eXtinct

by Michael Czyzniejewski

My daughter’s assignment was to pick an animal that started with each letter of the alphabet and write them out, one animal per line, twenty-six lines down the side of a piece of notebook paper. Good penmanship required. Homework was usually my wife’s area of expertise, but this wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle—Sadie’s in first grade—so I sat down with her when she was having trouble.

There were five empty lines—E, J, N, Q, and X. I pointed to the empty E line then stood up and made my left arm into an enormous trunk and swung it in front of my face and lumbered around the dining room and Sadie giggled and said, “Oh, right!” but instead of elephant she wrote eel. I did not feel the need to say anything.

For J I told her to think of a brand of a fancy car and she thought for a second and said, “Japanese …?” and I said no and realized there’s no reason why a six-year-old would know what a Jaguar is. I drove a Celica. I told her we could skip J for the time being because I didn’t know how to portray a jaguar, versus any other cat, and if I didn’t know how to act out a jaguar, I certainly didn’t know how to act out a jackal or a jellyfish.

N was harder than I thought it would be. “Wow, I’m blanking” I said, and instead of animals I kept thinking of people like my sister Nancy and Ned Flanders and Neil Armstrong and a newspaper man and a Navy Seal and nurses and Boom! I was about to yell out, “Nurse shark!” but Sadie was already writing newt.

I immediately thought of quail for Q and was wondering about how I could get her to think of a quail because it was another animal like a jaguar that a six-year-old probably heard of on some cartoon or in passing but maybe not? Why would a quail just fall into my daughter’s vocabulary? I felt down on myself because we hadn’t been good parents. Like we should’ve gotten her off her phone, off her laptop, got her outside. Gone to the zoo. Run flashcards. Flew a kite in a fucking park. I had been spending too much time onscreen myself. Had ducked out too many nights to throw darts with my bros and try disgusting whiskeys at $11 a shot. I was so easily distracted. I hadn’t read her a bedtime story in two years because …

“Quail,” Sadie said. “That’s like a pigeon, right?”

I said, “Yeah, like a pigeon. Good job, sweetheart.”

X. In one of my grades school classrooms, above the chalkboards, there was a series of posters that wrapped around front and side, all the letters of the alphabet written out in cursive, capital letter and small letter next to each other, along with a picture of the animal that started with each letter. Aardvark. Bison. Camel. Dolphin. Etcetera, the name underneath, also written in cursive. A lot of the animals were the exact same that Sadie had down on her list, except she had bear instead of bison and falcon instead of fox and iguana instead of ibex and I think that was it. For X, my classroom had a picture of a brontosaurus, which is funny now, as that’s not a real dinosaur anymore, and the word under the picture was eXtinct. Like they couldn’t figure out the name of an animal that started with X, all these people at this school supply company, and all they came up with was eXtinct. I pictured a lot of nerd-types in the seventies with sideburns and bellbottoms, pale as paper, pouring over ideas around a conference table, working into the night, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays and pizza boxes piling up, a hard deadline looming, everyone worried about losing their job, having to report that they had finished 25/26 of the penmanship/animal classroom alphabet montage but had, like every team before them, failed at X. And then, at dawn, just minutes before the presentation to the boss, to the board, maybe a whole gaggle of school supply company stockholders, some desperate savior in the group yelled out, “eXtinct!” and at first everyone was skeptical, if not angry, if not sleep-deprived and suicidal, nixing the idea, but then as they headed to the conference room for their presentation, tucking in their shirts and fixing their hair, they were like, “We go with Roger’s eXtinct idea. It’s better than nothing,” but they still all thought, deep down, they were going to be fired. So when the boss stared at the list and hesitated near the bottom, stopping to ask about eXtinct, they thought they were cooked for sure, fired and fired hard, but then that boss got wide-eyed and announced, “I love it!” no one was more surprised than them. Just over a year later, third-grade me walked into Mrs. Galloway’s classroom and found his desk in the back of the second row and looked around at who was sitting where and at what creature we had in a tank on the window shelf and then followed the penmanship animals around the room, Aardvark, Bison, Camel, … all the way around to X, seeing eXtinct, thinking, “Why don’t any animals start with X?”

“I’m done,” Sadie said and I looked for her paper to see what she’d put for X but it was already in her bag, zipped up and on the table. Sadie turned on the TV and laughed about something loud. I fished out the paper inside a purple folder. Sadie’s penmanship was flawless, I should note. She had jellyfish for J. I skipped down to X and when I saw what she’d put, X-husband, I almost crumpled the paper and threw it against the wall. Instead, I collapsed into the chair, wishing again that I’d done a better job. With the animals. With Sadie. With everything.

BIO: Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of four collections of stories, most recently The Amnesiac in the Maze (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023). He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Moon City Press and Moon City Review, as well as Interviews Editor of SmokeLong Quarterly. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and two Pushcart Prizes.