Hollow Kingdom

by Kira Jane Buxton

  “Hello?” I asked in English, appealing to the MoFo within. “Hello?” Hopping onto a doormat that seemed to be a liar with its message of Welcome, I scratched desperately against the green wood with my feet and beak. A bated silence. Then an outbreak of barking filled the air. I shot up, flapping like a loon to the nearest window. My face smacked into the glass, pain shooting up my beak, embarrassment burning my veins. I shook my head, thinking I should be immediately vindicated for this classic bird faux pas, because THERE HADN’T BEEN GLASS ANYWHERE ELSE IN THIS DAMN CITY! Dennis let out one deep and sonorous woof. A greeting. The yapping coming from inside became panicked and frenzied. The window was painted with a film of dust and the dotted imprint of my snooter, but I could see in alright. I could see the quaint living room with the family portrait and the sooty fireplace, how the powdery hardwood was littered with empty wrappers. I saw dust motes dancing through the light beams coming through various windows, all intact. And the source of the yapping became clear. In among the King’s Hawaiian bread bags, hollow dog-chow sacks, punctured peanut butter jars, shredded cake-mix boxes, a graveyard of graham crackers, Chips Ahoy, Lucky Charms, quinoa, and a landmine of raw pasta lumps and turds, was a Pomeranian. Signs told me there had been no healthy MoFo here for a long time, but still, there was a survivor.

  She yipped at the window, a chaotic SOS song in the key of fear. Her button eyes were brimming and shiny. I marveled. This was a creature who deserved life. She had managed to avoid getting attacked by her changed MoFos, she’d avoided getting mauled by wild creatures despite practically living at the zoo. She had been imprisoned for who knows how long and she’d lived on the American diet and persevered. I felt a sense of awe for this Pomeranian, historically a lapdog for German royal MoFos, desperately loved and respected by her own MoFos, as evidenced by the custom-framed eleven-by-sixteen portrait of her in a Christmas sweater and her tartan, monogrammed bed. Her name was Cinnamon and I was going to break her out of there. The MoFos wouldn’t have stood for her imprisonment and suffering; they’d have called the ASPCA or NASA or AARP and they’d smash the teal door in and save her life like the heroes they were born to be. She was someone’s Dennis and I was going to give her one more chance at survival.

  “Cinnamon! Sit!” I told her through the glass. She cocked her head, seized by palpable jubilance at words she knew and utter bewilderment at getting dragooned by a bird. My heart soared as she parked her tiny furry butt next to a fossilized Fig Newton. It worked! In that moment, I felt more powerful than Scarface and his little friend. I rapped my beak on the glass one more time, cursing its impenetrable force field of a surface—the bane of all birds. I might not have been able to open windows, but I was lucky because Big Jim taught me about the dangers of them back when I was just a nestling, a tiny toothpick-boned goblin. The first time I bumped my beak into the glass, he scooped me up in his sausage fingers, told me not to be embarrassed, and showed me YouTube evidence of MoFos slamming into glass doors.

  “It’s the reflection of trees and plants that’s confusing, S.T.,” Big Jim said. “One time, I plowed into a Walmart door and spilled hot coffee all over my balls.” Then—just for me—he marked each window of our house with a hastily bought, gas-station bumper sticker, like “baby on board,” “well behaved women rarely make history,” and “I love my Belgian Malinois.”

  I gave Cinnamon a nod through the glass. I dropped from the window ledge, shuffled back over to the front door, gave it a mighty kick, and let out a lengthy “Caaaaaaaaaaaaaw!” to cover up the self-inflicted foot pain. Dennis rolled his eyes and whined. Nope, we weren’t getting in.

  “We’re coming back for you. I promise,” I told her in croaky clicks.

  As we reluctantly turned to leave, she began to whine, paws padding away inside her prison. The last glimpse I stole was heartbreaking. She was a tornado of fluff, spinning round and round. The tiny survivor didn’t want us to leave. But I didn’t know how long it was possible to stay alive—even as a real tough fluff survivor type—in a sealed cemetery of empty wrappers and excrement. We had to hurry.

  I went airborne and Dennis thundered across Phinney Avenue, lit with purpose. We would find The One Who Opens Doors and this little teal and white house would be our very first stop. Our first freeing. And we would do the MoFo thing and free the others. We’d find all the surviving Dennises and give them a chance at living.

