My 12-Year-Old Asks for a Bag of Rubber Bands for His Birthday

He bites the hand that feeds him, pure reptilian instinct, like the cobras and crocodiles and Komodo dragons he’s always telling me about on his happier days—venom potent enough to kill twenty full-grown men, conical teeth designed to puncture flesh and crush bone, hunger so voracious that the lizard babies have to scamper up to the treetops as soon as they hatch, or their mothers will forget who they are and eat them. On other days—the less happy ones—he says he will never forgive me for hatching him into this soft, warm-blooded body, he wants to live in the wild with the frogs and fish and painted turtles, he cries, screams, slams doors over and over, until the wood splinters, and I feel a swamp rising in me, thick and spongy, like the marsh he has threatened to hide himself inside, like the peat bog that looks like solid ground until you step out onto that inviting green carpet and feel the whole world give out under you—your heart and lungs clogged with decaying matter, expanding, threatening to burst—but you still have hope as long as you can claw your way back up to that fresh, clean air.

Later, he wants to be near me, and I let him sit on my lap even though he’s getting too big for this now, all elbows and bony hips and preteen boy smell, and he tells me about crocodile bites: 3,700 pounds per square inch of force, the most powerful bite in the animal kingdom. If they get their teeth in you, all you can do is roll with it, literally, until they decide to release you or until your flesh can’t hold out anymore. But they aren’t so tough in the opposite direction—once their jaws are closed, all it takes is a rubber band to keep them shut, or a length of twine, or you can even do it yourself, one hand closed around the end of their snout. Nature has taught them to clamp down, but not to let go.