New Orbit Magazine Issue 08; Feb 2020, The Future of Animals

“Who’s Ike? Your son?”
For a moment, I thought the kid was
crazy. “No, he’s the polar bear! Him and me,
we’re the only living things here. We both
survived by keeping our heads down, and I
don’t intend to do anything to stir up any
trouble now.”
the zoologist in charge of the polar bears, was
long gone at that point, quit in protest, and
no one bothered to ask me, so they missed
one big old, half-blind bear. The government
folks were supposed to come back after the
removal and check up on everything. They
never did.
“That’s an interesting strategy,” Max said.
“But if you don’t sign that paper and take me
on as an intern, I’m going right back to the
city to tell them all I could find here was a
janitor just doing his job and a lonely, old
polar bear who’d be better off in a preserve.”
I chewed on that for about a half a
minute. “Okay, then, let me show you
around. We’ll just see how you much you like
it here.”
So I took the fool kid to the empty
monkey cages that I mopped on Mondays,
the bird pavilions that I swept on Tuesdays,
the Elephant Exhibit that I raked over with
the old tractor on Wednesdays and the lawn
on Lion Hill that I mowed every Thursday
and sometimes again the following Monday.
Then, I took Max to Ike’s enclosure
where I had him mash up some stinking cod
for the old half-blind bear. Ike didn’t even
bother to come out of his cave to say ‘how do
you do.’ He’s a smart one, that bear. When
the clipboard people came counting, he’d
hidden far back in that fake rock cave, and
then he was nowhere to be seen when they
back came with the tranquilizer guns. Hank,
After leaving the bucket of smashed cod
for Ike, I took Max to the drained hippo pool
which was growing a nice coat of mold and
needed a good scrubbing. I handed him a
brush and some gloves. The kid went to it like
he had something to prove. But as he
worked, he kept glancing at the video screen
that snapped on every time someone
approached the exhibit. After all the animals
went to preserves, the activists set up live
connections to show what a jolly good time
the animals were having in their new homes.
“I don’t think that’s really ‘live’ footage,”
Max said.
“Course it is,” I said.
“Well, we’ve been here 20 minutes, and
I’ve seen the same hippo do that same slide
through the mud three times.”
“Hippos like to roll in mud,” I said.
“Come on, Frankie,”
“Names Franklin,” I said. “And so what?
The connection went out a couple years ago.
Now I just play the old tapes. I’ve got them
on a loop.”
That’s seemed to set something off in the
kid. He got suddenly overly excited. “So
instead of live animals you have these tapes
are what two, three years old? Some of the
animals might even be dead! Do people still
come to watch these? They risk potential
terrorist attacks to come see pictures of dead