Acceptance like Damp Earth
Anguish resides in the heart, sweeping through its chambers and arresting those intimately involved.
They start as a trickle, the flow of them. Most things do, in their way. The adults plod and shuffle along in exhaustion like cattle, corralled by the limestone ticket counters and turnstiles. Bodies pressed together move as one hulking form towards the exit and, presumably, sleep.
Children skip and prance about with faces painted as tigers, bears, and the odd superhero mask. Among them are some who stamp the floor in shoes with blinking multicolored lights, their yelps of protest splitting the air. Sullen faces stream past Theo and me, resentment brimming in their stares at the adults waiting to get inside.
Their judging glares draw blood — bodies in miniature yanking and ripping at heartstrings with the finesse of a demolition team performing open-heart surgery. Unintentionally, of course, but I wonder if there’s more to their looks than jealousy. Pity, maybe, because they know. Of course, they do, but children don’t react as adults do, compartmentalizing or outright ignoring feelings. Children live their feelings. Overflow with them, flooding their veins, infusing them with rapture or misery, like ships running aground and taking on water, slowly slipping beneath the rising seas.
“I feel awful, like I’m taking something from them,” I whisper to Theo.
“The zoo closes at five anyway,” he says back, dark spots blooming in the armpits of his linen shirt. Standing in line for the better part of forty minutes, we’re not much different from pouting children, sweaty, reeking, long run out of things to stare at on our phones.
“Last call, closing time. The little boogers are wasted on sugar and overpriced hot dogs,” Theo looks up, smirking at the families filing past. “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. Besides, our money’s as good as theirs. At $150 a pop for VIP tickets, I think we’re entitled to the run of the place for a few hours.”
I feel a hollow throbbing within, not nearly as bad as before, but that only means it’s not crippling. I tense my muscles against the strain, hoping I can keep from falling inside it, losing myself again.
Theo catches this mid-rant, perhaps tipped off by the grimace I’m too exhausted to hide. Annoyance melts, his face softening, giving way to concern, and he places a hand on the small of my back.
“Are you sure you’re up for this, Sydney?”
I nod, though the act convinces neither of us. I watch another volley of families trickle out carrying dozing children, limbs limp at their sides. A lioness cradles her pouting cub, the child’s left eye rubbed clean of makeup. Her face puckers into a scowl as our eyes meet. I respond with a wave, which she rejects, burying her head into her mother’s shoulder.
Tonight, the San Antonio Zoo hosts its annual adults-only fundraiser. Every detail is designed to get you to open your purse strings, from the animal-themed food and drinks to the interactive activities that invite patrons to a look behind the scenes. By some grace of God, security, or event planning — the trinity that oversees all public gatherings — the crowd has never drunkenly stormed the animal pens to ride the giraffes. Each year draws more sizeable crowds, though, so there’s no telling when that’ll finally happen.
Theo and I always attend, a tradition born of sentimentalism but now more habit than anything. Our first date had been here, a point of embarrassment for Theo — he could barely afford groceries on his call center salary. Admittedly, the outing was a bit hokey but endearing nonetheless, especially in the aviary, where a handful of orange-beaked finches ruined his favorite shirt. Amidst the earthy smells of a barnyard, set to the soundtrack of bawling children, I saw my future with this curly-haired, lanky man.
The booth attendant, their lime-green work shirt permanently creased across their chest, stares at us with waning patience through the glass, quickly waving us through. We enter, arm in arm, to the left of Pride Plaza and the flamingo enclosure, whose pink and white inhabitants stand expectantly, grounded by clipped wings. A staff member in shorts and a tan button-up, a pewter whistle dangling from their neck, leans on a wall overlooking the plaza. They’re getting shorter, I think, initially, before realizing they’re sliding down. I strain my neck backward to determine if they’re under the influence of boredom, alcohol, or sunstroke.
A gruesome puzzle rapidly coalesces, the pieces shorn into shape by careless hands. The afflicted staff member struggles to remain upright, their shirt brushing a maroon streak the color of bruised eggplant against the stucco wall. Their face is ashen, purple semi-circles pooling beneath bloodshot eyes that look to the heavens for relief. A loosely rolled flap of scalp adorns one of their shoulders like a snake that’s halfway molted. The rest of their hair, whatever remains of it, hangs in a tangled clump saturated with life and death itself, blood and earth. The left arm sleeve is empty, painted the same red-brown smear as the wall. Their right arm hangs slack, like the child from the entrance, though not from fatigue. It looks to have been deboned.
