Menagerie

by Bradford Morrow

  “You’re a big girl now. You don’t need to play with all those silly things anymore. Be a good girl. Be a doll for mommy.”

  Once the shadow has gone away, Greta pushes the dresses into the corner of her closet.

  HOW TEDDO IS KILLED BY ACCIDENT

  On a fine summer’s day, Teddo and Gray #2 are walking by the river, discussing the finer points of growing cabbages for making into ice cream, when suddenly something terrible happens. Croc, being tickled by Monkey, leaps up into the air with laughter and accidentally lands on Teddo. Earlier that morning Croc had a large breakfast of fish and snails, making him heavier than usual, so now when he lands on Teddo he crushes the life out of him.

  THE CREATURES GO TO WAR

  Everyone is very upset. And since all the Amber Potion was used up on Pigly, there is none left for bringing Teddo back to life. Gray #2 barks angrily at Croc for being so careless. Monkey steps in front of Croc and says, “It was an accident.”

  “It didn’t look like one to me,” says Flopsam, coming to Gray #2’s side, his small floppy hands curled into fists.

  “Not so fast,” Monkey says, holding his banana like a pistol. Flopsam takes a floppy piece of string and whips the banana out of Monkey’s hand.

  “Why you!” Croc says and snaps at Flopsam very hard.

  Other creatures come running to see what all the commotion is about, and very soon there is a War.

  Croc has bitten onto Flopsam’s floppy leg and is spinning him in the air like a helicopter. Billy Block, hopping mad, bounces onto Monkey’s head. Juniper throws slops over Billy Block so that the latter’s painted numbers are obscured. Sandra feels sorry for Billy Block, but she wants to help Juniper, so she kicks Billy Block into the river. Gray #2 bites Sandra’s neck. The tall door opens and a long shadow peeks in. Percilily does an elegant belly flop onto Gray #2 in order to break his bones. Croc has begun to make explosions with powder he has dug up from under the pillow. The creatures are badly hurt—missing teeth, eyes oozing black goo, skin fluffing and peeling away—but they continue to fight and bite and blow up and hit one another until Monkey, who is old and wise, crawls away from the War to look for My Bird and ask for help.

  “It has to stop,” My Bird agrees, and together My Bird and Monkey go on a journey to look for Greta.

  Together, My Bird, Monkey, and Greta agree that the creatures will continue to fight and argue until Teddo is brought back to life, so Greta journeys to the Battleground. When she arrives, big as a giant, My Bird and Monkey on either side, the creatures stop fighting and fall silent. They feel very ashamed, and they move aside so that Greta can inspect Teddo’s body. She lifts it up and feels that it is dead. There is no Amber Potion, the creatures say, but Greta hushes them. She takes Teddo in her arms like a baby and breathes into his mouth. He is alive, the creatures can see. Her breath has brought him back to life. The creatures cheer. The long shadow shuts the door.

  HOW IT HAPPENS AGAIN

  Greta is playing. She is making Teddo and Percilily go ice-skating together. There is, however, a spot on the river where the ice is broken. Teddo loses his grip on Percilily’s hand and goes flying toward the broken ice. He cannot stop. He looks behind with wet, pleading eyes, but something is pushing him forward—he is going too fast and cannot stop. He falls through the broken ice and the water is so cold that he cannot swim properly. Percilily tries to skate over to help him, but she trips on something and it is too late, too late. Teddo has drowned in the cold water.

  Greta reaches down and pulls him out. She takes him in her arms like a baby and tries to bring him back to life with her breath. But it doesn’t work anymore; it only worked once. Teddo is dead for good, she decides, her eyes wet and her throat painful. It is so sad: He is really dead.

  GRETA’S BROTHER (B.)

  He runs into Greta’s room and bounces on her bed. He has made a bow and arrow and asks her if she wants to play. But Greta is sad. Teddo is dead and won’t ever come back again. Greta’s Brother offers to kill her so that it won’t matter. My Bird kindly pecks his eyes, and he runs off to go live with the Indians.

