quiet.
“Look at that mallard with the blue streak,” Jeanette said dreamily, pointing.
“It’s a Spotted-billed Duck,” Joey said. “And…huh. They aren’t native to the U.S.”
“What about that one?”
“That’s a Reyard’s Duck. They’re from the Vancouver area.”
Their father covered the crumbs in his hand and said, “Let’s quit feeding these aliens.”
He led them to the cat house. The leopards, servals, tigers, and pumas all circled in narrow spaces dotted with artificial-looking rocks and toys made of rope. Bars covered the fronts of their cells, instead of the greasy plexiglass used for most of the other animals. The cats paced in tight figure-eights, their eyes never leaving the crowds of gawking humans before them. Their movements were as fluid as flight or swimming. The big cats had always struck Jeanette as oddly conspiratorial—lurking, shifting, never averting their gaze. Always furious and hungry, moving and trapped.
“Cats are so smart,” she said, in awe. She held Joey up in her sack and pointed her at a spotted civet.
“I’d like to see ‘em go toe-to-toe with those wolves back there,” the father said, throwing a thumb back to the North American Adventure section. “These kitties are all too independent, that’d be the death of them. They couldn’t last a second against an organized pack, even if the dogs’r dumb.”
Jeanette smirked. “I don’t know…”
“Cats aren’t smart,” Joey said. “They run almost all on instinct. If you sever their brains from their brainstems, they keep moving, eating, and hunting, like nothing’s changed.”
The father threw his remaining breadcrumbs out and wiped his hands on his coveralls. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Their brains control very little of their behavior,” Joey said. “Its role is almost purely inhibitory.”
“Huh.”
“I’m just saying, that doesn’t sound very smart to me.”
Jeanette groaned. “I thought you liked cats.”
“They’re fine.”
“You really think they’re dumb?” Jeanette held the bag up to her face. “Didn’t you always want a cat?”
“They’re cute. It’s just, the fact is they’re dumb.”
Jeanette huffed.
“I think your sister wants out of here,” the father said.
“What do you mean?”
“Come on,” he whispered, like it was obvious.
“I’m fine,” Joey said. “But…they’re looking at me funny.”
Jeanette lowered the bag out of the civet’s view. Her sister glowed a dim yellow. Jeanette thought she could hear Joey’s breath rising and falling.
Jeanette said, “Joey? Are you okay?”
“It’s the cages,” their father said. “They’re freaking her out I bet you.”
“What? Are you kidding? It’s fine. I don’t care. ”
A serval crept to the edge of his cage and stood poised, gazing down at them. Jeanette felt the back of her neck get hot. She pulled the bag closer to her body and tried to imagine that she was a water buffalo, or a gazelle standing alone in a field. The cat blinked slowly, looking almost reptilian, and the muscles in its shoulders tensed and rippled. For thousands of years they’d been crafted to hunt and roam, and now they’d been given security.
“It knows something’s up,” Joey said.
Their father grabbed Jeanette by the hand and pulled them out of the cat house. They stood outside the ape building, letting a light drizzle fell over them.
Jeanette said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t think about how this could affect you.”
“It doesn’t. Listen, these animals aren’t unhappy, I don’t think. They don’t know any better. Animals live for homeostasis, and that’s what a zoo is all about.” Her breath, or the recording of it, heaved loudly a few times. “I think most of these animals would choose captivity if they could, you know? It’s not like they enjoy struggle.”
She forced a short bark of a laugh out from her speakers. Their father suggested, in that case, they should get out of the rain and go visit the primates. They were in the ape house mezzanine and wicking water from their bodies when Joey suddenly flashed bright red and cried, “NO! No. No. No.”
Jeanette pulled the BrightBox from the tote. “Baby are you okay?”
A fat family in rain slickers stared at them and their screaming prism.
“Let’s get out please. Okay? Okay. Okay let’s please just get…out.”
Joey’s voice was rapid and thin. It sounded like she was genuinely hyperventilating. The glow on the box rose and fell, shifting from red to a bright orange, its colors pulsing with the rhythm of a failing heart. Jeanette turned the box over and examined it for water damage.
“System report?” she asked dumbly. The user guide had suggested a reboot in the event of ‘questionable client behavior’.