I stop, a scream welling in my throat, trapped against my vocal cords like a cork in a bottle. It will be released only when the time is right, and a rich spectrum of blood-curdling notes has matured.
I tear free from Theo’s hold on my arm. The staff member halts their downward trajectory, lifting their head by unseen tethers. The calm in the plaza shatters with the flamingoes’ squawks and beating wings. I shut my eyes, willing the image away, waiting for the scream to work its way loose.
“What?” Theo asks, his furrowed eyebrows staring at me. The staff member, their maimed limbs, the trailing streak — are gone. So, too, is the flamingoes’ nails on a chalkboard caterwaul. Only the sound of my hammering heart remains.
“Nothing,” I say, pushing the moment down to the furthest recess of my mind.
Around the corner, hyenas cool themselves in a shallow water feature, their muzzles perched atop the loins of their neighbors. The rear of the enclosure is bathed in shadow from hanging canvas, forming a makeshift barrier from the scorching sun. Dark shapes shift within them, some with hooves, while others twitch about on hands and feet. Equally disinterested in all things, the hyenas continue napping while I pull Theo away before anything manifests out of that unlit static.
There are supposed to be two kinds of bears in an area called ‘The Grottos’ — spectacled and black — but both appear to be either well camouflaged or retired to their evening quarters. The Komodo dragons have also taken leave.
“How easy do you think it would be to pass off an empty zoo by saying the animals are sleeping?” Theo asks.
“I’m not so sure they haven’t done that already,” I scoff, just as a gibbon’s black face outlined in sandy fur emerges beyond a chainlink fence. It gives us the once over, quickly losing interest. I imagine a pair of tall primates in colorful, compressive clothing like the millions of others they’ve seen during their tenure here is business as usual. It plunges back into a pool of growing shade behind a shale wall and is no longer.
We follow signs to the children’s section of the grounds, where vendor tents and a soundstage spill out on the walking path. I see cages off the side of the stage by a wall of speakers, one with a tortoise exhibit and the other with pygmy monkeys. Theo continues towards the drink tent while I stop an official-looking woman, clipboard in hand, wearing sunglasses that look like a parrot mid-flight.
“Will the animals mind the noise from this?” I ask, prompted by a sudden urge to know. The woman with the clipboard removes her glasses, her face knotting into a tight frown.
“We always consider the animals during these events,” the woman’s tone is measured but might as well be coated in broken glass. “Organizers chose this area because it backs up to Brackenridge Park and the parking lot to lessen the sound pollution,” she says, as if the sound will magically seek out those unpopulated areas.
I mirror the edge in the woman’s voice, pointing to the tortoises and pygmy primates, “I guess those animals are deaf, then? Or did you design the speakers so that the sound will avoid them?”
A small crowd forms around us, pausing their mechanical pressing of tepid fish tacos and bottom-shelf margaritas to their mouths to stare at us. A gentle tug at my arm — Theo — looking horrified as though witnessing a busful of orphans crash into a vanful of nuns in slow-motion.
I lean all the way in. “Considering the animals’ days are filled with shouts, they can probably manage an 80’s cover band. Right?”
The woman’s mouth contracts into a lipless line across her chin. Theo wraps an arm around my shoulders, steering me away.
“Thanks for caring!” I call over my shoulder.
“The hell was that?” he whispers once we’re safely out of earshot.
“I just asked how the sound affects the animals. She’s the one that got ugly about it,” I say.
“I think maybe we should….” Theo starts, but I catch the eye of Emily, Rodrigo, and Kashaf from work and storm over.
“Which one said that to you?” Emily asks, their eyes turning to slits as I imagine sharks do when they go in for a bite. A knowing smile twists loose. Emily’s knuckles wrap tightly around the plastic wine glass in their hand. “Maybe she’ll find herself accidentally pushed into the crocodile pond.”
