This afternoon, the animal sanctuary is still. Like when you show up at the nursing home after feeding time and all the residents are napping.
At least there, birds flutter around the benches, zip over passersby, swipe remnants from picnic tables and garbage cans. Here, they decline to cross over the split-rail fence at the entrance. Today they perch silently on the posts. Choose to forage or starve rather than snag a beakful of fleas from a bison’s back.
“Too hot I guess,” I say. The air’s too wet and steaming to coax a trill from a cicada.
“Lazy,” Ben scoffs. “Told you all those big cats would be a bad influence.”
We were drawn to the eeriness of the place, so many creatures lumped together in one giant enclosure. The chain-link fence went up one night, an entire globe’s worth of wildlife parachuted in the next. Natural enemies paced in agitated circles, drunkenly staggering off the haze of tranquilizers. A precarious relationship based on mutual confusion.
Seemed like a grim choice but what did we know about animals?
In the following days, they snapped and hissed at their unfamiliar neighbors, no longer sure of the natural hierarchy and where they fit. Asian species mingled with North American, drank at the same waterhole with Australian, roamed the same hard-packed Earth like survivors of a beached Noah’s Ark.
Visitors cocooned inside their favorite childhood bible story like a security blanket. Until people insisted that it was a metaphor for Pangea and there never was any boat. Our little sylvan hamlet gained ugly notoriety on Yelp. Influencers unsheathed their claws with arbitrary arguments meant to divert attention from reality, from witnessing the moment natural instincts kicked in.
Who would we even call to question, to complain?
#
Today the enclosure is thick with gnats. We freeze, tilt our heads. Gallery patrons wondering if the canvas is hung right-side up. It takes us a few minutes to decipher the picture. Why we didn’t hear the scene unfold is a question that itches our throats like a swallow of mosquitoes.
A giant polar bear sits on its haunches like a melted lump of sugar, hugging a gnu under one meaty paw and a mountain lion under the other. Kneeling hyenas grimace in a way that suggests ‘cheese’. Otters float in pools of blood, swans tangle in rivers of entrails. Heads of leopards wear fringed shawls, their fangs piercing shallow trenches.
“They were dragged from over there,” I say. Where a ragged jumble of paw prints prove they saw this coming.
#
Flower, my family’s Great Pyrenees, returns through photographs and memories, not live images. One of me in my red pajamas, coaxing her to chase me around the living room with a treat in each fist. One of me using her belly as a pillow in the middle of the floor. One of her on the couch that she wasn’t allowed to sit on until her last day.
My mother sobbed like I’d never seen, not when her sister died, not in the crash that took my father’s arm; inconsolable, in a stark office at the Humane Society. Or Anti-Cruelty. One of those. I see this play out even though I was six and packed off to my grandma’s for a sleepover. Many years later she insists the Society people didn’t put her down, surely they found her a new home. She was a beautiful dog. A puppy only. Someone picked her up right away. She passed down this story, a metaphor.
#
Last winter, Ben and I flipped through old photo albums in Mom’s facility, absentmindedly, as she drifted off among the blips of monitors and squeaks of professional shoes. Waiting for our moment to escape. Then Ben noticed little me, that red pajama picture, the majestic white furball baring its sugar lump teeth.
“Hey, you had a dog?”
“That wasn’t our dog,” Mom said. So suddenly her sentence snapped off the end of his. “We were babysitting.”
No. You could have done more. Classes, day care. Found a live person to love her like I did. But I said nothing.
#
At our living room window this evening I hold my white Ragdoll limp in my arms. Andy purrs as I stare across the park. The leaves of the trees shroud all but the base of the enclosure. The floorboards squeak as I rock the fence out of view.
I watch someone, tiny at this distance, approach the sanctuary, tentatively as we had.
How could I warn them, all the way up here?
With no one to parse it with, they bend into a zee and empty their stomach. A lifetime of meals runs down the dusty slope, it seems. I’m not there but I can smell the acid just the same, and I press my nose deep into Andy’s fur and inhale the clean-sheet essence of his back.
“Just don’t look,” I say as I turn.
#
No one could decipher Mom’s last words. The nurses needn’t relay it over the phone. She was quiet all day, then looked clear into their eyes, and even though I wasn’t there, I heard.
We couldn’t handle it, you understand? You couldn’t imagine the food bill, the rent.
