A camel followed me home from your wake. Dad offered me a ride, but Mom didn’t want me in the car, so I walked instead. As I reached High Park, cherry blossoms fell on my hair that was still wet from my morning shower, cascaded down my one good black blazer. There was a roar behind me, like a jetliner was taking off from the island airport, and when I turned around, a massive caterpillar was gnawing at the blossoms and next to it, a camel was hovering in front of the sun, spitting out stems like they were toothpicks.

“Git,” I said, and raised my arms and waved them around like I was trying to scare away a bear. But, of course, a camel is not a bear, and it smacked its teeth, hump bulging from its back, as if to say, What are you looking at? Haven’t you ever seen a camel in Toronto or cherry blossoms in July?

When I got home Mom refused to let it in the house—you know how she hates anything that sheds—so Dad made a bed for it in the garage, arranging the winter tires in a row and padding the barrel he used for homemade wine with the yard waste we forgot to put out last week. Then he sent João, your little boy, with a plastic grocery bag to pick up all the shit that the camel had trailed down the street. When João came back, Dad fashioned the bag into a pillow and nested it under the camel’s head.

“How’s that for recycling?” he said proudly, and I laughed because we all needed the distraction.

João wanted to sleep with the camel because he’s four and misses you. He climbed onto the camel’s hump and wrapped himself around it, just like when he was a newborn and would sleep skin-to-skin on your chest after you breastfed him, and the camel started licking his head like he was its calf. 

I tugged João off and brought him upstairs, but he tossed and turned and complained that my bed was uncomfortable and he’d rather sleep with the camel, and why did I bring him here anyway? And what was I supposed to say because it seemed ridiculous to make him stay here if he all he wanted was to sleep with the camel. So, I brought him to the garage and helped him climb back on and after he was settled, he patted the camel’s downy undercoat the way he used to swat at your earrings when he was a baby and thought that everything that shimmered was a toy. The camel grunted and João hummed, both of them oblivious to the stench of crap filling the garage.

I gagged. I couldn’t stay there anymore. When I left, I kept the garage door open because maybe the camel would disappear and take its bag of shit with it.

Outside, the night was cool. The cedar tree we bought Dad with our first pay cheque delivering catalogues and planted on our front lawn rustled and the air was swept with the scent of loamy soil. A woman came up the street walking a Bernese Mountain dog, its fur silvery satin in the moonlight. She stopped when she saw the camel, leaned over and cooed at it, then straightened.

“Adorable. What’s its name?”

I had to think about it. I had never considered what to call a camel.

“Dolores,” I said finally.

She pulled her dog’s leash taut. “That’s my dog’s name, too.”

I was annoyed because not once today had someone said, This camel does not belong in the city. It’s a wild animal that belongs in the desert.

When I turned back to the garage, the camel was sleeping, a snore thrumming from its nostrils like the chugging of a faraway train.

“Oh, I’m out of bags!”

The woman’s dog was crouched on the boulevard grass, snuffling with effort. When her Dolores was finished it kicked at the grass, and she apologized and tugged the dog away.

I went inside and fished around under the sink for another plastic bag until I found one gunked with orange dish soap.

Outside, I stooped and picked up the mound the woman’s dog had left behind. Holding the steaming bag away from me, I carried it into the garage and dropped it next to the bagged pillow where the camel was lying. The camel raised its sleepy head. When I scratched between its eyes, it purred like a cat, and I realized it had only nibbled at cherry blossoms all day. I yanked on a cedar branch until it splintered and came free and brought it into the garage where the camel was waiting, its mouth opened wide. Its yellowed teeth were filed flat, and the roof of its mouth was covered in spiky flesh, protruding bones and tissue folded into a row of cones, ready to devour anything I fed it.

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Kelly Pedro (she/her) is a Canadian writer who lives on the Haldimand Tract — land that was promised to the Six Nations of the Grand River — in a house full of people and animals, including a cat and a snake.