Animal Planet by Garth Robinson

My father once found a great blue heron dead at the frog pond. He drove an old Volvo station wagon. If my mother ever borrowed the car, she would come back and complain that it was like driving a barge. I’ve realized as an adult that my father is a very sweet and sensitive man, and I believe that he has always understood this sweetness as the reason why the world has hurt him. Sometimes, when I was a child, his eyes appeared so large and wet that I could see clear-through to another animal within him, one that was helpless and in need of something it could not articulate.

My father drove home with the dead heron in the trunk of the Volvo. A year or so later, he would drive home with our dead cat Pete in the trunk. It had been the state highway for Pete. When my father came home, he asked me and my older sister to come out and look in the trunk, as if he needed us to identify the body.

Both Pete and the heron were buried in the very back of the yard, near a stand of pine trees. There were at least a dozen pets buried there, but in my mind there were hundreds. I imagined them like glowing stars beneath the dirt, stars that would crack open and release something evil if I were to accidentally dig one up. 

This was my great fear. Because the graves were marked only with sticks or flowers that would disappear with the seasons, it seemed entirely possible. 

It took a few days for my father to tell us about the heron. When he told me, I was excited because this sounded like a fantastic and exotic story to repeat at school. But I was also scared. I had a friend whose father was into cross-country skiing, and another whose father liked to host barbecues for his neighbors. These passions and extroversions made their fathers seem strange and youthful to me, and very human. I realized that they were just small boys who had happened to grow up. In turn, I realized that I would one day be an adult, but also that I would remain me. My own father tended to stay at home, and he had few hobbies that seemed important to him. I saw him as predictable and mild-mannered. Because of this, the heron burial felt like an unusually eccentric and almost reckless thing for him to take on. 

My father has a habit of waiting to tell us important information. Sometimes, he forgets. Other times he has complicated and tender reasons. For years we owned a Scottish Terrier named Georgie who often bit me and my sisters on our hands and faces. My father and the terrier liked to sit on a bench together at the frog pond, and my father would feed him treats. Once, a little girl tried to sit next to them, and Georgie latched viciously onto her cheek. My father waited until the dog had died and been buried under the pine trees to tell us the story. He said he hadn’t wanted us to see the dog any differently. 

I believe he waited days to tell us about the heron because this was a beautiful and sad thing to happen to him, and in this way a kind of burden. I believe he waited days for it to lessen itself in his heart, because he thought that by telling us about it, he would be asking us to bear some of its weight. This is also the fundamental problem in my parents’ marriage. My father has a very hard time saying to my mother, “Help.” 

By the time I was a young man, my parents had very little to do with one another. When I moved back home at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, their lives were as if on opposite sides of a window. For the first time in years, I watched spring arrive in their backyard. It was a muddy spring, and it seemed impossible that it would give in to the crocuses and the bleeding hearts and the woolly tangles of the forsythia. A family of rabbits built a den beyond the pine trees, and at dusk they wandered through the yard as if lost, or shellshocked. There was an immense amount of suffering going on. Reading the news, I understood that enormous and violent things could still occur, that we were not immune to history, and that the world could change in very drastic, sudden ways. 

Time passed oddly. I imagined it moving outward instead of forward, like a ball inflating and preparing to pop. My mother worked in auxiliary services at a private school, and every few days she’d go in wearing double masks to ship packages or organize receipts. My older sister took video calls in her bedroom, and my younger sister did yoga outside. Mostly, we were all together. I don’t think my mother ever expected to have us all living in the same house again. Some days she couldn’t contain her happiness. I felt a similar peace, but the death and the horror on the news made these feelings unrecognizable, made them feel like dread, like guilt. 

Because my father hadn’t been able to hold a job in several years, his days were strangely unchanged. He had begun to spend a lot of time in the basement, where he liked to watch obscure shows on Discovery Channel and Syfy. In the middle of the night, we could hear him laughing at old movies from the 1940s and 1950s. The voices sounded hopeful and stern and dignified, which is the way that everyone sounds in black-and-white movies. 

Sometimes, I wondered if he felt at ease in the pandemic, because he was used to the world feeling hopeless and incomprehensible. 

The warmer months have always been easier for my father. In June and July he can have hours of goodness. We all began working in the garden each morning. My father trimmed trees with a pole saw, my mother moved wheelbarrows of dirt from one end to the other, I used a lawn edger to neaten the boundaries of the flowerbeds. At the start of summer, my mother took to saying, “The garden’s never looked this good.” She kept saying it. She was in love with these days and knew she could never admit it.

