Puppies & Lambs

The waiting room is particularly loud today. Puppies yelp from their crates, desperate for their owner’s affection. Children are not too dissimilar, except—crate-free—tug at their parents' hemlines instead and declare death by boredom.

It's Ursula's fifth visit to the Young Life Transfusion Center and she's positively bristling with anticipation. Her newly acquired lamb bleats from the crate between her feet and she's quick to give it a firm warning kick with the back of her heel. She’s embarrassed others may hear her animal of choice and think less of her.

Ursula deserves to be here as much as everyone else, she tells herself. She's paying the same membership fee as everyone else. Besides, no one knows if a lamb is any less, or any more, effective than a puppy. What if it turns out they're even more effective? She thinks. Pah! That will show them.

She doesn't understand why people have been so quick to pick puppies as the must-have transfusion animal of choice. She blames good marketing and one particular Young Life Transfusion influencer for the puppy-fad. Although, she supposes, the influencer is part of the good marketing too.

At first, finding good puppies was like trying to find toilet paper during COVID. But, since more clinics have started popping up, puppies have become easier and easier to come by. It’s no longer a matter of getting your hands on them. Now it’s a matter of which breed you can get your hands on. As the country steps into fall, chocolate labs are all the rage. But, Ursula saw a TikTok video just this morning predicting dalmations will be the puppy for winter. ‘Spots are so in’—she remembers.

“If you don’t quit your whining so help me God I will offer you up to the doctor instead.” A red-nosed mother pulls Ursula from her daydreams. The child, at which the threat was directed, shrinks into herslef, presses her lips firmly shut, and takes a tentative seat next to her now sneezing mother.

“God knows why it had to be puppies.” She mutters between fits of short, sharp, hushed sneezes. She retires a sopping tissue up her sleeve and begins rummaging in her bag for the next. As if on cue, Ursula’s lamb bleats again from under her chair. The woman’s eyes shoot up from her bag and lock on Ursula’s.

“Is that a lamb I hear?” The woman asks Ursula from across the room, equally disgusted and curious. Heads turn in Ursula’s direction. Shoot, she thinks.

Ursula slowly nods her head. She’s doesn’t want to draw any more attention to herself and her lamb than she already has. Yet, she fears, it’s already too late. The red-nosed woman eases herself out of her chair and moves across the room, leaving her child and pup behind, and temporarily forgotten. She sneezes thrice more before taking a seat next to Ursula.

“Is anyone sitting here?” She asks, already firmly planted in the seat. Shes continues without Ursula having so much as a breath to reply with. “How many sessions have you had already? Have they all been with a lamb?”

Ursula squirms under the spotlight. She notices other women in the waiting room pause their conversations, cocking their ears toward her. Their magazines or phones remain raised in front of their eyes, but their attention is now on Ursula.

“This’ll be my fifth.” Ursula mumbles.

“Speak up, lass, we cannie hear ya.” A broad, red-headed woman stands up from a few rows away. “It’ll be ye fifth, ye say?” The rest of the room gives up the façade, putting down their magazines, locking their phones, and turning to face Ursula. Ursula nods her head again.

“And?” The broad shouldered Scottish lady presses. Her eyebrows raised, her hands on her hips. “Dinnae sit there like an oyster, hen!”

“Well,” Ursula begins, fidgeting in her chair. “I’m pretty sure I’ve felt warmer, despite it getting colder.”

“Bullshit.” Another woman calls from across the room.

“Let her talk!” Another barks back.

“You look great, hun.” Says another woman, now sitting next to Ursula. The woman gives Ursula’s hand a sympathetic pat. “Were puppies out of budget for you too?” She asks.

Ursula looks to the crate at the lady’s feet. She sees the nose of a puppy pushed up against the gate, like Playdough just before it’s pushed through a shape cutter. Ursula looks back to the lady whose hand is still on hers. “I can afford them. But, I know people like you that can’t. It must be tough, right? Scary?” The woman’s eyebrows manage to slope just slightly in sympathy, despite the botox.