Joey said, “Systems are fine. Let’s leave. Now. Everyone is staring at us. That woman is going to fetch security. Let’s just go.”
Their father turned to the woman in the rain slicker, who gaped back at them uncomprehendingly. “Really, what the hell could security do?” he said. She shrugged and opened her mouth. “Really, ma’am. We’re harmless.”
The woman gulped and nodded, pulling one of her children’s stout fingers into her own fist.
When they made it to the parking lot, Joey’s light cooled to a steady teal and her breath quieted. Jeanette’s face was flushed and puffed-out in a manner suggestive of eminent puking. Her breath matched the unsteady, anxious thrum of Joey’s artificial one. The father pulled Joey from his living daughter’s arms, allowing Jeanette to drop to her hands and knees. She heaved and coughed but didn’t produce any fluid.
“I’m fine,” Joey said, a little bewildered. “Jean I’m okay, cool your motherfucking jets.”
“Ugh,” she wiped her brow and rose with a sigh.
“That was embarrassing. I just got worried about you.”
“I’m fine. Need I remind you that I’m waterproof, shockproof, loaded with anti-virus software, and have a battery life of three days. If anything malfunctions in the box it will turn black. There are no service reports.”
“But still,” their father piped up, “you can feel fear.” He smiled approvingly as he said it.
Joey blinked yellow. “Does that make me a person, then? Or close enough?”
“You..,” he grinned. “Well, you girls were always more than enough for me.”
They walked a path along the river and climbed the grassy steps to the botanical garden’s greenhouse. It was a massive, bulbous structure, built like a series of interconnected sacks, each hospitable to foliage from a unique corner of the world. The rainforest displays were decorated with polymer statues of dark-skinned children in tattered loincloths, stereotypical crap that Joey was normally inclined to grouse about, but this time she didn’t complain. One of the statues, their father pointed out, looked just like the girls had in their own preadolescence. The polymer girl stood in a thicket of lilies, buck naked holding some kind of flute. Her cheeks were like apples and her lips were pursed in a song she could never play.
“Looks just like you girls,” he reiterated.
“Really?” Jeanette said, turning her attention down to Joey. “Do you think so?”
“Facial scanning software fails to confirm that,” Joey said. Seeing their father’s frown, she added, “but I see what you mean.”
Jeanette took them to the miniatures room, where tiny trees and hedges had been sculpted and deliberately grown to accommodate an elaborate fairy castle and bonsai forest. She was ashamed to admit it, but she still occasionally imagined herself as Thumbelina, the shrunken inhabitant of a magical, tidy little world. In the same room there were bonsai trees of every conceivable shape, each held firmly in a wood box by layers of sand and grit. Each was trimmed carefully every day by botanical garden associate, according to the signs. It was painstaking work to maintain th
e right scale.
Beside the trees were rows of bonsai melons, which (the signs said) had been grown into perfect geometrical shapes through a process called “organic space restriction”. An ashen-faced botanical gardens employee with fingers like tendrils approached them and offered a sample of square cantaloupe. Jeanette and their father chewed while Joey read the displays.
“It’s better than a regular melon,” their father observed.
The garden employee nodded. “The tissues on the insides are more compact, so there’s more sweetness by volume.”
Jeanette held a piece up to Joey’s sensors. With a fingernail she squeezed a bit of the juice out for her to taste.
Not noticing, the garden employee went on, “you see, the process can only be conducted on three melons per plant before a new plant has to be started. This is because the constriction is actually quite traumatic to the plant’s circulatory system…”
“I need to get the fuck out of here,” Joey said suddenly, flashing bright blue and making the garden worker jump back.
6.
It’s 1993. It must be; that was the year Joey got the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers t-shirt that she wore as a nightgown, tunic, and dress, all day, every day. It was years before Febreeze was invented, so their dad had to wash it daily, while Joey was in the tub with her action figures.
There are grey streaks of mud and silt where the shirt hits her knees. She’s had it awhile. It has the Black and Green Rangers on it; she got it for Easter. Jeanette wouldn’t wear hers, because it had the Pink Ranger on it. She likes Yellow, when she watches the show at all.
The girls