HEADLINES

“Sheer darling! Starlet flaunts her incredible post baby body”

            Kelly scattered the newspapers and magazines around the base of the aquarium and watched as the paper absorbed the water dripping down the glass, the words and pictures melting away into nothing. The baby alligators only hatched a week ago but already they were showing their athleticism, causing the water to slosh back and forth and spill over the top. To Kelly, they were incredible. Like little green jewels.

She picked up a mouse with her gloved hand and dangled it over the water. Immediately, a thrumming cloud of green moved toward her. One of the faster ones leapt out of the water and clamped down. The others followed and soon the mouse was below the surface being torn to pieces. There was never much blood, and that always surprised Kelly. She believed that when a living thing died there should be plenty of blood and noise.

That was how it had been with her baby. There was groaning and bleeding and then when there should have been the cry of a newborn there was nothing—her screams, yes, her blood, her, the sheer pain of it all, but no baby.

She hadn’t wanted to think about it, after, and when her husband posted the news online she stopped talking to him almost completely.

“I need support too,” he said.

She never answered him and didn’t know if she ever planned to.

“Hey there,” she said against the glass. She wiggled her finger above the water and one of the baby alligators, flaunting its advanced abilities, jumped up and latched onto her glove. Its grip was surprisingly strong and she cried out and shook her hand. The alligator let go and hit the floor with a wet smack.

“You okay?” Tomás, the other reptile keeper, ran over from the snake tunnel. He knelt and picked up the alligator by the tail.

It hung upside down, suspiciously still, and Kelly’s face began to fall apart as she looked at its limp body.

Tomás swung the gator in a pendulum motion. “It’s fine,” he said. “Just dazed.” He dropped it back in the water and as soon as it was submerged it began to twitch and then to swim. “See?”

Kelly laughed as the alligator rejoined its siblings, then held up her finger to examine the damage. The glove boasted a constellation of tiny puncture marks, blood beginning to spring up and fill the holes.

She peeled the latex away and she and Tomás put their heads down to examine the wound. “No big deal,” she said. “Barely anything, really.”

He nodded. “We should use iodine just in case.”

They took the first aid kit down from its place in the cupboard, and Kelly poured the iodine over her finger before Tomás bandaged it.

“Does it hurt?” he asked. “We could find you some ice.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think that would help.”

He was young and good-looking and Kelly thought about kissing him. She felt that her marriage had ended at the exact moment she was bitten, and she wanted Tomás to know.

“Sure it would,” he said. “That’s just what my parents always did for me and my sister. No matter what the injury was, they said to put some ice on it. It works, actually, because it makes you numb after a while.”

When he looked up from her finger his eyes were so round and brown and star-lit they made her feel impossibly old. She knew she would never kiss him, then, and another thought occurred to her even as she realized it.

“You won’t tell anyone about this, will you?”

He shook his head.

“You’re a darling!” She had never used those words in her life and she couldn’t even tell where they had come from.

He didn’t look surprised, though, and simply finished taping the bandage together.

America’s heartbreaking #MeToo confession: She was sexually assaulted at 9 years old

Tomás didn’t mind the sight of blood leaking from Kelly’s finger. He was good in an emergency and experienced in first aid—growing up his family never went to the doctor for anything less than a near-death emergency. He came to America with his parents and younger sister when he was nine years old, and by the time he was eighteen he had negotiated his father’s dislocated shoulder back into place, given Bea three stitches on the arm, and lanced every boil that plagued his mother’s neck.

He was good at caring for bodies, and he was good at his work in the zoo. The pay was bad, but they didn’t check paperwork and he liked the animals.

Looking at Kelly, he could see she was relieved he wasn’t going to tell anyone about the bite. The other keepers at Valley of the Sun Zoo viewed any animal-related injury as proof of incompetence, but Tomás personally found this finger-pointing ridiculous. All the employees were inexperienced and untrained, and as a result there was an injury or minor disaster almost every day. Management didn’t seem to care about these mistakes as much as the keepers did, because despite the general laxity with regulations they had all been made to sign waivers releasing their rights and lives to heaven.

Kelly was probably correct in thinking an injury would have been worse for her, though, because she was new and had barely spoken to anyone since starting a few weeks ago. The other guys weren’t the kind to warm to a female keeper in the first place, and had decided on her first day that she was stuck-up. They could see, anyway, that her work boots cost more than two weeks’ salary.

“I have a confession,” she said.

