Emma Lamb loved mornings.
New York City was never quiet, but there was a kind of calmness in the hour around dawn that she wouldn't miss for the world. She would never sleep in, even if her job didn't demand that she rise early.
She loved her job. She had been a fully-licensed veterinarian for nine years now, and there wasn't a day that she regretted her career choice.
She loved her apartment. Cozy but minimalist, it was always filled with the background noise of the animals in the kennel room downstairs. It was also frequently filled with friends, but Emma always sent them home at the end of the evening. She lived alone, and she liked it that way.
She loved her commute. It was exactly fourteen steps downstairs to her office, a cramped but scrupulously clean space whose rent she worked her ass off to afford. Between that and lingering student loans, she wasn't nearly as rich as some of her clients seemed to think, grumbling under their breath as they wrote out checks.
The kennel room in the back of the clinic was always her first stop. She didn't board animals, but the two cages along the back wall were usually occupied by dogs or cats recovering from surgery and miscellaneous illnesses. Emma greeted today's inpatients by name, refilling their food and water dishes with one hand while checking their condition with the other. No movement was ever wasted.
Then, the other side of the room. "Good morning, Sasha," she said, in the tone she might use for a friend: warm, familiar, without the babying cadences some people used in such situations.
Sasha had no particular response to the greeting. This was first because she was a dog, and second because she was not used to the name. She had only acquired it yesterday, when she appeared outside the back door of the clinic without papers or tags. She was old, but seemed in good health and well-socialized. Later, Emma would have to call the shelter uptown to retrieve the dog and try to find her a new home.
The next stop was that same back door. Emma stepped out into the cool fall air, drawing a deep breath.
And then she saw that it was a kitten dump morning.
She hated kitten dump mornings.
She knew it was a kitten dump because the box was meowing. This at least meant that the kittens were alive and relatively well, which was better than some of the alternatives.
She picked up the box and carried it back inside.
It turned out to contain seven kittens - alert, wriggling, not obviously sick or maltreated. Emma estimated that they were about five weeks old. It took her about an hour to check over the kittens, corral them into a cage, and document their arrival. That done, she moved the cardboard box out of the way so she could clean the exam table.
There was something wrong about the thump the box made as she set it on the counter. Folding the flap down, she peered inside.
Lying in the bottom of the box was a turtle.
Emma swore under her breath. Partly at herself - how could she have missed this? - and partly at the dumper. She wasn't a reptile vet. She could never shake the perception that reptiles, so motionless much of the time, were lazy, and laziness was one thing she could not stand.
She washed her hands, wiped down the table, and then took the turtle out of the box. It lay on the table as though it hadn't even noticed its change in surroundings.
Emma picked up the wall phone with its long cord, dialed a familiar number, and tucked the receiver against her shoulder.
"Beardsley Zoo Reptile House, Ron Engel speaking."
"Ron, it's Emma."
"Hey, Emma. What crawled in today?"
"It's a turtle," she sighed.
A herpetologist who didn't know her might have gone straight to, "What kind?", but Ron had been fielding these calls from Emma for years. Instead, he started on a cladistic assessment.
"What kind of pattern does it have on its head?" he asked.
"Ah…" Emma bent down to peer at the small animal. "Definitely striped."
"What color?"
"Kind of pink-ish."
There was an uncharacteristic pause in the line of questioning. "Pink-ish?"
"I would say definitely pink-ish," Emma repeated.
"Well," Ron said, "sounds like you have a pastel red-eared slider. Those are unusual."
"Lucky me," Emma said, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
Ron chuckled. He had always been very patient about Emma's lack of love for reptiles, though he generally considered it to be a serious character flaw. "Male or female?"
Emma flipped the turtle over. "How does this go again?"
"Males have the cloaca further out," Ron reminded her.
"I'd say it's a male, then," Emma said.
"And how does he look?"
Emma watched the upended reptile move its stubby limbs. "Even for a turtle, I'd say he's making a pretty weak attempt at flipping himself over."
"Mm." A worried noise.
"Also, is it normal for red-eared sliders to have proportionally huge heads?"
"Not really, no." A pause, then - "Get him some water and a UV lamp. See if he's doing better in a few hours."
"I will. Thanks, Ron."
"Any time."
Emma flipped the helpless turtle back onto its front, and clicked the receiver into its cradle. In short order she'd assembled a terrarium with a water dish, some food, and the old heat lamp she kept around for just such occasions. In went the turtle, and then Emma headed to the front door, to turn the sign to Open and await her first appointment of the day.
