“You really don’t think so?”
Bit of an attitude, as I asked this, managing only a polite glance at the capuchins all twitchy and jumpy behind the glass, scrabbling around the enclosure and using their fingers with the same dexterity I might lay pencil to paper or tie my shoes. Children around us shrieked with delight when one of the hairy fellas leapt from a perch and landed upside down on a branch several feet away and I wanted to say, In another world it’d be the monkeys watching you behind the glass, kid.
My twin sister frowned as we walked. “Do I think mom and dad are homophobic? No, I don’t.”
“Mom said those people, Erin. I was on the phone with her last week and she said she was glad I got dumped because maybe now I’d stop dating those people.”
Her sigh was soft, but I could still hear it over the polar bear’s loud splash into the pool. “She meant fortune tellers, not gay people in general.”
“God, it’s not enough that you had the perfect grades and the college degree. You always have to have an opinion on my relationships, too, don’t you? You still can’t handle the fact that I date women.”
My girlfriend Starr—who for the record was an astrologist and energy reader, not a fortune teller—dumped me three weeks ago and my sister Erin dragged me out of bed and was treating me to a trip to the zoo in an attempt to cheer me up like I was some kind of five-year-old. I guess I had made her nervous when I was all ‘I don’t know if I want to keep living’ and meant it last week, after three months of telling her that me and Starr were so deeply and disgustingly in love it’s like we invented a new form of it, that every fiber of our lives were connected and intertwined, that it was chakra, it was destiny, it was engine fuel, and not to mention that when our palms met our hand prints came together to form a small Matisse painting because we were just that meant to be.
“Not all women. Just one woman. When will you realize that none of us liked Starr?” Erin said. My eyebrows rose. This was news to me. “None of us. The breakup is making you delusional.”
I wanted to say, It’s not making me delusional, it’s making me suicidal, but I didn’t think she’d appreciate the joke, she never did with things like that. As it happened, I couldn’t even get any response out anyway because a whooping sound filled the air and at first I thought it was the orangutans or maybe Erin choking on the cotton candy we’d been sharing, but then a voice cracked from a loudspeaker somewhere above our heads ordering everyone to find shelter because, they were sorry to say, due to an electrical shortage the tiger had escaped from its pen. And possibly, one or two other animals too, the voice said, although it didn’t specify which ones.
For years afterward the people who had been at the zoo that day would speak of how violent the orange was, how bright and dazzling, how much more brilliant a tiger’s fur is up close than it is in pictures or behind glass and how silently it moved through the crowds and concessions as people cowered and screamed, how with stealth the tiger struck past the cotton candy machine and the electric blue Slurpee machine and the pillars of souvenirs, overpriced all, the racks of small handheld fans and panda bucket hats and plastic bubble machines and stuffed plushie tigers, the latter of which were so startlingly lifeless compared to the real thing passing by that the bridge between the two felt biblical, unbreachable forever.
“None of you liked Starr?” I whispered as we squatted beneath the bushes. “But you got her a Christmas gift last year.”
“So did Mom and Dad. Can you believe they dared to buy their daughter’s girlfriend a gift even when she showed up for Christmas unannounced? So homophobic of them.”
At the sound of a raw, explosive growl and a choked scream, we curled into tight little balls, forcing our bodies to become as small as possible. “I told you, her other plans cancelled last minute,” I hissed. My voice was soft, but I knew Erin would hear me. “You’re acting like I brought home an untrained puppy.”
“Her gift to everyone was a free energy reading! As if any of us wanted to sit through that after Christmas dinner. She was drunk on eggnog.”
“Will you stop? She was drunk on whiskey.”
Through her elbows, Erin flung a glare at me. “As if that’s any better.”
We watched the tiger tackle a guy in a knit polo and running shoes, the animal’s jaws tearing through the dude’s stomach as easy as Starr burned a hole in my heart. I heard children crying and the pounding of footsteps on pavement as people tried to quickstep it the hell outta there.
My muscles grew sore as I crouched lower. “Why did you even bring me today, if you didn’t actually want to help me feel better?”
Eye roll as seismic occurrence. “You always do this, sulk and make dramatic death pronouncements and never learn anything. Now you’ll start the whole cycle over again in a month with someone new. I swear you have the worst taste in women.”
The next animals to escape were the flamingos, in a pink chaos of feathers and a faint whiff of shrimp.
“Oh.” Erin lifted her head to watch the bubblegum beauties. “They’re cute.”
