday, and extremely muggy. I decided, in my three-year-old wisdom, that it was time for the ducks to learn how to swim.

I filled up my baby pool with water. Then I picked each duck up by the neck and held it under until it stopped moving. In a few minutes, all of the ducklings were floating lifeless at the top of the water and I was playing with them. I remember that they were extremely soft, and their bones and skulls felt incredibly small and delicate. I remember being so overwhelmed with this fragility that I squeezed them as hard as I could, then shook them with something like pleasure.

I'm not sure if I fully understood what I was doing. I think I did, on some level, and I also think I liked it. But I wasn't all that clear on the exact workings of death. Somehow, I expected the ducklings to struggle back out of the water at any moment. It wasn't until my mother came over that I really understood the finality of what I'd done. I remember very clearly looking up at her face and seeing--for a split second--that she was afraid of me. I burst into tears; but my belated remorse was not enough to lift the curse that was to follow me into the future.

Needless to say, my parents were reluctant to hand over another pet to a killer. But my persistence won, and at age five, I got my first dog. I don't recall its name. We were living in an apartment in western Massachusetts at the time; my mother going to college, my father supporting us, lord knows how. We were quite poor and, as a result, my new pet had to live on shitty dry generic dog food. There was an elderly couple living below us (I think they may have been the landlords), and they would lure my dog downstairs with luscious Gainesburgers, which had just come onto the market and were very chic. The dog's loyalty wavered and when it came time for us to move, my parents decided that it would stay with the old folks. Since our new place wasn't that far away, I was promised visiting rights. I never saw the damn dog again.

My parents bought another dog, "Rascal," about a year later. We had moved again, this time into our first house, a quasi-mansion smack dab in the middle of nowhere. Maybe they figured I needed some company. I was six or seven, and yearning for a sex change. I spent my time running around in the woods, building forts, swearing, and killing small animals and insects. Every once in a while I would practice pissing standing up. As a result, poor little Rascal put up with an awful lot of shit. I would regularly attach my Boston Red Sox baseball cap to his head with masking tape, so that it tilted cockily to one side. I taught him all the standard dog tricks and forced him to follow me everywhere: up trees, through streams and into mud.

Rascal's only problem was that he was an auto-junkie, addicted to chasing cars. Considering a car came down our road about once a week it didn't seem like that big of a deal. Most of the time I would catch him and hold onto his neck while he writhed and barked, dying for a fix. But one cold winter day I just wasn't quick enough. Rascal went streaking down the hill, panting and racing like a demon. I heard tires squeal, then the dog, then nothing. I went running down, my heart going a mile a minute, and found that the car had taken off. All I could see of Rascal was a bloody path in the snow.

I followed it for I don't know how long and finally found him huddled up in a ball, still bleeding and, thankfully, still breathing. I put him inside my coat and carried him home, thinking that if this didn't make a man out of me, nothing would. Rascal got himself a cute little cast and everything was hunky-dory until a week later when he spotted another car and went racing after it, cast and all. The whole drama was replayed--the squealing, the running, the bleeding--with a different, yet familiar result: Rascal died. I cried for days. He was dumb as fuck, but a trooper all the same.

It was time, we all felt, for a cat. "Sleepy" was beautiful with green eyes and didn't give a shit about me. She had no interest in following me through the woods and only went outside when she felt like killing something, which I thought was pretty cool. She lasted about a month before we found her completely flattened at the bottom of the driveway. I remember my dad burying the corpse, then coming in and sitting down next to me. There was a really long, meaningful moment before we both burst into a hysterical fit of laughter. Pet death was becoming a joke. I was, I thought, growing up.

We soon bought another house, this time in suburbia. I turned back into a girl again. For Christmas, there was a cute little yellow puppy waiting for me under the tree, wrapped bondage-style in pretty pink ribbons. I named him, originally enough, "Ribbons." By New Year's, pretty little Ribbons was a stain on the pavement.

Next in line was a beautiful Irish setter named, rather sickeningly, "Erin." We were now no longer a quaint hippie family, but a troop of money-grubbing-Twinkie-munching-god-fearing Americans. There were more of us--a brother who was surprisingly affable--and a whole lot more money to go along with him. Erin was my first purebred dog and absolutely gorgeous. We kept her, paranoid as we were, on a long run in the back yard. That poor dog never tasted anything close to freedom until one night, after an evening of decadent spending, we returned to find a large hole in our door. Lo and behold, everything was gone: the TV, the stereo, my mother's jewelry and, of course, my dog.

That was when the Golden Age began. I was visiting my godfather's farm and found a stray kitten wandering through the woods. She looked so pathetic that my parents agreed to take her home. "Alexandra" (or "Alex," as I liked to call her) turned out to be more than a mere cat. She had some sort of ancient spirit trapped in that sleek body of hers, some wise old sage which would peer out understandingly in the times of my angst--which was all the time at that point. I was thirteen and a complete mess.

I remember crying into her fur, listening to "Open Arms" and telling her about how some boy or another had broken my heart. Alex would more than put up with this: she would stare at me and I would swear that she knew exactly what I was talking about. That cat shared all the traumas of my adolescence. When I left for school I bequeathed her to my brother, who loved her just as intensely.

When my parents moved to Florida, they actually let the cat ride with them, which is really impressive if you know my parents, who could give two shits about most animals. And in Florida, beautiful Alex was torn apart by the neighbor's Rottweilers. My father, a long way from the Peace Corps by now, went over afterwards with a shotgun, screaming obscenities. Not that it mattered--all the joy had been merely a tease, an aberration. The curse was back.

In a halfhearted attempt at healing, I purchased a fish, which immediately somehow managed to die in my roommate's shoe. It took a few days to find it--just long enough for rot to set in.

Now I have plants, which are all pathetic-looking, and seem to cringe when I touch them. I won't allow myself any more animals. After all these years I've become a sort of bitter pet widow. What happened? I don't know. Looking back, I think I may have been being punished for my own actions, especially the first and bloodiest of them. And sometimes, in the deepest, darkest part of the night, I can still feel the delicious smallness of a duckling's skull.