"The Donkey Tale" -- a short story

The Donkey Tale
by Donald G. Redman

It was one of those magical mornings we’re all blessed with at one time or another. My brother and I stumbled out of the house bleary-eyed and trundled off toward the school bus stop when Tommy McCurdy yelled from across the street: “Hey, there’s a donkey in my backyard!”

“Pshaw!” I said (pronouncing the “P”).

“Honest,” he said. “A real live donkey just walked up in my yard. He’s in the backyard right now. My mom’s gonna feed him some carrots.”

My brother and I dashed across the street without checking for traffic and met up with about twelve other kids who had heard the news. We all crammed in his backyard and sure enough, there was a danged donkey. I knew then that my mom and the Reverend Patterson were right – Jesus does love all the little children.

Tommy’s mom, Mrs. McCurdy, was all worried and was yelling at us to be orderly and stuff.

Mrs. McCurdy was always yelling. Tommy’s little sister, Kaye, was my age and sometimes she’d hang out with me in our playhouse in the backyard. Somehow Mrs. McCurdy got it in her head that I was Kaye’s keeper and that I knew where she was every minute of the day. As soon as she would see me step outside of the house she’d yell from across the street, “If you see Kaye…” Every time she’d yell that, I would immediately cringe, thinking she was spelling out a really bad curse word, until she added “…tell her to come home.”

Then there was the time that me and Tommy threw a dart in the air and it came straight down on Mrs. McCurdy’s cat. Boy did she ever scream. You should have heard the cat scream, too. I didn’t actually throw the dart but I was with Tommy when he did it. Oh, and he got the dart from me in an even swap for a 45 record of “Happy Together” by The Turtles. But that’s a different story for later.

So it was not a surprise that on this day Tommy’s mom was yelling. She yelled at us not to gather around the backside of the donkey or we could get kicked in the head so hard it’d make our brains fall out or worse.

Tommy and a couple of other lucky kids, including my brother who had muscled his way through the crowd, were at the front of the donkey, petting its forehead and feeding it carrots. I was among the smaller kids forced to stand a few feet back from the donkey and wait our turn to pet it. But I couldn’t wait. I broke free of the line and reached out to touch the donkey’s mane. The donkey turned his head to look at me and for a brief minute I was lost in his eyes – eyes so big and watery you think you could swim in them. And then the danged thing bit me. Hard! On the stomach!

I yelled out in pain and pulled up the front of my shirt and saw teeth marks on my stomach. Bloody teeth marks! Boy, I was really bawling then. But even though I was crying and yelling real loud, I could still hear Tommy’s mom screaming even louder: “Sweet Jesus!”

Mrs. McCurdy ordered everybody to get off her property or else she was going to call the cops. She told me I might want to have my mom check out my wound, adding “I doubt you have to worry about rabies. That’s just a donkey for you – they’re either kicking or biting or braying.” (I thought she had said praying, and I thought that was just about the craziest thing I had ever heard – kicking and biting and praying – ‘til I remembered Tommy’s family was Pentecostal.)

My dumb brother took great delight in my misery and thought there was probably nothing funnier in the whole wide world than me being bitten by a donkey. I couldn’t find any humor in it, but I did experience a small amount of glee when my mom said I could miss school while he had to go learn something that day.

We never did find out where that donkey came from or where it went. Before the cops got to Tommy’s house, the danged thing just wandered off never to be seen again. The only sign we had that the donkey ever existed was the teeth marks it left on my stomach.

For days after the episode, I was the star attraction on my block. Everybody wanted to see the teeth marks the donkey left behind. My brother said he’d be glad to be my manager and that we should start charging kids a dime for a peek, but I didn’t feel right about that. It didn’t bother him: he turned a nifty profit by setting up a Kool-Aid stand in the front yard with a handwritten sign reading: “Buy 1 drink/see wild ass bite mark free.”

A couple of weeks passed and the bite mark faded away. My brother’s Kool-Aid stand went out of business and I returned to just being another kid in the neighborhood. The block soon returned to normal, the quiet only intermittently broken by Mrs. McCurdy’s lament: “If you see Kaye…tell her to come home.”


Copyright 2010 Donald G. Redman All Rights Reserved