  MONKEY FIGHTS THE INDIANS

  Now there are Indians all over the place, riding horses and shooting buffalo. They disturb the creatures with their noise and their dancing. One falls off his horse and tries to hitch a ride on Flopsam. Another uses his feather to tickle Sandra, who hates to be tickled.

  Monkey has an idea. He puts banana peels on the ground in places where the Indians, riding their horses, are likely to slip and die.

  Monkey is a hero. The Indians are gone and things are back to normal.

  However, one banana peel has been forgotten, and on the way to the ceremony where Monkey will receive his Hero’s Cape, Juniper slips and breaks his neck. Greta tries to fix him, but it too late; he is dead and she can’t bring him back. Who will Sandra marry now?

  THE TWILIGHT OF THE CREATURES

  The creatures are now very sad. They pull each other’s hair and say evil words to one another. Gray #2 becomes very angry and foam fizzes from his mouth. He is no longer a guardian. He runs around and barks and bites. Percilily tries to stop him, so he eats her face off. She runs and screams, without her face, and drowns herself in the river. Sandra is so angry at Gray #2 that she grabs him by the tail and turns him inside out. Inside out, Gray #2 can no longer breathe the air that he requires, and so he slowly suffocates. Flopsam and Billy Block cannot believe that Sandra has killed Gray #2. They find a pair of scissors and cut her into many pieces.

  Greta needs to scold the creatures so that they will learn to behave. She takes Flopsam aside and tells him that he is bad. Flopsam feels so ashamed that he runs away to the place on the ground outside where Greta found him, and there he sets himself on fire.

  Greta cannot believe what is happening. She cannot believe that the creatures are dying. Her face is very red and wet. The door keeps opening, but Greta doesn’t care.

  Billy Block pushes Monkey, so Monkey throws Billy Block against the closet door. There is a loud bang and a crack, and Billy Block’s brains spill out and he falls to the floor and can no longer hop up and down and will never get to go on a journey into the forest to find his parents and siblings. Croc loves Monkey very much. However, Croc cannot forgive him for throwing Billy Block against the closet door.

  “But you killed Teddo,” Monkey says.

  “That was different,” says Croc. “That was an accident. And besides, Teddo wasn’t as important.”

  Monkey puts a stick in Croc’s mouth to keep his jaws pried open so that Croc can’t kill him. But Croc crawls forward and grabs Monkey’s neck and strangles him, both of them making gurgling sounds. Now Greta will never know where Monkey came from. She is making loud noises. She watches two white shaking hands take Croc by the jaws and pull them apart until there is a cracking sound.

  Greta, eyes and nose leaking great quantities of fluid, takes My Bird into her lap and holds him very tightly. She pulls the string at the back and My Bird says that he hopes they will remain friends forever. She pulls the string again and My Bird says he wants to die.

  “I’ll never kill you, My Bird.” But My Bird insists, and, with stinging eyes and a terrible pain in the muscles of her face, Greta holds tightly his long, floppy neck and snaps it. Soon the sun goes away and everything is covered in shadow.

  THE NEXT DAY, PLAYING

  On the following day the creatures have all come back to life. Even though they were permanently dead, Greta has made them alive again. She plays with them and has fun. But there is something different now, some new thing inside her, because even though the creatures move and speak, Greta cannot forget that they are really dead. Greta plays and no one bothers her, except for the bones that are buried beneath her, and Suzy, who waits in the corner of the closet.

  Pond Animals

  Martine Bellen

  We live in a cage of light

  An amazing cage

  Animals Animals without end

  �
�Ikkyū

  He brushes the Heart Sutra onto seashells and tosses them into the pond. “Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form.” The waving, wielding, yielding, booming fluid that is puddle, companion of moon, compassion of moon;

  Heartbreaking atmosphere swallows seashells in the perfect

  Wisdom of the moment, of the moon, in the ancient pond beyond,

  To the other shore …

  Though it is frozen, melting, dripping, Animals Animals

  Dripping from within … Pond without end …

  Something is swimming across her, and then there’s the swooping,

  The shimmying.

  In every Japanese garden, there is a pond. Weeping willows

  And black pines.

  Water’s edge. Darting turtles, daring.