Emily is wound a little too tight, but that happens when you work in customer relations all day. Credit card fraud forces customers and reps into corners until everyone’s baring their teeth at each other, and all that’s left is the pearly sheen before the tearing starts. Under that kind of pressure — ‘battle conditions’ as we call them — you make a family out of co-workers, even if you have nothing in common short of communal trauma.
“Easy, Em,” I tip back my glass, patting their hand. “But thanks.”
Emily relaxes but still shoots accusatory looks at passersby.
“Perfectly valid question,” says Rodrigo. “This whole event feels…” he rolls his hands, struggling for the word.
“Colonial,” offers Kashaf.
Rodrigo snaps his fingers, “Yes! A caste system, even. The lower class in cages while we roam free.” He shivers, “It’s disgusting.”
I see Theo stewing in my periphery and change the subject. “I think it’s time for a refill,” I suggest.
85% humidity feels just a few rungs below getting steamed alive, so we opt for frozen green drinks topped with plastic animal rings and take in the grounds. The falling sun coaxes a few creatures from their shaded retreats. Squawking macaws preen themselves, seemingly oblivious to our passage, while jaguars pace a penned sky bridge suspended over the walking path, stalking us with heads low slung heads.
A large, flat compound carved out of the limestone walls appears on our left. An expansive sign lists facts on African elephants, but the three in the elephant stage appear to be their Asian cousins, more compact with speckled skin on their faces and ears — two huddle beneath a red tarp, and a third stands in the far-right corner facing the wall. The loner sways from left to right, periodically wiping her trunk along the stone wall or plucking something off the ground. I remember this one from Theo’s and my first visit. She doesn’t seem to have changed much– or even moved.
“That elephant never faces the crowds,” Emily says. “I wonder why.”
“It doesn’t look right,” Theo adds. “Maybe it’s rescued or something.”
“That’s Lucky,” adds Kashaf. “She’s been here as long as I can remember.” A pregnant pause before the group hurries to the giraffe exhibit, where VIPs can hand-feed them kale.
Lucky stops swaying and ambles about to face me. Behind her limps a broken figure, wearing an oversized novelty cowboy hat, eyes milky-white, with a faint wisp of gray for a pupil. Something else shifts from the corner Lucky stared into so intently, and another three elephants emerge out of a space no bigger than a coat closet. Each is robed in dusk with gleaming silver orbs peering out at me. They swell, merging with the night until I can almost feel them against me.
Every breath becomes labored until I am pulling through pursed lips. I no longer wish to be here, confronting whatever this is. I run, head spinning until I find Theo.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” Theo pleads, his pupils the delicate color of pecan shells.
“I’m fine. I just got a little freaked out. I haven’t had alcohol in a while, and I’m seeing some really bizarre shit….”
“I just wonder if you’re pushing it,” his eyes are too fragile to hold back his tears for me much longer.
“I was the one that went through it. I know my body. It’s everyone else that can’t keep their opinions of it to themselves!”
A rustle of wings, or maybe leaves bristling against summer’s heavy breath, fills the silence. The grazing blow of my words nearly knocks Theo over. This is my pain, but I’m not alone in the suffering.
“Please,” I say, reaching for his chest and pulling it close. “I just want to be around people right now.”
Emily jogs towards us out of the giraffe exhibit and pulls an abrupt 180 to intercept Kashaf and Rodrigo. I cradle Theo’s face in my hands, holding his lips to mine, trying to breathe reassurance into him that I don’t possess. Theo embraces me against him, as do I, and we sway, buoyed in the churning waters of grief.
X
“I want to thank you all for coming,” says Gerald Sloan, who’s introduced as the CEO of the San Antonio Zoological Society — as if the group is so magnanimous that it would gladly have animals on the board if only they’d respond to the invites. Mr. Sloan — Gerry to those of us with expendable income and big hearts — has a face like an egg, thicker on one side and pointed at the other. A splotchy brown goatee with a dusting of white hangs from his chin while gunmetal eyes flicker in the artificial lamp light. His smile is that of someone who does so because it’s expected, propped up by PR coaching.
My family — work and actual — have found a corner table strategically located near the drink tent. It took a lot of convincing after the incident at the elephant exhibit, but I talked Theo into staying.
