James Randolph V leaned back in his chair, gazing around his office. Almost automatically, his hand reached for one of the boiled sweets he’d used to wean himself off smoking and popped it into his mouth. The problem with replacing one habit with another, of course, is that then you’re left with the new habit. At least boiled sweets were a lot better for him than tobacco.
Tobacco was something James had literally grown up with. A scion of an old Virginia family, tobacco was the foundation on which the Randolph family had been founded and on which they had prospered. But James, through a strange series of events, had ended up not in the tobacco business but in the fluffy business.
As General Counsel for the The Fluffy Ranch, nestled in the fertile land between the Mississippi and the border with northern Missouri, he enjoyed a sizable office in the administrative building. A variety of frames lining the walls told the story, almost like a timeline.
There was his undergraduate degree, from West Point. The shadow box from the first half of his military career. Airborne Ranger, Special Forces, a fruit salad of ribbons. He still carried himself with that bearing, still kept his hair in a high and tight and worked out in the mornings. It was, perhaps, the happiest he’d been in his life.
And then his wife left, and took the children. Unable to cope with the long absences and crazy optempo, and unable to get her husband to listen and accept reality. It had been like a bucket of ice water being thrown over him, waking him from a wonderful dream.
Elizabeth leaving had forced James to face up to a number of things, albiet too late to preserve his family. One of them was the fact that playing Captain America for his entire career would not leave him with an easily transferable skill set for his inevitable second act in the civilian world. And so he applied to the Army’s Funded Legal Education Program.
There was the law degree the Army paid for him to get, and the LL.M in military law from the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School in his native Virginia. As he had hoped, serving the second half of his twenty year career as a JAG officer left James in a much stronger position to reenter the civilian world. Sure, he did rotations in military justice and operational law. But there was also administrative law, labor law, environmental law, and contract and fiscal law. When he retired, James had multiple corporations interested in his services.
Unfortunately, he chose Hasbio. There on the wall, after the membership certificates for various state and federal bars, was a framed news headline about the company’s collapse.James, along with the rest of the company’s lawyers, had been out of a job. It should have been easy to get another. But his association with Hasbio turned out to be the proverbial Mark of Caine, at least for corporations that had nothing to do with fluffys.
“Daddeh? Pawaweagaw’s ball am stuck.”
The whining of Paralegal, his companion fluffy, broke through James’ reverie. Many people were surprised when they learned that James liked, let alone owned, fluffies. They had ruined his career, after all. But Hasbio had insisted that those in senior positions take a fluffy home as a form of product testing and, down the line, hopefully free marketing. Despite himself, James had taken a liking to them.
James pushed himself out of his chair, heading over to where Paralegal had managed to wedge the ball. Dark blue with a black mane and tail, Paralegal was a Carpdime fluffy and the result of one of James’ breeding projects. James viewed the breeding of fluffies as a hobby, in much the same way the Queen of England bred corgis. He had been aiming for dark blue with yellow, and so he had been disappointed when the black started coming in atop and behind the coat that was the perfect shade of blue. But he had taken a liking to the foal, and felt ready for a new companion after the death of his last pet fluffy, and so Paralegal moved out of the project and into the house.
Once the filly, now a mare, had mastered the litterbox, she began accompanying him to the office. "There you go, girl."James murmured, rolling the ball over the carpet. But Paralegal had lost all interest in the ball, and sat back on her haunches with her front legs raised in the classic huggies pose.
“Daddeh giv’ upsies?” she trilled hopefully, and even as he leaned down and picked the fluffy up he found himself wondering if getting the ball stuck had been a ploy to get him to come over here and away from his work. But fluffies, surely, were not that smart.
Carrying Paralegal back over to his desk, James resettled himself into the chair. The fluffy curled up in his lap, one hand absent-mindedly petting her as the other scrolled through his email.
“Daddeh, Pawaweagaw wan’ opewa.”
Ah yes, opera. Wagner helped James think, and to his surprise Paralegal had become quite fond of it too, More than once he had seen the ring cycle at Bayreuth, and he idly imagined he would take Paralegal someday despite the difficulties travelling internationally with fluffies presented. He pulled up the music player on his computer, and soon the mystical strains of Parsifal filled the office.
As he felt Paralegal relax toward sleep, his attention returned to his email, As General Counsel, his work touched every aspect of the facility’s operation. Everything from labor law to the FAA regulations governing the drones fell into his domain, and as the overseer of contracts he was one of the few who knew precisely the destination that awaited those fluffies who left on the monthly government trucks. Such knowledge did not trouble him, however. For all his personal relationships with fluffies, James did not consider himself a hugboxer. He had no desire to save every filthy feral he happened across in an alleyway, but nor could he hate the creatures simply for existing.
After all, they did not ask to be created. They were the unwise, unwilling, and unwanted bastard children of humanity’s hubris and greed.
And so, when it came to fluffies, James Randolph V’s attitude was best summed up in the simple words that lawyers reflexively reach for in answer to almost any question:
It depends.