  In every human being, there is a pond. Weeping and pining. Her

  Edge. Her ledge.

  Her daring.

  Jorge Luis Borges recognized that his inner animal had nearly expired. While in his younger years, he was a monkey, now he had turned into a tired old moose. The first sign of the metamorphosis was his losing his black, then the reds; his last color was yellow. And one day, our hero awoke to realize he had become

  His mother’s dream.

  It was her eyes that kept him.

  Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour was written while he was dying of stomach cancer. Stalked by death, he was a sheep cat. Little sleep cat. The lame one. The lamb.

  Fading colors, farming colors

  Kafka asked for his work to be exsanguinated upon his death. Defenestrated. The waning breath of his words to be bled out, tossed, singed, torched, not humiliated by bylaws and red tape.

  Once the growl is gone. A soft resting place. Elephant

  Intelligence. The grief.

  She spots the cup of pond on the night table. The table has slipped into a dream, and she buries her nose into the lovely pond and, with her paw, sends ripples deep into her animal. A guttural noise in the forest, yonder, that’s buried in the body on the bed, in the bed of her body. The ground rolls over, and, as she leaps to safety, the pond follows her onto the floor,

  So the dead can ride over rivers … into the sun,

  Wearing their horse bone suits

  Her death closet filled with ancient helmeted heads,

  Water monsters

  A body of standing water, a standing body. Water gardens are ponds as are solar gardens of thermal water. Vernal ponds spend some of the dry season not as ponds. Though even when waterless, they might be referred to as a basket of fluid,

  They might be referred to as ponds.

  The ones that are most deeply hidden are touched by sunlight or a

  Person

  Walking through them without being submerged. Ponds as

  Ponds and ponds not as ponds but as puddles reached into

  And turned into ponds

  By light and life

  Ponds turned inside out.

  Once ponds sculpted the moon, the moon of his eyes filled

  With jellified orbs—He saw

  Amoebas and seahorses and starfish and multiverses

  Singing above and beyond this shore …

  Animals Animals without end …

  Aerie

  Emily Anderson

  THE EMBROIDERED TOWELS rub it in my face. Aerie at Eagle’s Rest: You’re Home to Roost. Home. The point of a nest is to fly it. But there is no getting outside of this place; it’s shaped like a doughnut. The wind hoots over the courtyard like a hillbilly over a jug. They call it the nest. I call it a hole.

  Yesterday I got caught in a draft and rolled right past my suite. Had to cat the loop again, including the special-care crescent they call the Hatchery, where the demented get left out like a carton of eggs, lolling their bald, white heads, forgetting to blink their invisible eyelids.

  The staff refer to them as Memory Birds or Hatchlings. As in, “I found this little Memory Bird trying to make a break for it. Where does she belong?”

  “Oh, put her with the other Hatchlings.”

  ***

  Their loony logic seems to be that if they give me enough bird helpers, I may start to think I am Cinderella.

  An orderly wearing seagull-print scrubs tries to run her mop under my Philadelphia highboy. “You’re going to have to get on your hands and knees for that one,” I tell her, and she does. I ask her why they call them Hatchlings and she says, “Who? They do?”

  A tech in wren-print scrubs takes my blood pressure. I ask her about the Hatchery. She gets frustrated and beaky and overinflates the cuff, squeezing until I cry aloud.

  Two big men in turkey-print scrubs install a 150-inch flat-screen television on the wall above the credenza. It’s from Stu, naturally. I look at it for a while. I press the help button and demand those turkeys de-install.

  ***

  Aerie at Eagle’s Rest: An American Fairy Tale. So says the bald eagle on the binder where the hawk nurse logs all my intakes, outputs, and opinions. Apparently my insides are an affair of state. And my mistakes. “What are you, trying to read your future?” I ask, as she peers into the commode. She laughs. I feel like the golden goose.

  ***

  The president held both my hands in one of his. Your disregard for human life is a credit to us all. Pepsi, the first canary, swooped through the trees, dive-bombing us with cherry blossoms. Pink snow, Mr. President.