He waited for her to go on, noticing as he did so that her pants were soaked to the ankles and that the skin on her cheeks was turning red in patches.

“I wanted to touch them.” She gestured to the tank. “I didn’t think they would bite me.”

He laughed. “We all feel like that. Even the guys in big cats, though they would deny it. Everyone daydreams about having the magic touch, or the right aura, or whatever. To be an animal charmer. Right?”

“But it’s still heartbreaking. I bet they wouldn’t bite the Dalai Lama.”

There was something about Kelly’s face that felt familiar to Tomás, but he couldn’t place it. Something about the way her mouth was drawn down at one end or how it looked like she was exerting enormous effort just to keep her eyes open.

“Only because the Dalai Lama wouldn’t put his hand over the water.”

When she smiled, he realized she looked like his mother. Not really, since his mother had dark hair and was beautiful and Kelly had light hair and was not. Still, though, there was something similar about the way they looked—like their faces might be moving but their insides were frozen.

He’d seen that exact expression once when he came home from a half-day at school, finding his mother sitting at the kitchen table. She wasn’t crying but when Tomás looked at her he became frightened.

“I’m home,” he said, since she wasn’t moving to greet him.

When she heard his voice she reached out for him and smiled. “Hi, baby.” She got up and made him a snack and asked him questions about school, chiding him for forgetting to tell her about the half-day. He realized then that she shouldn’t have been home at that hour. She should have been out cleaning one of her houses.

That was the same face that Kelly so often wore, and Tomás had to hold himself back from asking her why.

“Why did you take the job here? For the animals?”

She looked again at the gators. “No. I just needed something new, and they let me start immediately. They didn’t even take the time to check my references.”

“Sure,” he said. “That’s why a lot of us are here.”

She inhaled, paused. “Sometimes I just feel like I need something new.”

The desire to reach out and touch her came and went, like a fluttering moth. “Me too. Sometimes I feel like that too.”

Moms, sisters, wives rank among most ‘difficult’ kin

Kelly liked to take her breaks outside of the reptile room so she could get some sunshine and fresh air before going back to the dark coolness where she now spent her workdays. She walked to the monkey exhibit and took a seat on a bench, watching the wide-eyed capuchins sit huddled on a little wooden bridge with their long black tails intertwining. She looked at her phone and saw that her husband hadn’t called or texted since the gator bite, as if he had also somehow come to the conclusion that it was useless to keep trying.

She wouldn’t have answered him even if he had reached out, but staring at the blank screen she nevertheless felt a sense of sadness that echoed the pulsing in her bandaged finger. She imagined how the conversation would eventually go, the first real one in weeks. “I know this is difficult,” she might start. Or she could just hold out her hand and say, “Look. It broke the skin.”

She thought about Tomás and wondered what kind of family had brought him up. Her own parents were dead and her brother had never been gentle or sweet. “It’s time to get over it, Kelly,” he said on the phone last week, his voice filled with the tough-love tenor that she resented but had learned to live with. “Just try again. You know, mom had two miscarriages before you were born.”

Kelly hadn’t known, and it felt like a betrayal. After they hung up, she made a list of all the questions she’d never thought to ask her mother. Have you ever had trouble getting out of bed? Been afraid for your life? Was anyone kind to you? Do you remember the bad things or only the good? Kelly’s life had been normal, her family stable, and yet she’d somehow arrived at a point from where, looking back, it was all like so much smoke. She tapped her injured finger against her forehead, hoping to recall something concrete that might explain her to herself.

A mom and two pre-teen daughters walked to the observation deck in front of the exhibit. The mom was looking at her phone and the daughters were arguing, colliding and tugging at each other’s clothes and looking more like monkeys than the capuchins, which were sitting absolutely still with their eyes glassed over.

The woman was taking a picture of the monkeys with her phone. “Give it a break, girls,” she said, not looking away from the screen.

The sisters quieted and the younger one pointed. “There’s a man in there.”

Kelly followed her finger and saw Austin, one of the primate keepers, raking the inside of the exhibit. He glanced up and waved when he noticed the girl looking at him.

The mother waved back. “That’s hard work. Especially in this heat. Maybe if I made the two of you work like that you’d have better attitudes.” She blew a strand of hair out of her face and fanned herself with a map of the zoo.

Austin went back to raking, his khaki shirt coming untucked from his waistband. He was one of Kelly’s least favorite keepers, being overly friendly and shouting people’s names whenever he saw them. The affable exterior was a lie, though—on her first day she’d overheard him making fun of Tomás with some of the other guys.

