The Care and Feeding of Griffins Read Online Free PDF Page B

them, stubble-chinned men in slippers instead of shoes, college-aged kids with raver ’s gel still spiking their hair, bar-hoppers looking for one for the road in twelve-pack form, and a smattering of just-off waitresses and nurses and gas station attendants still in their uniforms and on their way home.  Taryn, her unbrushed hair and vague look of desperation, not to mention her sporadically-peeping backpack, blended right in.
    She bought two cans of kitten formula, eyedroppers to feed it to him, a bolstered puppy bed, two baby blankets, a pet carrier car seat, a currying brush, baby shampoo, some puppy training pads, and a teddy bear that played Brahm’s lullaby when its paw was squeezed.  It killed that new TV she was saving for, but she didn’t care.
    Aisling was peeping continuously by the time she got home.  She took her backpack and the bag with the formula inside and left everything else for later. 
    No can of powdered milk was ever read as thoroughly as that one.  Taryn mixed up four ounces, tested the temperature on her wrist twice, tasted it, and finally filled an eyedropper for Aisling.
    He bit as soon as the eyedropper touched his beak, but pulled back fast when Taryn squeezed the bulb to push milk into his mouth.  She crooned at him and he shuffled forward with answering peeps, only to retreat again at the touch of food.  Taryn shifted him awkwardly in the crook of her arms to pinch his beak between her fingers and hold him still while she dribbled a thin stream of milk into him.
    He swallowed.  He coughed.  He thought about it as she praised him.  She could see the nub of his tongue poking at the inside of his beak for more drops to investigate and consider.  And then he opened wide as a book and uttered the world’s most pitiful plea for more.
    He got the first ounce on him, but the rest in him, and went to sleep immediately afterwards with formula beading on his beak.  Taryn swabbed him gently clean and dry and left him on the floor by the sofa as she went to bring the rest of her purchases inside.  She arranged his bed next to hers, laid out piddle pads everywhere, and was assembling her pet car seat in no time.  She was feeling pretty good about herself when he started throwing up.
    The sound was unalarming, just a wheezy sort of cough.  She glanced around in the same overprotective curiosity that had caused her to drive twenty miles an hour around a forty-mile curve, expecting to see nothing at all out of the ordinary (apart from the griffin itself).  Instead, she saw streams and bubbles of formula pouring from Aisling ’s nostrils, his beak opening and closing and his little ribs working for breath.
    Taryn swooped him up with a cry and whether it was the sound or the sudden movement, Aisling coughed violently and finally cleared his airway.  He peeped, his head bobbing bewilderedly around him, and tried to crawl up onto her shoulder.
    She held him, her heart pounding.
    Was that normal?  Should she have burped him?  She ’d read somewhere that birds didn’t burp, but lions probably did and that was the part where his stomach was.  Maybe the formula was wrong for him.  Maybe he wouldn’t be able to digest it at all.
    She needed help.
    There was no help.
    Through the rising fog of panic came one quiet image, one she did not at first understand.  The library steps, that wonderful concrete library up in Washington from when she was a kid.  That great, grey monolith of slapped-slab architecture with all those marvelous nooks and walls and corners, black windows gleaming in the sun and dozens of shallow steps climb ing triumphantly to the dungeon doors of its interior.
    ‘ Well, what about it?’ the logical left of her brain asked calmly.
    There was a lady on the steps one time.
    ‘So?’ she wondered, but there was another memory bubbling up from childhood’s tar.  A speck of blue.  A paper dragon.
    Gosh, she ’d had that thing for years.  Until she was fourteen at least.