Some days, my younger sister set up an old baby fence in the grass and began what we had termed the End of Life Ritual. After Pete’s death, all of our cats had been inside cats. When they neared death, we liked to take them outside and hold their noses up to the beebalms and the lilac tree. Their eyes became big and seemed to vibrate. The cats had moved from a world of abstract symbols and distant observations to the stuff of truth and experience, and I imagined this as a pleasure that was almost too intense.

It was heaven, and also evidence of all they had missed out on.

Tony was born the runt of the litter, grew into a fat imperious housecat, and by the start of July had shrunk back down to thinness and bone. His brother Sandy passed years before through the End of Life Ritual and into the outer beyond. In normal times, we would’ve already put Tony down. But COVID rules meant that we wouldn’t be allowed to accompany him into the euthanasia room, and my mother thought that this would constitute a kind of betrayal. So we all waited. We took him outside. My sister set up the baby fence around him and sat in the grass and wrote poems for the dying animal. 

One day before his death, Tony performed a miracle. My sister went off somewhere and left him in the grass. When she returned, the cat—whose teeth had begun to fall out, who was too weak now even to purr—had killed a chipmunk. We celebrated the cat as if he were a war hero. What fearlessness, I thought. What love of life.

The next day Tony lay down on his side. His ribs were like bars on a xylophone. On the shaded porch I made a catbed from towels and cloth. As I watched him, I felt that we were alone on opposite ends of a great tunnel.

Eventually, the cat’s body shook and tautened. Then something seemed to leave it. It was as if a sparrow had flown indoors, been caught inside a curtain, and after much fighting and twisting had at last gone free. 

Like a child, I went to find my mother.

That afternoon I offered to dig the hole for Tony. Always this had been my father’s job. I chose a spot a little ways from the pine trees, where I couldn’t remember ever having a burial. But as I dug, I thought of all the cats I could barely remember, the dogs my parents had owned and loved together before I’d even been born. It was hot now and clouds puttered across the sky. Any moment I might turn up the bones of Pete the cat, or of his mother Crumpet whose cancerous ear would look now like the fossil of an ancient petal. Hidden in the dirt were the delicate forepaws of the orange stray my father had once taken in, the skull of an evil old tabby named Schatzi who sat on the kitchen table and yowled at anyone who walked by. I could picture the basset hound I’d seen in photos, when my father wore a beard and my mother dresses and long earrings, could picture the ossicles now shed forever from their soft hoops. Sandy’s pelvis like a child’s rattle, and the long smooth femur of a greyhound, and hamster bones just chickenscratch and soot. The tiny, desiccated slips of Georgie’s heart and lungs. Somewhere, the fine wings of a heron, driven home and cradled in the trunk of my father’s station wagon, dry now and stranger to pondwater and sun, bare as the joists of a house. 

We gathered around the hole. Tony lay swathed at the bottom. My younger sister read one of her poems. “Baby,” she said. “That’s a birch, and buttercups. These are pines, and violets, and love…” 

My parents stood opposite each other. Through the tops of the pine trees I could feel the whole of the world pressing in. The backyard might’ve been at the dead bottom of a lake. Our love and our grief had been so ambient in the last few months, and I found that there was almost some relief in giving it such a focus, such a clear logic. 

Afterwards my mother went indoors. My father lay down in the grass with his legs beneath him, watching as I shoveled dirt back into the hole. He appeared like a statue of a mermaid or an angel. Behind his thick glasses, his eyes were as big and as lonesome as an old dog’s. He started telling us about a show he had seen recently on Animal Planet, a documentary about a population of wildcats that live in the Scottish Highlands. “They just look like normal, fairly large cats,” he said. “Except they’re completely wild.” I thought this was a dumb, sweet thing to say. I could imagine that this was where Tony had gone, that he had sunk down through the dirt and emerged on the other side in a Scottish field somewhere, that he’d spend eternity loose in the long hills and rocky pastures, tracking and hunting little anonymous animals through the thistle and the gorse, sleeping each night on whatever bed of heather or foxglove he preferred. 

My father kept telling us about the documentary, talking and not really saying anything at all. What generosity, I thought. What perfect timing. 

Garth Robinson lives along the Chesapeake Bay and holds an MFA from Hollins University. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Indiana Review, Pithead Chapel, DIAGRAM, Your Impossible Voice, Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction. 

8 October 2026