“Some of you may not be aware, but the zoo is a non-profit. We rely solely on ticket sales and the generosity of community members like yourselves to sustain our operations,” Gerry glides across the stage with a fluidity that reminds me of the jaguar stalking us from the sky bridge.
“The zoo strives to maintain itself as ambassador to young and old alike so that our spokes-animals’ wild counterparts may continue to exist.” Gerry’s ability to toss out media bites like ‘spokes-animals’ while straight-faced is both impressive and cringe-inducing. I lean over to Emily to say so when a chairback crashes to the ground like a gunshot.
“All animals deserve to be wild!” screams a woman encircled by four others clasping hands in a human barricade, their white shirts imprinted with “How many have died here?”, “Free Lucky!” and “Tormenter!” in a blood-red font. The color is too similar to the collapsed staff member by the entrance, painting a macabre mosaic with the life seeping out of them, and I avert my eyes.
I look, instead, to the stage in time to see the shine from the back of Gerry’s head disappear behind several brawny security guards. Someone else rushes the stage and addresses the crowd.
“Lucky the elephant has lived 60 years in captivity, never knowing the feel of genuine earth beneath her feet or the breath-stealing majesty of the endless jungles of her native Borneo,” the man’s voice booms even when the microphone cuts out. “Tonight, Lucky will be free!” the words fill the night, taking on a life of their own, bouncing from every surface until it seems like I’m breathing them.
Theo’s hand grips my shoulder, but the jostling crowd pulls us apart. Our table flips over, and I see Emily go wild-eyed and surge after the protesters. Hands flail, groping for balance, for belongings, for loved ones.
A low-warbling drone emerges out of the darkness, building until it’s the sound of a hundred brass sections. Sidewalks tremble, and a towering silhouette cuts out of the dark. The cone of my attention narrows to a pinprick, details lost to fresh waves of manic dread that collect in my stomach. The man onstage is right — Lucky and her pen-mates have been freed and are now thundering down on the attendees.
Organizers designed the fundraiser to be an open-air affair with booze flowing like rivers into the awaiting mouths of patrons. Consequently, most buildings are locked against the slipperiest of all vermin — belligerent drunks. Only the bathrooms are available as a means of escape, but they are quickly filled beyond capacity.
People careen into hedges, some into trees, and many more try to scale the twelve-foot fence behind the stage without success. Babel builds as the stampede of bodies confronts its meager prospects, eventually turning on itself as affluent, upstanding members of the community — doctors, lawyers, school teachers — claw and snap at each other for the slimmest hope of survival.
Things move with a supernatural speed. I glimpse the woman with parrot sunglasses falling to the ground beneath the oncoming herd. Several others are pinned to the fence, their heads dipping below the mob, mowed down by the rush of bodies. The space around me clears, save for a presence in my periphery — Lucky is a foot from me. Each step from her great footpads sends tremors through my body, rattling my teeth.
Another outshines a night of strange events: Lucky stops.
Standing beside me is the bloodied staff member from the beginning of the night and the crooked figure with the cowboy hat I saw in Lucky’s exhibit.
I suck in breath and look into the puffy, wrinkled craters of Lucky’s eyes, see how much they look like my own, irises like glass marbles cast in amber surrounded in an aura of eyelashes. Lucky’s pupils vibrate, separating into the sun’s twin, a sky unobscured by buildings, and trees rooted in earth untouched by concrete. Lucky and I are alone, joined at the eye, as a bass drum splits the air like thunder in my ears.
A refrain of grunts chortles out behind me, the soft clawing of cloven hooves exposing bare earth, of thickly-muscled appendages rummaging around. High-pitched shrieks fill the ever-darkening sky as primates howl in voices too close to human.
Lucky sways, the muscles tensing in the massive girders that are her legs, her trunk acting as a pendulum with each bob of her head. I, too, begin to lean, my body moving in rhythm with the silver-skinned metronome.
Branches and trunks sprout from the soil. Emerald leaves, whose sweet chlorophyllic taste makes my mouth water, blot out the sunlight. They grow in thick blooms along the canopy, looking like low-hanging clouds, the kind that drags lazily along but do not bring rain. There’s a break in the trees as night sets in, allowing a mauve roof that blushes with pink galaxies. Here, the earth and heavens embrace privately, away from voyeurs and camera-happy tourists. Lumbering grey titans crowd around me, but they are no threat, offering only warmth and safety.
