C’est magique
In a country where dogs sleep in gutters and cats slink through back-alley trash heaps, I’d all but given up hope of meeting anyone with a real pet here. I definitely know people who own animals, but those animals are almost always on an unalterable path to becoming dinner.
Then I met Magique.
Who, you ask, is Magique?
Magique is my friend Shannon’s host brother’s sheep. He has unfathomably skinny knees, sleeps curled in a ball, and bleets like a screaming man. Magique enjoys rice with onion sauce, trying to sneak into the house, and an occasional good, old-fashioned round of head-butting.
There’s something inexplicably hilarious about seeing someone keep an unexpected type of animal as a pet. “What do you do with him?” I asked. But then again, what do I do with my dog at home? I pet him and feed him and parade him around my neighborhood on the end of a long piece of rope. I guess that’s really no less weird than letting a sheep traipse around your yard and eat your leftover rice, is it?
Don’t answer that.
