Theodore & Rosemary
by Alex Juffer
“Have you seen my duck?” Rosemary asked strangers. “He goes by Theodore. He can be moody, but he’s my best friend. He speaks in a pitch that only children can hear, so perhaps your son overheard a rather dramatic mallard around these parts?”
At this point, the parents would draw their children back, although Rosemary was no threat, under eighty pounds herself, who favored a purple corduroy jacket that flapped about her knees and ate up her wrists.
Rosemary would invariably find Theodore at the nearest pond, organizing the ducks to stop living off the crumbs of humans. His pitch was a hard sell given that Theodore loved bread himself, especially a good sourdough, and performed his oration between bites.
***
Sometimes people would try to scare off Theodore, mistaking him for a persistent nuisance.
“No, that’s my duck, he’s a friend,” Rosemary proclaimed to a particularly aggressive man with a rake.
“I’m sure he is, honey,” he said, still jabbing at Theodore with the handle.
“He talks. He says your hair piece looks like his cousin.”
“Please don’t speak for me,” Theodore interjected.
The man reached down to grab Rosemary by her jacket. She screeched in surprise, which melted to laughter as they ran, Theodore’s wide, flat feet clapping on the pavement.
Rosemary lay on the ground, catching her breath and gurgling up occasional laughs. Theodore paced around her, pontificating about the human desire to meddle with other species, the dangerous conflation of violence with control.
***
Theodore would fly south for the winter, although he always returned. Rosemary walked the parks long before the spring thaw, retracing the steps of past hangouts. At home, she drew him from memory, often failing to capture the noble green color of his head.
Rosemary had a hard time replacing Theodore’s friendship during the winter months. After discussing the intricacies of flight, middle-school conversations about shoes, boys, and volleyball paled in comparison. Her aloofness was mistaken for disdain, the girls turned on her, and the disdain emerged, hardened.
It bothered Rosemary that, whenever she did find Theodore, he didn’t appear to be searching for her, although he could have easily flown around and spotted her.
“I missed you,” Rosemary ventured.
“I knew you would find me,” he replied.
“And why couldn’t you find me?”
“Because I knew you would find me, so I didn’t have to find you. I’m no good as a finder; I’d only get lost.”
***
When Rosemary turned eighteen, she started to lose the ability to communicate with Theodore, his voice turning to a warble in her eardrums. It broke her heart, losing her best friend, and she foresaw a day when he was any other duck, a day on which she threw him breadcrumbs just to keep him around.
She couldn’t abide such a thing, nor could she abide losing him. When he came over to see her new studio apartment, she fed him sleeping pills camouflaged in a bowl of brown rice and made sure he passed in her care.
Rosemary placed Theodore on a shelf, a painting of a pond hung behind him. Unlike other taxidermied animals, lacquered, almost shocked to be in such a state, Theodore seemed to eye Rosemary’s living room cautiously, peering out from his fixed position. Eventually, she blacked out his eyes with a Sharpie so that he’d stopped following her with his gaze.
It wasn’t the same, she had to admit to herself. And yet, on warm Sundays, she still took Theodore down to the fountain in the park for a swim. She’d roll her pants up and push Theodore around the water, the children watching in reverential horror.
The Molotov Cocktail 