Normally she would have enjoyed seeing visitors point at Austin as if he were one of the animals on display, but today she noticed the sweat dripping down his face and the diligent way he piled leaves to one side of the enclosure. The woman’s comment rankled.

She found herself approaching the trio from behind. “Hello,” she said. “Would you like to know more about the capuchins?”

The woman spun around. Seeing Kelly’s uniform, her face relaxed into a smile. “That would be wonderful.” The girls were speaking in their own sign language and didn’t turn to look at her.

“Well, these monkeys are really fascinating. They’re native to Central Asia and are among the most rare species that we have here.”

She frowned and gripped her purse more tightly to her shoulder. “That’s not what the plaque says.”

Kelly made an apologetic face. “Yes, the plaques are very out of date, I’m afraid. But that’s why I’m here. To educate you. Actually, something interesting about these monkeys is that they mate for life. Those are the wives, there, all huddled together like that. They’re very community oriented.”

The woman was nodding now, looking at the monkeys. “I can see that. Look, girls, these monkeys mate for life. Isn’t that amazing?”

“Amazing,” they said in unison, without turning to look at their mother.

Candidate Joe Arpaio Vows To Keep Pushing Birtherism

With Kelly on break, Tomás was alone in the reptile room. There wasn’t much to do, though, because the snakes were fed and he had emptied some of the water from the gator tank so it stopped spilling over. Everything was in order and all he had to do was stand around and wait for guests to walk through.

He glanced at the entrance and, not seeing anyone, took out his phone. A series of red notifications appeared on his screen. Bea had tried to call him several times.

His hand shook as he pressed the number to call her back.

“Hey.” Her voice was deep and gravelly, like all the other girls at the high school.
“What’s wrong?” There was nowhere to sit, so he stood in front of the python and watched its curves unfold in agonizing slow motion.

“Nothing. I just need a ride to practice and you weren’t picking up.”

Tomás leaned his head against the glass. The python didn’t seem to notice. “I’m at work, so you’ll have to find someone else to take you. And don’t keep calling me like that. I thought something happened.” His words echoed through the snake tunnel and he turned toward the entrance again just to make sure nobody was coming.

“Fine.”

He knew she was annoyed, but so was he. “Okay,” he said. “Bye.” Putting his phone back in his pocket, he realized they would have to have yet another conversation about her carelessness.

They had crossed the border together, Tomás and Beatriz. She was only three years younger than him, and they could both remember the way the darkness had felt so full and active that they became convinced there were invisible insects swarming their bodies and pouring into their lungs. For days after, they shook their heads and swatted their arms and coughed into their hands to see if anything would come up. Finally their father smacked them and told them to stop.

Still, Bea didn’t seem to understand the way they had to live. She acted like she could never come home one day to an empty house, like confidence and assurance was just a choice the rest of her family failed to make. Their parents didn’t have the time or energy to keep pushing her below the line of visibility, and so it fell to Tomás to do the dirty work of erasing his sister. He tried to plan out what he would tell her. “Live like you don’t want to leave a mark,” he might say. “Like you’re a ghost. Like you’re cleaning a house and don’t want to undo all your efforts.”

His aunties were always asking when he was going to get a girlfriend, someone to marry one day, but Tomás knew he had already made the only vows that mattered to him. He and Beatriz had entered the country hand in hand. They used to laugh at the kids in school who didn’t know Spanish. They would speak to each other loudly so everyone could hear but no one could understand. Now, to save her, he had to make her quiet.

Purposeful footsteps sounded on the tile and Tomás straightened up, expecting to see his boss. It was only Alex, though, one of the petting zoo workers, breathing hard and waving as he rounded the corner. “Come on,” he said. “Millie’s giving birth.”

Tomás followed, jogging out of the reptile room.

“Dan and I have a bet going,” Alex said between breaths, smiling over his shoulder. “If it’s a boy, I get to name it.”

“Name it what?”

“Oh, I have a few candidates in mind.”

They ran past the monkey exhibit and Tomás noticed Kelly talking to some guests. He motioned to the petting zoo and she waved. “And if it’s a girl?” he asked.

“Dan says he’ll call it Ariel, after his favorite stripper at the Candy Club. All the girls there wear pink underwear.”

“Like Joe Arpaio?”

“I guess. But sexy.”

