Abby Alten Schwartz
Fur for Thought
I tag along with my dad to the boring hardware store because of one redeeming thing by the cash register: a spinning display of rabbit’s foot good luck charms hanging on beaded key chains. My sisters and I collect them in every color — red, green, orange, turquoise, purple — and their saturated hues provide just enough deniability to allow us to ignore the fact that we’re carrying around a severed paw. We stroke soft fur across cheeks, down arms, run a fingertip over the edge and feel the bones and nails still intact.
I covet my big sister’s patchwork rabbit fur bomber jacket — am thrilled when, in high school, it finally makes it into the hand-me-down pile she leaves on my bed. I lose track of it years later and become a card-carrying member of PETA in my 20s. I don’t think of it again until, 30 years later, Nikki Swango sashays across my TV screen wearing a rabbit fur coat on Season 3 of Fargo and I swoon once more. Damn, I felt sassy in that thing.
In a haughty voice, I inform my mom that I’m anti-fur. I tell my mother-in-law I’m anti-fur. They can wear their floor-length coats, but I have no desire to wear one, I announce. They shrug.
PETA is like that friend who gets too loud when she’s drunk. You don’t drop her for it, but you start to edge further away. Throwing red paint at women on the street isn’t my jam. When they get too loud about Big Pharma I have to pick a side. Right now, BP is my daughter’s best hope for a future. It’s a no-brainer.
My father-in-law buys my 5-year-old daughter a hulking black faux fur coat with a matching hat to wear to the theater. When she doesn’t respond with suitable glee, he calmly tells her no problem, if she doesn’t like it, he’ll send it to her cousin in Colorado, which lands, as intended, as a mild threat. Later, in private, she chirps to me in her husky voice, “Mommy, let’s send the coat to Gabrielle. I’ll tell her she can wear it if she wants to look like a BEAST.”
My friend takes a job at a furrier. A former model, she knows furs and needs this job as a single mom. One day, my daughter asks her about the place where she sells “corkus mink.” It takes me a minute to realize she’s saying carcass, flipping it like a Latin name. From then on, my friend and I refer to furs as corkus mink.
I’m at a fundraising gala for the organization that raises money for cystic fibrosis, my daughter’s genetic disease. I’m a board member and when they ask for a volunteer to model a donated fur for the live auction, I agree. I walk — no, strut — across the dance floor in my short skirt, knee-high boots, and hip-length fur, arm linked to the celebrity sportscaster who is linked on his other side to my best friend and fellow CF mom in a matching fur. With my chin lifted, lips red, hair freshly ironed, glossy and swinging, I feel like a supermodel, sexy AF.
For 9 minutes I wrestle internally and ultimately decide not to bid on the fur.
At another event, someone bids on a child-sized white rabbit fur jacket and later presents it to me to take home to my daughter. Fuck it, I think. She has to put up with this goddamn disease. If she likes it, she can keep it.
After we move my mom to Memory Care, I clean out her closet and stuffed in the back is a white vinyl zippered body bag. Inside: a floor-length corkus. Not mink, Tanuki raccoon. It hasn’t been properly preserved in a temperature controlled room. For 6 minutes I contemplate sending it to a furrier, having it cut and sewn into something I might wear. By minute 7 it’s clear I don’t want a fur. I find a vintage reseller to take it on consignment and never hear back again.
Abby Alten Schwartz is a Philly-born-now-Jersey-Shore writer whose work has appeared in Hippocampus, HAD, The Citron Review, Many Nice Donkeys, The Belladonna Comedy and elsewhere. Her weirdly poignant flash fiction story about Carol Brady was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, which only encouraged her to get weirder. Find Abby on Substack at Name Three Things or visit abbyaltenschwartz.com.
