Demonology by Rick Moody

chessboard, if you saw it from the air. This was
     near Bidwell, Ohio. Don’t know if it was Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto, some company like that. The particular spread I’m
     talking about got sold to developers later. I guess it was more lucrative to sell the plot and buy some other place. The housing
     development that grew up on that land, it was called Golden Meadow Estates even though it didn’t have any meadows. That’s
     where we lived after Dad got laid off. He’d been at the bar down by the railroad when the news came through.
    So he took the job at Sears, in the power tools dept. About the same time he met my mom. She’d once placed ina beauty contest, Miss Scandinavian Bidwell. They got married after dating a long while. My mom, probably on account of her
     beauty crown experience, was eager for my dad (and me too, because I showed up pretty soon) to get some of that American fortune
     all around her. She was hopeful. She was going to get her some. The single-story tract house over in Golden Meadow Estates,
     well, it was a pretty tight fit, not to mention falling down, and we were stuck next door to a used-car salesman nobody liked.
     I heard a rumor that this guy Stubb, this neighbor, had dead teenagers in the basement. The Buckeye State had a national lead
     in serial killers, though, so maybe that wasn’t any big surprise. My mother convinced my dad that he had to get into some
     other line of work, where there was a better possibility of advancing.
Was he going to spend his whole life selling power tools?
Her idea was raising Angora rabbits. He went along with it. They really multiplied, these rabbits, like I bet you’ve heard.
     They were my chore, matter of fact. You’d get dozens of these cages with rabbits that urinated and shat all over everything
     if you even whispered at them, and then you had to
spin
their fur, you know, on an
actual loom.
If you wanted to make any kind of money at all. I didn’t have to spin anything though. I was too little. But you get the
     idea. Turned out my mother didn’t have the patience for all that.
    Next was yew trees. Some chemical in the yew tree was supposed to be an ingredient in the toxins for fighting cancers. Maybe
     my mother was thinking about that cluster in town. I mean, just about everybody in Golden Meadows Estates sported a wig, and
     so it wasn’t newsworthy later when they found that the development had been laid out onan old chromium dump. Meantime, we actually had a half acre of yew trees already planted on some land rented from the nylon
     manufacturer downtown, and there were heavy metals there too, which must have been fatal to the yew trees. The main thing
     is they cooked up this chemical, the yew chemical, in the laboratory by the end of the year.
    Mom made a play for llamas. She went down to the Bid-well public library. To the business section. Read up about llamas. But
     what can you do with a llama anyway? Make a sweater?
Well, that’s how we settled on ostriches.
The ostrich is a poetic thing, let me tell you. Its life is full of dramas. The largest of birds on planet Earth. The ostrich
     is almost eight feet tall and weighs three hundred pounds and it has a brain not too much bigger than a pigeon’s brain. It
     has two toes. It can reach speeds of fifty miles an hour, and believe me, I’ve seen them do it. Like if you were standing
     at the far end of the ostrich farm we had, the Rancho Double Zero, and you were holding a Cleveland Indians beer cup full
     of corn, that ostrich would come at you about the speed an eighteen-wheeler comes at you on the interstate. Just like having
     a pigeon swoop at you, except that this pigeon is the size of a minivan. The incredible stupidity on the ostrich’s face is
     worth mentioning too, in case you haven’t seen one lately. They’re mouth-breathers, or anyhow their beaks always hang open
     a little bit. That pretty much tells you all you need to know. Lights on, property vacant. They