  ***

  Two turkeys lift me onto the examining table. I have never liked big men to touch me. Especially not big men who are big birds. But I am a positive person, a Daughter of the American Revolution, so I lie there, waiting for the nurse with the hawk scrubs, thinking that it’s better than childbirth. Better than spread-eagling into icy stirrups. I always told my children, If I could have just laid an egg and flown away! Sure as shot wouldn’t be here if I had flown.

  ***

  I wear emeralds and my fingernails are dirty. They’ve fished up a string of so-called Reasons to Roost and clamped them into my binder. Campaign contributions to the calibrated malaprop. Vertigo at galas. Spicules. Enlarged pupils. A scare at the house in Scottsdale.

  Me. Here. Confined. Me. A bird of the air.

  Is it a crime to be afraid?

  ***

  Wouldn’t not pressing “panic” on my Lifelink have been the true evidence of incapacity? I subscribed to the surface so I could use it. And where is the accountability, I want to know, of the Private Emergency Services Team who took fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes, to show up. I could have been dead. Dead.

  The irony. Me. A woman perfectly capable of defending her property.

  I’m a good shot with a snub-nose .38 special. I’m a good shot with an 870 Wingmaster.

  Apparently I’m not who I think I am. I’m a raven lunatic with the towels to prove it.

  ***

  The leaves are flailing. I can look out my window and see clear to the road. The bulldozers circle around our hill, digging and digging. I know what they are up to. They’re making our hill seem taller. They’re building a dramatic approach to the Aerie. So says the Forefeathers for Our Future folder. “Take a dramatic approach.” They asked me for a contribution.

  Why do you care what happens outside of America?

  Every day the bulldozers look a little smaller.

  The approach is working.

  I think the American people trust me.

  ***

  “How’s the flexibility in your fingers?”

  “Enough of this hawk talk! All I hear is cak-cak-cak-cak-cak! I want to know about the Hatchery.”

  “The Hatchery?” The hawk wraps each of my fingers with yellow tape.

  “The Hatchery. I demand to know why you call it that.”

  She smiles and asks me if I remember Gil Hatchery. “May he rest in peace,” she cheeps and rips a piece of tape with her teeth.

  “RIP indeed. My late husband respected him, until he became so forgetful. He said he was a good golfer for
a debt collector. He used to say, ‘That Gil could squeeze blood out of a stone and—something—out of a golf ball.’” I tap my yellow talons against my chin. My husband’s thinking gesture. I always liked his big mouth.

  “Mr. Hatchery was not only a good golfer. He was a good man. He left Aerie at Eagle’s Rest a very generous bequest.”

  “Was that so-called beak-quest before or after the egg timers?”

  “Egg timers?”

  “Alzheimer’s. Do I have to make cuckoo noises to get at the truth?”

  “Because of his generosity, the Hatchery Crescent has become a state-of-the-art crescent, a national—no, an international—leader in long-term transitional cak-cak-cak-cak!”

  “That’s what you call it?”

  “I’m just going to palpate your gizzard here; any sensitivity?”

  “Cak-cak-cak-cak!”

  “Very good. Deep breath, please.”

  “And the Hatchlings?”

  “Who?”

  “The Hatchlings. Isn’t that what you call them?”

  “Why do you call them that?”

  “Why do you?”

  She pulls a camouflage pen out from behind her ear and begins to scratch.

  ***

  That pigeon nurse with the foreign twitter-twatter! Today she poked me five times, out for blood: Jab! Jab! Jab! Jab! Jab! No wonder she’s still wearing Rat of the Sky scrubs. When I defended my poor arm, she squawked, “I get Eagle!”

  The doctor came in, looking like Steve Martin with his white hair and useful complexion. I admired his platinum bald-eagle tiepin. He smiled and said, “Young lady, I hear you’re quite a tough egg to crack.”

  His name is Lawrence Eagle, and he was in my son Chip’s class at Harvard. I didn’t even feel a pinch when he took my blood. He’ll give that Pigeon the what-for. I have every confidence.

  ***

  We get a different engraved fork at every meal in the Rookery Refectory. Today at lunch my salad fork said, Aerie: Fly with the Best and my dinner fork said, Aerie: The City on a Hill.