Revenge of Cuddles (a choose-your-own-adventure) - Joseph Lezza
Cuddles was a horrible hamster. So said R.L. Stine. To me, he was a cipher. “From Taco Bell,” said Lacey, stuffing his mouth full of Milky Pop pens. “He came with my kids meal!” Cuddles was a wisp of a thing, a curl of rubber with neon eyes and two buck teeth protruding from his Wilford Brimley mustache. There was something mad about him, his crazed expression made real by the tiny convulsions Lacey hammered through him as she tapped her knee on the underside of the desk.
CHOOSE
Ask Lacey if you can hold Cuddles – go to footnote #1
Continue to fixate on Cuddles in silence – go to next paragraph
Cuddles was said to have eaten monster blood. And, if you looked closely, you could see a few drops between his chompers, staining his whiskers. He kept the madness within him. Until Lacey turned him inside out, until she withdrew the Milky Pop pens and his bowels with them. I watched her toy with him, thrashing him like snap bracelet. As the turned him inside out, I watched Cuddles’ face squish, invert, and give way to a wisp of neon. To my nine year-old eye, Cuddles seemed happier this way. He no longer trembled. That must be what it’s like, I imagined, to have someone crack you like a glow stick. To gush forth, acid green. To empty out your rancid bits for the world to see.
Fractured, but vivid. Feral, but known.
CHOOSE
Realize you’re missing social studies and pay attention to the lesson – go to footnote #2
Fall down a bottomless well of questioning – go to next paragraph
Are all hamsters green inside? Or, just those of us with monsters lurching through our veins and reaching their callous, varicosed hands up our throats and out towards the light? Can they be monsters if we only tremble when we swallow them back into the dark? Do hamsters eat monsters in the wild? I thought it was pellets. My third-grade brain had questions, all smothered by the final inversion, when Lacey brought the hamster back and shoved the monster down where only the pens could see it. When Cuddles went back to shaking.
CHOOSE
Proceed home with intent but give up when you smell dinner cooking – go to footnote #3
Proceed home and insist on dinner at Taco Bell or you’ll firebomb the earth – go to next paragraph
I needed that hamster. I needed him from that inexplicable place that tells us to put chips on a sandwich and to run up the stairs the instant we turn out the lights. I needed him that night, needed to free the beast, needed to set him on the corner of my desk the very next day. A shield and a signal of our shared mutation. So, I begged. I pleaded until Dad gave in, until Mom took the pasta water off the stove, until we pulled up to heaven’s gate and a voice beyond the light asked “Can I take your order?”
CHOOSE
Play it cool and order like you don’t care – go to footnote #4 S
cream, you little nerd – go to next paragraph
“I want Cuddles!” I screamed over a half-open rear window. Hamster was the entrée, to me. On the side of what made no difference. Over Dad’s sigh from the driver’s seat my fevered snout conjured up the scent of fresh rubber, blown quickly away by a static caterwaul. “All out,” screeched the voice box. “Would you like a Slappy’s Candy Keeper?”
CHOOSE
Demand they call around and find the nearest location with Cuddles in stock – go to footnote #5
Accept Slappy amidst a silent rage seizure – go to next paragraph
A rolling boil worked its way up the well of my esophagus and flooded my ears. My mind’s eye saw my face become a fountain, spewing hot, fluorescent gore from every socket. And, as Dad swiveled – his expression imploring a decision – the last words I heard, before the world gave way to rumbles, were “Slappy is the dummy with the yummies.”
CHOOSE
Get over it – go to footnote #6
Let this fester and use it as copy in twenty-odd years – go to next paragraph
I don’t recall choosing a toy that night. I don’t recall choosing a meal. I recall choosing only to bury my childish fury under some nameless combination of meat and cheese and beans…and Slappy at the bottom of some pastel trashcan. I chose to sit there, shaking, feeding my inner monster cinnamon twists. I chose to let it fester, to tremble. To push it down where only the pens could see. To write, instead.
From the rancid bits.
Footnotes:
1. “Ew, no. You have cooties.” The shockwave of a desk scraping itself across the floor and away from you pummels your geekery into the walls and halls of the school, echoing endlessly. You will never know true friendship.
2. Did you know that the early colonists hunted largely pheasant, partridge, woodcock, and quail? Now you do. Next week, in class, you’ll be drying apples and dipping candles. Soon after, you’ll go to high school, college, and inevitably grow up to be something really boring, like a CPA. Enjoy New Rochelle.
3. Shut up and eat your broccoli only to wake up the next day and learn that all Taco Bells have shuttered and they’ve burned all the toys in effigy. Grow up and find yourself working at KFC, slinging greasy chicken and staring out the window at the charred remains of the structure where, long ago, people once Lived Más. Live menos forever.
4. Distracted by efforts to disguise the actual motive behind your restaurant choice, Mom & Dad order you a Chicken Ranch Taco Salad which comes, not with a toy, but with a side of self-loathing and body image implications that will follow you like a wraith for the rest of your life. Say hi to your therapist(s).
5. The drive-thru employee, making $4.75 an hour, would sooner stick his hand between two flour-tortillas and eat it than ring up every store in the tri-state just to please your little snot nose. In fact, not only will they not be doing that, now you don’t even get Slappy. You get the Wrappin’ Mummy. He doesn’t even come with candy.
6. Hah, right.
***
Joseph Lezza is a Pushcart and 3x Best of the Net-nominated writer on the east coast. His debut memoir in essays, I'm Never Fine: Scenes and Spasms on Loss (Vine Leaves Press), was a finalist for the 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Award and the 2021 Prize Americana in Prose and was named by Buzzfeed LGBTQ+, them, StyleCaster, abc7 San Francisco, and Lambda Literary as a "Most Anticipated/Best Book of 2023." His work has been featured in, among others, Longreads, Identity Theory, Variant Literature, and Santa Fe Writers Project. His website is www.josephlezza.com and you can find him on the socials @lezzdoothis or on Bluesky @josephlezza.com.