  We crossed the street and stood under the bold white letters that said WOODLAND PARK ZOO. You can imagine how elated I was to discover that they’d placed cutouts of frolicking penguins all over their sign. Fucking newspaper-colored, ice-balled dick goblins, yeah, that’s who you want as your brand ambassador. It was a deeply ominous portent, right in front of the entrance. I could only hope that there would be some balance, that inside, we’d find The One Who Opens Doors and they’d be in sync with our vision, our plan to set the domestics free. To give them a chance to thrive and keep the legacy of the MoFos alive. The problem was, I didn’t know what was on the other side of the zoo’s turnstile gate.

  Dennis barfed, and I wasn’t sure whether it was a comment on our nerve-wracking predicament or the portobello mushroom sandwich staging its final protest.

  Chapter 15

  Just Above the Root Structure of a 200-Year-Old Spruce Tree

  (translation by a Steller’s jay)

  What if I were to offer you an extraordinary gift? What if it were to change the way your eyes took in the world? Would you accept? Would you keep it or toss it aside?

  You see, I know you. I’ve been watching you your whole exquisite life.

  I am Mother Tree. Part of something greater than my one. We, of ancient forest and all of us, are connected through swirling root. Here and there, so tightly we interweave that when one of us dies, the other must die too. Our stand is one, braving licks of lightning and the sticky scarlet appetites of insects. We warn neighboring crowns of drought and danger with our scent song and send quick, silvery messages through Web, fungal lattice. Like you, we sweat. We scream when thirsty, we bleed when sliced. And we remember.

  Listen.

  Our words, through crackling roots and the echoing pulse of a mushroom’s gossamer threads, are not bound by time. And a secret for you: if one of us is felled and left as a bloody stump, we will send it our healing, quietly cheating death for a hundred years. You don’t know about these things because until the gift, you haven’t been listening.

  Your magnificent eyes have been down.

  Do you know how many years I am? Do you know that if you press your shell-like ear to my bark, you can join in my drinking? Did you know there are more lives in a palmful of soil than of your kind on this big beautiful blue?

  Perhaps you still cannot see that I am fighting the greatest battle of my years. A bark beetle army has declared war on my body. It started like many beginnings, with a singular soldier who chose change. He burrowed into my skin. He summoned a militia and I hammered back, unleashing gluey syrup onto the glossy armor of an infantry. And now a complexity in the art of war—the army has brought reserve soldiers, this time with a fungus on their backs. Now the fungus will aid them, burrowing under my bark to sever my defense.

  Listen; life is worth a fight. Expectation must be shed like winter leaves. Even in death, there is wondrous beauty. And death is not The End.

  I have given you a gift. Now you see me. You see the stippled scarring on my trunk where a woodpecker drilled into me for blood. You see moss, my emerald cushiony companion—watch her survive, she was the very first of us on this big beautiful blue. You see my children who stand at my feet. One day, I will crumble and shatter to the forest floor where my bones will feed a thousand hungry mouths and my children will stretch for the sun.

  The One Who Hollows as well must return.

  Life is as beautiful as it is deadly. Fungi might be friend or foe.

  Breathe. Listen. Look.

  The forest is where all secrets are kept under lock and key, deep in soils d
ark and rich. The woods are where the truth lives, etched into the veins of leaves and the prismatic skin of a dewdrop.

  If you are alive—whether of blood or bark—you will be struck by pain, love, longing, fear, anger, and the particular ache of sadness. There will be joys that quiver your leaves and betrayals that will sever your roots, poisoning the water you pull. These are the varying notes in the music of living. Look up, to close your eyes is to stagnate. To rot and stop the song.

  My gift to you is to know that we are here, all around you, talking to one another and dreaming of your success. Sorcery is everywhere, in the silver stroll of a slug and lighting up the very veins of you. Open those beautiful eyes to a world who is a mosaic of magic. She is just waiting for you to notice.

  Chapter 16

  S.T.