A set of luminescent orbs spring to life not far off, startling us from slumber. Roars unlike any other I’ve heard rumble through the forest. The drum membrane strikes again at my ears, but a different eruption is its source.
Gunshots. Panic. Flight.
I feel the rough-hewn skin of a loved one, their body stiff and cold like muddy riverbanks, wrinkled with deep valleys formed by the currents of time and age.
Chains around my neck. Cages.
I sleep — a long, dreamless narrowing of consciousness.
The world takes shape from that black womb, but it is not the canopy of verdant boughs and vines that greeted me when I was a calf. Hairless things, whose harsh, flat faces remind me of stone, lead me to a dirt patch. They prod and inspect me with skin that feels different from the touch of my former family — better former than not at all, I tell myself, but I can never swallow the lie.
The days melt under the blazing sun, turning hard and lumping together like clay before shattering. The resulting ruin strews across the floor of my enclosure, tiny moments no bigger than a fly’s eye that I pluck from the ground to look at when the feeling moves me, which is not often.
When I am older — I can tell the passage of time because my vantage is higher from the ground, my shadow much longer at sunset — an object cinches my back, and the hairless things ride on me. The item on my back smells irregular — of fallen trees and decomposition. I hear whispers on another side of a rock face. It’s a difficult accent, but I make it out. They tell me what’s on my back is called a ‘saddle,’ made of the skin of another being.
Horrified, I protest, refusing to leave my hay-strewn pen, fearing the return of the scalped animal hide. Hairless things responsible for my feedings start placing my food outside my pen. The water, too, is moved. Eventually, I feel a pinch, and the dreamless sleep comes again. I am in the part of my quarters where the crowds of hairless things can gawk at me, and the saddle returns. Its scent becomes my scent with enough time.
Whether that’s good or bad eludes me. It just is.
I am here so long that I forget the sound of rain on leaves — the taste of spring water. I outlive many of the hairless things. They share the same smell as the saddle — mushrooms and stale air leeching off their thinning, sallow skin. That’s how I know they leave and never return. No matter. New ones replace them.
In that way, they are endless.
There are other captives here, their presence known to me by smell, whisper, or through whimpers and wails carried on the wind. Sometimes, the crying comes during daylight, but more often, when darkness bubbles up from the horizon.
Some die in this place. I see them lingering in their previous shapes, drenched in black as if cut from the shroud that drapes over at the time of your last sleep. Except for the hairless things, they look the same alive or dead.
An ape beats a hairless thing. I hear rumors, but I can also hear the wet smacking from my chambers. It’s an act of passion, not premeditation, though to pretend past experiences and treatment didn’t influence it is beyond naive.
The memory is too blurry, but either one of my pen-mates or I pluck a hairless thing from our backs like a bloated tick and slam them to the ground. The transgression? It kicked us. They always kick when they ride us, though. Reason or not, its jumbled body lay still until its mirror image rose from the heap, and in our pen, it stayed.
They no longer ride our backs.
I am not afraid of the visions of the dead. I have forgotten what it means to be afraid, too.
I have lost pen-mates — some missed, some not so much. Soon enough, they, too, are replaced. I mourn each, but less than the originals, whom I miss but can’t remember.
Now other memories. Not Lucky’s, but mine.
A stillborn child. Small. Oh, so incredibly small. It fits in the palm of my hand. I nestle it in my arms, wrapped in my shirt, and refuse to let it go. The hairless thing named Theo is with me, a hairless thing named Sydney.
We are together.
We are alone.
A grey fog evaporates from my eyes, revealing Lucky. My face is wet, and I let Lucky’s hairy trunk brush the tears off my face. I stroke her leathered skin, each ridge a fingerprint, a memory, and notice she, too, weeps. I move toward the elephant corral with Lucky’s trunk draped around my shoulders. The two figures — the armless one and the broken cowboy — are joined by another, one wearing novelty sunglasses. They join me as escorts for the other elephants. We walk in silence, enjoying the feel of the night air against our bare skin. Freshly scratched earth fills my nostrils, damp and new, the smell of acceptance.