Alex led them past the open part of the petting zoo into a barn situated at the back of the enclosure. It took a minute for Tomás’s eyes to adjust to the darkness, but when they did he saw the donkey lying on her side. Greg, one of the few permanent Valley keepers, was squatting beside her and watching as her sides heaved up and down with every breath. Dan was kneeling at her head. Her ears twitched back when Alex and Tomás approached, but her eyes stayed focused on something just ahead.

“Check this out,” said Greg, gesturing to Millie’s hindquarters.

When Tomás looked, he saw two skinny, encased legs emerging from beneath her tail.

“How long has she been like that?”

Greg shrugged. “About twenty minutes. Not to worry, though, she’s a good birther. But I’m going to start pulling, to speed things along.”

He grabbed the little ankles and leaned back on his heels. “Push,” he said. “Push.” Tomás worried that the baby’s legs might come out of their sockets, but Greg just kept pulling.

Millie started braying softly and moving her legs like she was trying to run away. Dan stayed by her head, not touching her but whispering something that Tomás couldn’t make out.

Alex covered his eyes. “It’s like an exorcism.”

“Almost there,” said Greg. The head emerged slowly, and then the rest of the body slid out with a sudden flow of liquids. Greg ripped the sack open and exposed the baby’s head to the air for the first time, the ears popping up and the thin legs struggling for purchase against the dirt. Millie laid her head down.

“And?” said Alex.

Greg smiled. “Ariel.”

French ice dancer devastated after embarrassing wardrobe malfunction

            Kelly went back to the reptile room thinking about the woman and her daughters. They’d accepted her primate explanations willingly enough, and she had enjoyed herself for the first time in weeks. “Capuchin, of course,” she said, “comes from the French word meaning ‘coat.’ You see the way they’re all wearing little brown coats? They have the best wardrobes in the animal kingdom. Anna Wintour can’t get her hands on these.” The woman laughed and the daughters examined the monkeys with doubtful looks. Finally the girls pulled their mom onward to the next exhibit and Kelly made her way to her assigned post, stopping to buy a popsicle from the man who worked at the food cart.

The credit card reader was malfunctioning so she pulled a few dollars from her pocket. “How’s your day?” she asked, as he counted out her change. She’d barely spoken to anyone since she took the job, but suddenly she couldn’t seem to stop.

The man was wearing a collared shirt with multicolored stripes, and his hair was slicked down with sweat. “Hot,” he said, handing her coins that were, indeed, warm to the touch.

In comparison, the reptile room was cool and dark, inspiring in Kelly a pang of loss that she couldn’t explain. The last time she’d felt like this she was still a dancer, during the moment just before the stage lights came on for the start of a performance. She remembered standing there, waiting, ready, her body at full attention, knowing for itself that this was the good part—that afterward possibility would be replaced by something lesser.

She put her hands against the glass of the alligator aquarium and noticed that Tomás must have drained some of the water from the tank, because now it was only about two-thirds full and there was a bathing rock exposed where the gators were stretched out on top of each other under the sunning lamp.

“Excuse me,” said a voice behind her. Kelly turned around to see a lanky young man hovering in the entryway. He was pushing a stroller, but the visor was pulled down so she couldn’t see the child inside. “Can you tell me where I can find a manager?”

“I don’t think there’s one in today. Is there something I can help you with?”

He rolled a zoo pamphlet between his hands. “Well, I don’t want to cause trouble. But I just overheard someone talking about all the police outside, and I’m wondering if I can get an admission refund. Come back on a better day.”
“Police?”

“Yeah, you know. The immigration police. I don’t want to be involved in anything like that. But I did pay money.”

Kelly looked at the alligators. They weren’t moving, but somehow she still saw them as a swirl of green.

The man shouted after her when she started running, but she didn’t look back. When she arrived at the petting zoo she was out of breath and panting so hard she couldn’t speak, but she had found Tomás.

He smiled and pointed at the donkeys on the ground in front of him, the baby wet and slick and the mother still devastated from her efforts. “Ariel!” he said.

She held up her hand, the one with the bandaged finger. “Can you get me some ice?” she said, hoping he could read in her injury or divine from her palm lines what she was trying to say.

All mobility seemed to leave his face, and a mask took its place as she watched. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” He looked once more at the baby donkey lying on the ground, still attached to the umbilical cord. The mother was curved toward it and licking the fluids off its nose, so that together they formed a complete circle. “I’ll be right back.”

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Laura Irei earned her MFA at the University of South Carolina, where she was a Presidential Fellow and served as co-editor of the Yemassee literary journal. She recently completed a collection of short stories and is currently living and writing in Phoenix, Arizona.