The Zoo

First it was the sandpipers disappearing, one after another. We thought it wasn’t so bad, it was probably some errant night worker leaving the enclosures unlocked. It didn’t matter so much anyhow, the sandpipers never attracted much attention. People walked right on past and harped, where are the lions? Where are the lions? It wasn’t that hard, you just had to follow the signs.

Not a week after the sandpipers’ disappearance, we discovered the turtles were gone. There were only tortoise claws in the dirt. Now, turtles don’t try to escape if you leave their cages wide open, they couldn’t if they wanted to. So we knew it was something to pay attention to then, who we gave those giant cartoonish key rings to. The turtles were never the main attraction but people took obliging pictures in front of them, because as Keith said, well, they were a staple. We contemplated extending the construction of the walls, make them a little higher, prevent the nighttime intruders from stealing off with more animals. Keith said he called someone but I guess they never responded.

Then it was the frogs, the toads, the salamanders, those animals in the amphibian corner. When we opened up the next day, their little glass cells were empty but for a pool of black water, a spray of ferns, a bronze plaque on the wall proclaiming their species. Someone searched the cages and I assume they were quite thorough. That afternoon we filed another report and then the animals were officially missing; they closed off the amphibian building and the walkways to it. I saw some kids crying that day because they wanted to see the frogs so I directed them to the snakes instead. Snakes make for better pictures, when they’re not sleeping in the back of their dens like it’s hibernation season or something.

A day and a night and the otters, minks, and mongooses were stolen. We were starting to get a bad name. The stats were plummeting down already, who knew so many visitors liked sandpipers? Keith was mad all morning, skulking back and forth his office. He lit a cig, which he hadn’t done for years because of lung cancer and how it was bad for the animals. The stress was getting him.

I released the statement that evening, how a section of Mammal Planet would be closed for cleaning. We sliced off the walkways with caution tape. But really, no one needed to know the dens wouldn’t need cleaning ever again.

Keith called the night shifters into his office and we questioned them one by one. They hadn’t seen anything suspicious going on. They were circling every entrance and policing every walkway with flashlights throughout the night, and nothing. We were a little relieved after that. It was a fluke, somehow, a clever joke. If it was unexplainable, we wouldn’t try to explain it.

But then it happened: the rhino disappeared. The rhino was beloved, she was named Amelia and it was engraved on her plaque and everything. The kids loved Amelia, we had Amelia plushies in the gift shop and they were as popular as the lion plushies. You couldn’t come to the zoo without visiting Amelia. We didn’t search the enclosure, we didn’t need to. It was smack in the middle of the zoo, a circular pen with walkways leading to it from all sides; we couldn’t even mask it with caution tape. How did you even go about stealing a 2 ton rhino? We issued a statement: the zoo was closed, indefinitely.

Keith’s office was so choked in smoke I started avoiding it. I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t understand Amelia’s abduction. The night shift workers were all fired. There were journalists calling every phone all at once. We unplugged them.

That night when they closed the zoo down, I stayed behind. There wasn’t much closing down to do anyways, we didn’t have many animals left. The spider monkeys and ferrets and sloths had gone with the rhino. I prowled around until it was completely dark and then plotted myself in a bush next to the lion dens, which I figured the thief would target next. The lions, the crown jewels.

Through a fan of leaves I watched them pad across the rock, oblivious, circling down to sleep on the warmed stones. They were beautiful, really, the moon just reaching the tips of their fur and silvering it to a halo. There were three of them; two slid behind a boulder and I lost sight. It was just the one lioness. She stood on a boulder, tail stirring back and forth in this calm way I couldn’t remember the feeling of. It was funny how much I couldn’t remember now. The turtles, frogs, otters, rhinos!

That was when I watched the lioness disappear. Her pelt was growing paler and bloodless, and then she was the same color as moonlight, the same consistency of it, too, fragile and flickering like a heat wave. I breathed and swallowed and huddled in the dark. There was a twig digging into my back. I don’t know what I was waiting for. For a moment the lioness was just a stamp of space against the darkness; and then she vanished, completely. Just a zipping of air, and she was gone. So there was no thief. There was only them and us. There was only me, hiding, ready to deny my own guilt.