  Woodland Park Zoo, Seattle,

  Washington, USA

  We were losing light and I didn’t like it. I instructed Dennis to wait by the turnstile gate. It was safer for me to be airborne and my heebie-jeebies were telling me to do recon of the zoo solo. Besides, Big Jim never brought Dennis to the zoo, even though he snuck me in once. My suspicion is that Big Jim had been shielding him from an alpaca exhibit. Inexplicably, Dennis is deathly afraid of alpacas. But leaving him on the ground at the mouth of the Woodland Park Zoo, vulnerable, a survival greenhorn, felt like nothing I’d ever experienced. Caches—especially ones I’d stuffed with special, sought-after treasures like golf balls, antique MoFo collectibles, Rolls-Royce hood ornaments, or Tinder Tiffany’s diaphragm—were always very hard to leave. After the electric thrill of meticulously concealing my treasure, I’d always embark on the Oscar-worthy theatrical production of nonchalance, pretending the new cache didn’t exist and that I wasn’t thinking about it twenty-four-seven. This was so much worse. Leaving Dennis was to feel a chronic, hollow ache, untreatable until I saw his ridiculously saggy skin again.

  I fluffed myself up and fluttered over the gate, finding stacks of rock formations. In full investigation mode, I lowered to perch atop one of the large, beige rocks. Speckling of the very worst kind of white shit told me what I needed to know—this was where the penguins lived. I gagged, barely holding in partially digested garbanzo-flour chocolate chip cookie. The thought of those bollock Jedis living here, shitting their lives away on MoFo property, was difficult. And now, where were they? The glass that looked to have held a large pool of water for the wang-bags to swim in was now in shining shards. A world where penguins roamed free. God help us all.

  I thought about how Big Jim hated penguins, and how we had laughed at them the time he took me to the zoo. They were weird, fake-ass birds that couldn’t fly, strange and useless. “What in the hell is the point of a bird that can’t fly?” he had said in between bites of a chili dog. He said they were a waste of space, much like people who believe in ludicrous things like environmental protection and tofu.

  A comet shot across the sky. Then I saw something else—streak, jet black—careen above the tree line. Two crows were performing aerial gymnastics, soaring high above only to descend into a pirouette of corkscrew dives. They were fucking playing. My blood boiled. I snorted my contempt and got back to attending urgent matters and exhibiting productive behavior in a world that was falling apart.

  Across from the penguin enclosure was a large roof I recognized as the zoo store. Dipping down, I saw the store had been ransacked, floor-to-ceiling windows smashed, counters and tables shattered, wooden display walls crushed into fine powder. T-shirts lay mud-smeared and trampled. Something had made quick work of a snack display, then gone on to decapitate and de-stuff a mound of plush animals. Hats, bags, coffee canteens, and African drums lay abandoned and wrecked. In an unambiguous statement, a mountainous pastiche of dung sat under a busted doorframe.

  The disrespect for MoFo property and the eerie silence bothered me. But the image of a tiny, dejected Pomeranian, all alone with her ginger head in her paws as The Black Tide came in to swallow her, tugged at my heart and kept me focused. I lifted, more determined than ever to find The One Who Opens Doors—a MoFo, blood pumping through his veins, his head populated with red strands and innovative thoughts. I knew he was here.

  Woodland Park Zoo had changed its spots. There had been monumental upheaval here. From above, I could see how the foliage had declared war, bursting forth from the soil, electric-green and surging with life. Tropical vines and stranglers were performing a creeping asphyxiation of the zoo. They were forming their own vertical superhighways as weeping willows surveyed them from above. Carnivorous pitcher plants with their baited jugs of acid had spread, readying for carnage. Bromeliads and Japanese quince and Tatarian honeysuckle, magnolias, red elderberry, English laurel, and bishop’s hat were active commanders in this battle, all wild and hungry and glossy green. I thought it a diverse and unnatural tussle. In some areas of the zoo, walkways were smothered in plant life, the sides of buildings held hostage by a weedy ambush. What I saw was silent war. This was a hostile takeover, the foliage committing mass destruction, swallowing up concrete one millimeter at a time. The MoFo who’d been freeing the animals hadn’t been maintaining the flora. I could see how it would just be too big a job, how garden greens can fight back and swallow a city whole. And I imagined he’d been busy doing what we’d been doing—surviving.

