Excerpt from Spider Love Song and Other Stories by Nancy Au, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Lai tried to grab the phone again. "This is my Louise!"

May took another picture. Click.

"Go ahead! Take my picture! If you don't have proof, then we didn't have this fight, right? Is that what you need? Proof?" Lai turned to the crowd. "How can you all just stand there? This duck is hurt! We need to save it!"

"Stop this now!" exploded the ranger.

Lai crossed her arms protectively over the bird. May slid the phone into her pocket. The ranger took a different notepad out of a pocket, one with alternating yellow and black carbon pages, and began to scribble. May could not see what he was writing, but glimpsed the word nuisance.

Lai freed one arm, laughed as she mimicked writing on the bird's back. "Look, May. Look. Who am I? Who am I?"

"Are you crazy, Lai?" said May. "Just let go of the duck!"

Undeterred, Lai used a deep, authoritative voice to mock the ranger. "Look at me. I'm an officer in charge, dressed like asparagus."

The ranger paused to ask, "Are you on drugs?"

"Sometimes," said Lai.

May jumped in. "No. No, she's not. No. No. Look, we're sorry. We won't take the duck. We love animals. I'm a vegetarian. Look! These shoes are pleather. They're so full of plastic you could drink a cup of water out of 'em! Lai doesn't want to hurt the duck. Please ... Lai? Can you just grow up and apologize to the ranger?"

Lai did not look at either of them; instead, she continued to cradle her duck.

"Lai. Let. Go. Of. The. Duck."

The ranger began to lecture Lai on the sanctity of city laws used to protect animals from people like her, pointing out that her tampering with the duck was more harmful to the bird's survival than the wilderness it lived in. As he tried to pry the animal out of Lai's arms, the duck stretched out its neck, puffed its chest, then defecated; green-white goo leaked through Lai's fingers, onto the ranger's boot.

"Shit!" the ranger shouted, his face turning crimson. "Literally!" Lai laughed hysterically. "There's poo on your shoe!" The ranger, who was at least six inches taller than Lai, made another grab for the duck and scratched Lai's arm in the process. Struggling against the ranger, May's wife held tightly to the feathery body. The duck squawked loudly when Lai's finger accidentally poked its mangled eye socket. "I'm so sorry, Louise!" Lai cried out. May's heart squeezed when her wife wiped angry tears from her own eyes with the back of her forearm, trying not to get poop on her cheek. Pushing away the ranger's outstretched hand, Lai lifted the duck close to her face, practically burying her nose in the filthy feathers; she squinted into the duck's empty eye socket. May could tell that Lai was trying to assess whether the duck was in pain, whether she'd really hurt the animal. As the ranger reached once again for the duck, May stared at the scratches on her wife's arm— she pictured jackals, coyotes, rabid dogs, all the things that ate injured ducks. And when she saw that Lai's abrasions were turning from magenta to a dark oozing red, she reached into the tangle of authority and feather and squawk.

"Stay back!" roared the ranger as he yanked the bird roughly out of Lai's hands.

Excerpted from Spider Love Song and Other Stories by Nancy Au. Copyright © 2019 by Nancy Au. Excerpted by permission of Acre Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.