People rose hesitantly from their hiding places and some even applauded at the sight of the baby flamingo waddling and gray and bringing up the rear. When the tiger appeared and quickly devoured the young piece of fluff, not even the most stalwart among us could hold back our cries of dismay. People once again dove for safety, leaving the tiger alone with its victims, a striped actor in a bloody one person show.
“Follow me.” Erin broke into a run, darting away from me fast.
“Don’t!” I shouted after her.
The tiger with bloodied flamingo residue on its chin jerked its head in our direction. I cursed under my breath and followed her, hoping the tiger would find some alternative zoogoers to terrorize. Did the baby flamingo have a juicy sibling?
Erin ran track in high school while I was more of an A/V and anti-exercise girlie myself so I could only jog breathlessly as I watched her sprint away. Erin ran for a concession stand and when she vaulted the cashier counter and shut herself in the Dippin Dots refrigerator to the left of the popcorn machine I looked over my shoulder to find the tiger following us curiously. It wasn’t running; maybe its fowl little hors d’oeuvre left it too full to speed after its prey?
Meanwhile I’m pretty sure the only thing my pathetic jogging and heaving was doing was warming me up. I was cooking myself in my own oven, making myself toasty and tender, readying my skin to fall off the bone like I was a prime cut at the sort of overpriced steakhouse Starr and I could never afford.
Starr. The thought of her slowed my steps, until I stopped altogether. Didn’t I want to die? Wasn’t that all I’d been thinking about for days? This was my chance. I could stand there, wait for the tiger to overtake me in our slow-mo chase. It would be so easy, so dramatic to die by tiger maul. So elegant. Might even be worth it: wait til Starr sees this, I thought. She’d feel terrible.
As I stood there, Erin watched the slow-motion pursuit I was currently on the wrong end of and her expression fell slack with fear behind the glass. She opened the Dippin Dots refrigerator door. “Get in here! What are you doing?”
Was tiger death really how I wanted to leave this mortal coil? I couldn’t say yet, nevertheless I started to walk again, rounding the concession counter and drawing near enough for Erin to reach out and yank me into the refrigerator with her.
There was barely enough room for the two of us but we did share a womb at one point even though I’d kind of crashed and burned since, so something instinctual in us must have known how to contort ourselves to fit together. We managed to make it work.
The tiger pawed at the glass then began prowling in front of us, a leisurely back and forth that spoke of forgone conclusion: we were toast.
“It’s freezing in here,” I said. “Why’d you take off running without me? Were you going to leave me out there to die?”
“Looked like you had that handled all by yourself. I told you to follow me, it’s your fault you’re so slow.”
I grinned. “I’m not slow, I’m suicidal.” If I was going to be mauled to death by a tiger, best to let the joke off the leash now.
Erin frowned—seems all I ever got from her was a frown. Why did she even bring me to this death trap of a zoo if she was just going to frown at me the whole time?—and her slim shoulders shuddered from the cold, knocking over a Styrofoam cup of Dippin Dots which bounced and scattered around our feet.
“Don’t kill yourself.” Her eyes were the levels of painful blazing glory one might see when the early morning sunlight glazes across a glacier at the very bottom of the world and her lips were blue like she took too many licks of a blue raspberry lollipop. With a tight grip on my forearm, she said, “Do you hear me? Do not. Kill. Yourself.”
The cold was getting to me too, or at least slowing the synapses in my brain from racecars down to bumper-to-bumper traffic, because I didn’t have it in me to tease or deflect or joke. I simply met her gaze and nodded.
The tiger observed us with sharp, golden eyes and my body was shivering so violently my vision started to swim and bounce which meant the tiger looked like it was jumping jump rope, its eyes yellow gumballs bouncing out of the machine. It sat back on its haunches and blinked at us, tail swishing, pose almost expectant. Almost friendly.
“Stay alive, dummy,” Erin whispered. “You deserve a woman who’s really special.”
Maybe I did. I didn’t really know anymore. “Thank you for taking me to the zoo today.” I was quiet, but I knew she would hear me.
Suddenly and out of nowhere the tiger fell to the ground with something like a tranquilizer dart jutting out its thigh. A horde of men approached wearing dark tactical gear and helmets and covering themselves with giant plastic shields the size of sewer grates. The ratio of armored man to tiger was twelve to one or maybe even twenty to one and Erin didn’t open the refrigerator door right away and I didn’t ask her to.
Instead we watched the men use painstaking caution and guns drawn to circle the tiger, the tiger who very clearly couldn’t hurt them just then, the tiger with its head lolled back on the concrete and its tail draped over a fallen stack of zoo maps, the tiger with paws of dinner plates and a big body bound back for the pen.