  A flash of movement caught my eye, so I gingerly perched halfway up a towering Sitka spruce and traced the motion. Ambling below was a hulking mass of muscle with the prickly skin of a durian. It took its time, veined and prehistoric, dragging its legs and shadowed claws along a walkway of weeds. Locked in terrifying jaws that leaked frothy strings of spittle was the limp body of a meerkat. The Komodo stopped, lifting his blocky head to register me. Our eyes met and my knees buckled. The dragon let the meerkat’s lifeless form drop like a winter stole. A daggerlike tongue in salmon pink stabbed the air, tasting me, licking information about The One Who Keeps. I felt my throat close, an anger I could barely contain surging through me. This creature was godlike, mesmerizing me with his armored form, genes that stretched back millions of years through time; I would never be a match for him. We both knew this. And here he moved with the slow sovereignty of the vines and the ivy. He was silent and insidious in his takeover, assuming dominance over his new domain with no respect for the lives that we were losing, no understanding that this wasn’t his world to conquer.

  “This is the world of the MoFos!” I yelled at the dragon. They had sculpted and designed and trimmed and cut down and bettered everything. And here was Komodo, cool and commanding, an indomitable takeover. Like Nature—the predator that shows no mercy. He was lumbering, puissant proof that MoFos were losing a battle against the earth.

  “You disgust me, you scaly fuck-bucket!” I screamed at him. Then I took flight before I did something utterly stupid.

  My eyes darted, wings cutting through the air with frantic flaps that sounded like the flicking of cotton sheets. I scoured for movement, for red hair, for the soldier who’d help me win this war. I lowered into an area called Banyan Wilds, a re-creation of tropical Asia, rife with thick vines and bamboo. I hovered over an enclosure that said it contained sloth bears, but found its star occupants missing, the glass wall along the front of the enclosure in shards. Perching on a large rock, I studied the terrain, searching for signs of life. A burning sensation in the back of my head told me I was being watched. I hopped and spun to find three sets of shining eyes watching me with heads cocked. I felt the feathers on the back of my neck hike up. Crows. They sat on a thick log that balanced on the sloth bear’s sunbathing rock and conferred with one another in a series of clicks and rattles. I blocked them out.

  I flapped to a neighboring enclosure, finding it to be the densely jungled home of the Malayan tigers. Again, the enclosure was empty, glass front gone. My heart started to race. To avoid the nuclear meltdown that was building steadily inside me, I lifted again, looking for my MoFo, flying above an enclosure that had a covered viewing area, which had informatio
n and signs about its inhabitants. The safety glass, to prevent visiting MoFos from coming face-to-face with eight 350-pound western lowland gorillas, lay shattered all over the hay and concrete. Acid rose in my throat. I swallowed and hurriedly took flight. My MoFo was here and I knew it. Discovering fragmented glass at the front of the jaguar exhibit made flying difficult, as a tremor took hold of my wings.

  Where are you, MoFo?

  I beat my wings, trying to stay airborne, trying to breathe as I fluttered over a building in the rainforest loop. It had a glass roof and when I found it to be intact, my pinions stabilized, normal flight possible again. Intact glass, a crystalline beacon of hope. I ducked into the building and was transported to the tropics by thick vines and the bulbous, gnarly rooted buttresses of exotic trees. Animal exhibits sat side by side: goliath pinktoe tarantula, yellow anaconda, false water cobra, poison dart frog, emerald tree boa, tiger rat snake. The animals were all gone, a tiling of debris and glass glittering on the ground. I started to hyperventilate, as if the anaconda had its muscly middle squeezing tightly around my throat. I shot by the enclosures, searching for life and signs of a MoFo’s intent—a glass-shattering ax, a life hammer, an emergency window-breaker escape tool—when I felt eyes upon me.

  Squatting on a log in the rainforest building, surrounded by thick foliage and signs of a mass evacuation, sat a shiny body. He stared at me with a smug expression, a pseudo smirk.

  “Where are the healthy MoFos?” I asked him, my breath hitched. “The ones who walk on two legs?”

  “Pass the moonstone river.” His skin was lime green, as polished as an airport shoe. His funny little nostrils twitched and his face made it hard to believe he wasn’t making fun of me, which was adding to my agitation.

  “What? That’s not what I asked you. Where are the MoFos?” I asked, reading the sign behind his shattered terrarium that identified him as a waxy monkey tree frog.