Ursula can tell the woman means well. She’s trying to sympathize with her. She’s just doing an awful job of it. Ursula notes the woman’s Cartier Love bracelet, her Hermès Mini Kelly perched in her lap, the Hermes mules on—what Ursula imagines to be—her perfectly manicured feet.

The treatment door flies open and Ursula sighs with relief as the attention shifts from her to (none other than) the influencer she’d seen just that very morning on TikTok. She gasps in shock. The room hushes quiet. The influencer, who Ursula is struggling to remember the name of in her presence, is beautiful. Her plump—‘not fat’—face glows. Her brows are thick and frame her acorn-colored eyes like drapes to a stage. Her hands are delicate. She moves with all the grace of a retired, professional ballet dancer in her late twenties.

“Unbelievable,” the sympathetic woman to Ursula’s left mutters, literally clutching her pearls. “I still can’t get over that she’s in her fifties.” And, neither can Ursula. The influencer—as by now Ursula has admitted defeat and will call her only by her title, like the Queen, rather than the name that seems to have escaped her in her old age, like Lizzie—is stunning. She looks as though she is in her early twenties, she has the grace of a woman comfortable in her own body and carrying herself as if she is in her thirties. She has all of the confidence of a woman in her forties that has achieved a level of acceptance with her twice-a-week therapist and living the mantra: “fuck it, this is is what I’ve got. I will work with it. I will love it. ”

“How many sessions has she had?” The red-nosed woman asks across Ursula, to the lady with the Hermès closet.

“Seventeen.”

“Fuck.”

“I know.”

“I can’t wait”

“Me either.”

“‘Scuse me, yer lady.” The Scottish woman bows as Influencer—for that is her name now—passes her by. Influencer smiles at the older lady and Ursula gasps again as if the whites of Influencer’s teeth are too bright for her tired eyes. Influencer leaves the room, and silence in her wake. The ladies eventually let out the collective breath they’ve been holding.

“My husband would be one lucky man.” One woman says to no-one in particular.

“My husband won’t be my husband by the time I’m on my seventeenth visit. Why would I stick with the same old vanilla ice cream, when I can get me some caramel, some chocolate, some mint, some fucking bubblegum!”

“And why settle for just one,” another woman cackles. “They’ll all be wanting you. And I’ll be wanting all of them! I haven’t had a man in my bed for twenty-odd years.” She slaps her thigh. The women chuckle and hum as a collective hive.

The puppies in their crates start to yap, and howl, and cry. The children start back up with their complaints of boredom, of hunger, of wanting to be ‘anywhere but here’.

Red-nose turns toward Ursula and Hermès. “Did you see her skin?” She stage whispers, playing shock for her newly-formed knit of friends. She runs a hand through her thinning, dark hair, briefly exposing its grey roots.

“Was it me, or was it speckled?”

“Spotted,” Nods Red-nose, smiling “It’s the Dalmatians she’s using. They must be purebreds.”

“Incredible.” Hermès shakes her head in awe. “She’s going to look so good come winter.”

“Ms Ferox? Ursula Ferox?” The doctor calls from the still open door, looking down at the sheet in their hands.

“Excuse me, ladies” Ursula pushes herself onto her feet. She picks up her crate as slowly as she can. Yet, despite her best efforts, the lamb bleats all the same. It’s cry sounds louder than the puppies and the children combined. Ursula winces at the attention, and slowly makes her way past the other ladies.

“That’s me,” she whispers to the doctor.

“Ready for your transplant, Ms Ferox?”

Ursula nods, looking down at her offering in the crate and willing the darned thing to keep quiet just a few moments longer. It will all be over soon.

She runs her free hand over her forearm, as she’s got into the habit of doing lately, she finds the long, stray, curly white hair that’s taken habit to growing out of a mole she has there in recent weeks. She gives the hair a sharp tug, wincing slightly as it comes free. She drops it to the floor and pushes her false teeth firmly in place.

“Ready,” she smiles at the doctor.