Emma had a rule that no animal could remain nameless for more than twenty-four hours. Between well visits in the morning, she collected a stack of index cards and a marker from the drawer in her office, and headed into the kennel room. After a moment's thought, she named the seven kittens after players in the ongoing World Series. Then, having run out of time and inspiration, she simply wrote Greenie on the last card, before taping it to the turtle's terrarium.
"Next patient is ready, Emma."
Emma turned and nodded to her veterinary assistant. Meredith was hanging in the doorway between the kennel room and the narrow hallway; just behind her was the back door of the exam room. "Pushkin, right?"
"Mm-hmm."
"Great. Later today, can you call the shelter and make arrangements for -" She glanced back at the cards hanging from the kittens' cage. "Gibson, Eckersley, Tudor, McGwire, Canseco, Baylor, Honeycutt, and Sasha?"
"Sure thing," Meredith said, and pushed off from the doorframe to head back into the exam room. Emma followed, and mostly forgot about the strays for the rest of the day.
Meredith hailed her again in the evening, as Emma was coming out of her office after finishing her charting.
"Emma," she said, "there's something strange about Greenie."
Meredith was from the country - that is, northwest New Jersey - and had experience with all kinds of animals. Emma leaned against the doorway of the kennel room, raising an eyebrow and awaiting an explanation.
"First," Meredith said, "what happened to his feet?"
"What do you mean?" Emma asked.
Meredith turned, leaning over the terrarium, inviting Emma to join her. "Turtles are supposed to have five toes all the way around," she said, pointing at the terrapin's tiny feet. "But Greenie only has three in the front and two in the back."
"You're right," Emma said.
"And there's something weird about the way he holds them," Meredith went on, making a gesture that encompassed Greenie's posture. "But mostly what I notice is the way he looks at me."
This was met with a skeptical expression from Emma.
"It's normal for animals to be curious, even reptiles." Meredith put a slight stress on the last words, knowing her employer's disdain for the cold-blooded branches of the vertebrate tree. "But - I don't know. I've never had a reptile look at me like that."
Emma leaned over the terrarium again. Greenie had his head tilted sideways, one eye pointed up at the women. The other, of course, was pointed towards the sand.
Or was it? Greenie's eyes, in his big head, seemed closer together than they should have been - more like a dog or cat than like a rabbit or a bird.
She drew back, unsettled. "Well," she said, "have you finished cleaning up?"
"All done," Meredith said. She dusted off her hands, a purely symbolic gesture that preceded proper sanitation. "I'll see you tomorrow, Emma."
"Good night, Meredith," Emma said, and in a moment she was alone.
But only for a moment. The back door had hardly closed when someone knocked on it. Emma turned off the lights in the kennel room as she went to greet her visitor.
"Hi, Terri," she said, when she opened the door. "Hi, Anna."
"Hi, Emma," Terri said warmly.
Anna didn't respond. Although she was human, she was only six months old, and thus in Emma's opinion was an even worse conversationalist than a dog. Terri liked children so much that she had produced three of them already, but she respected Emma's preference for small creatures with fur, and this was a large part of why the two of them had remained friends for so long.
"Come on up," Emma said, and locked the door before turning to climb the stairs to her apartment. "I'm so ready for this election cycle to be over," she said, as she followed Terri. "Can we just elect Dukakis and get it over with already?"
"If it weren't for the election cycle," Terri said, "I don't think there would be any news."
"There's always the Cold War."
"It's a Cold War," Terri pointed out, as they went into the living room. "There hasn't been anything to report since… ah…"
Emma thought a moment. "The INF treaty?"
"Could be," Terri agreed. Meanwhile, she produced a box of homemade cookies from her capacious diaper bag. Emma was fairly certain that the mothers of small infants were supposed to receive food from friends and extended family, but Terri was a feeder, and even childbirth could not stop her from cooking.
"If there was no news at all," Emma said, accepting the box of cookies, "that would be just fine with me. I like it when things don't change too suddenly."
The two women moved into the kitchen, and Terri changed the topic from politics to children. "Sharon got in a fight at school."
"Is that so?" Emma asked, simultaneously sticking a cookie in her mouth and filling the tea kettle.
"She won," Terri said proudly.
"Did the other kid deserve it? What kind of tea?"
"Jasmine, and the other kid started it, so I would think so."
Emma nodded, putting tea bags in mugs. "And Thomas?"
"He keeps coming home with the most beautiful art projects. I should bring them over sometime and show you."
Emma made a quarter-turn, her hip swiveling against the edge of the counter, and fixed Terri with a flat look.
"Or not," Terri said, lifting Anna from her baby carrier to cradle her in her arms. "Anyway, things are going well for Stephen."
Stephen was Terri's husband, and thus was her favorite topic of conversation after her children. He was a lawyer, specializing in the field of family law. Emma poured the tea and sat down, and the two women talked well into the evening.