Night Shift at the Petting Zoo
by David Hudacek
I work at a job where I’m not meant to sleep—at night, I mean, and I can’t sleep during the day, not in any real sense, at best a half-sleep. On bad days the sun doesn’t come up, all is twilight or dark, but on good days if the sun is out it’s worse—I can see the horrible brilliance of what darkness has hidden. Marching corpses and bodies like cordwood and even the living reveal their past scars and wounds, bruises appearing like blotted wine stains, highway maps of intersecting cords lifting from the skin in bas-relief. Sounds, too, banshee wail screams, muted cries, the crisp cracks of gunfire, pillow-muffled sobbing.
I meet my friends for coffee every morning after the night shift. Their day is just beginning, mine is, too, in a way. I stare into the wishing well of my coffee, pausing before I sip, the cup to my lips, my eyes waiting for the dead to come.
My friends are worried. For me. Why am I having coffee this early, when I need to sleep? That this job is killing me. Why does a petting zoo need a night watchman?
I explain that there have been coyote attacks. Vandalism. Animals escaping.
I don’t tell them what really happens at night there. To me. That when I walk the peastone paths, past Mr. Turtle and Mrs. Toad signs with their fading forest colours of evergreen and cedar, there are always animals awake, stirring, eyes like cosmic orbs, planetary bodies that have settled from the inky night sea onto the silty bottom that is our earth. With a gravitational pull, an otherwordly air. Staring.
It didn’t happen at first. I was given a faux-ranger uniform with khaki hiking pants two inches too short, a walking stick for herding any wayward zoo animals, and a can of mace both for coyotes—that spook easily, and bears—that don’t.
Those first nights were careless. I talked to the pygmy goats the way childless adults baby-speak to the young or enfeebled. Watched the three little piggies in their doghouses-cum-brick/wood/straw abodes, asleep most of the night, waking at dawn with wiggling curly tails. The white cloud of the sole loveless swan on its mirrored pond, a moon from another night.
It was calm and there were no killings and all that was there were the animals and their thoughts.
I suppose everything speaks to you, if you listen. I was the kid who cried when chairs were thrown away, as if my parents had removed a grandparent for being too unsteady. Cried because such things should never be normal, when everything was alive. Then I grew up and nothing spoke to me. Music, art, TV, a vocation—all radio silence. No life, myself included. I worked odd jobs, dishwasher, parking valet. Took a few biology classes at the community college—as if life could be caged in text. Drove around at night, soft music and canned beer playing tricks. Went nowhere. Which is how I ended up on the night shift at the petting zoo.
I had never really stared into a goat’s eyes until then. Didn’t know their pupils were so alien, rectangular black slits laid on their side, like cells in the act of mitosis, chromosomes lined up in glacial blue or amber cytoplasm.
My imagination had flagged: my pet name for the one pygmy goat as sleepless as me was Billy. I could think of no other, my mind blank as he would stare, guilting me into feeding him pellets from the bubble gum type dispensers that half-filled my palm for a quarter.
As Billy chewed, periodically butting his head against the chickenwire for another mouthful, I wondered how he had been removed from his mother—there were only kids in the goat pen, like an unwanted chair. If he ever thought of her, or if all was a moment of being. That I could never know. How different the world must be looking through rectangular pupils, as if he saw the world in that aspect ratio, as if it were all in a movie theatre, different than how I saw it, my world view kind of roundish, the edges blurred. Maybe for him it was sharp-edged and rectangular, visions of being taken from his mother an endless film loop in a dark theatre, playing over and over, again and again.
Not all the animals were as patient as Billy with my musings. But, one by one, I tried to look into their eyes at night: the lonely swans, black beads, as black as the night waters of the small pond; the big sheep eyes, almost like a doe’s; the intelligence in the piglets’. All those worlds.
One night I put a few of Billy’s food pellets in my own mouth, chewed them like he did, even attempting to move my jaw side to side instead of up and down, tasting their vaguely grassy graininess, wondering if he tasted it like I did.
That’s when I saw a figure. As I was mulling over the pellet taste Billy uncharacteristically didn’t ask for more by butting the chicken wire, but seemed to look over my shoulder.
There a gaunt man walked, dressed in clothes of another time, his off-white linen shirt with ties at a V in the front, the back torn in long angled lines like whiplashes, edged with blood. His steps made no sound in the peastone. I tried to call out to him, but my voice only came out in half-whisper, choked, fearful, like in a dream where you’re unable to shout or fight, your fists useless balls at the end of your dangling and immobilized arms.
I approached him with my mace can out, finally able to yell “Hey” in a menacing pseudo-park-ranger way. Like I meant business. But he either could not hear me or chose to ignore me, continuing on until he stopped at the little piglets pen, starting at the sleeping critters as if they were his lost children. His body seemed to soften there, but when I touched him on the shoulder he turned to me with a face still harrowed. A refugee of sorts, from another time or place. I hadn’t touched him in a menacing way, but with the instinctive empathy you felt for a sobbing stranger. Then he vanished. There was nothing there.
That next morning at the coffee shop was when my friends really began to worry. That I needed sleep, that I looked lost, like some post-concussive wobbling on the football field. I told them I was OK, knowing I wasn’t.
The following night the man wasn’t there, but after another morning at the coffee shop, in broad daylight, I began to see more of them. The living corpses, the dead, all from different times, in old-fashioned garb. In the streets, in parking lots, waiting for buses or horse-drawn carriages or family that would never come.
Maybe they’d always been there. Maybe I could see such things only after my eyes had been fixed a certain way, when I stared long enough like I had stared into Billy’s eyes. The mundane as stereogram, other worlds lifting up from the daily canvas.
But why them? Why not the children who rolled hoops and jumped rope and sang happy ditties, shot marbles, played stickball with tongues out, gritty street urchins full of hope and spunk? Young couples with a bounce in their step, arm-in-arm on the way to the pictures, brillcreamed and bobbed hair decades from grey?
Why only the sad ones?
We’re all like stations on a radio dial, set to receive signals at a certain wavelength. And my settings were for a suffering station. For the malcontents.
I tried to speak to those figures in the day, that no one else saw. None spoke back. Maybe the gap was too great to cross, between living and dead. But they looked at me with such pain in their eyes, like they wanted something from me. And I thought, You came to the right place. I know why I’m here.
This is where I took them. I led them to the petting zoo, where I had begun to see again. Where my parents had taken me as a child, when I could envision the world of an abandoned chair, an eyeless doll. When things still spoke to me. And maybe would speak to them.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Born in Charleston, South Carolina, and raised in New Jersey, David L. Hudacek is a writer in the Boston area. His first novel, Small Town Echoes of Metallic Minds, is currently on the shortlist for The Masters Review Novel Excerpt Prize. Much of his previous work has been in playwriting and screenwriting. His plays include I Woke Up in a Sam Shepard Play, staged at the Boston Theater Marathon, and The Presentation, performed at the United Solo Festival in New York on Theatre Row. Screenplays include Anna Blue (optioned by Cannes award-winning director Jerzy Skolimowski), and The Scouts, a top 50 screenplay at the Academy of Motion Picture’s Nicholl award.