by Arthur Aronstein
Twenty schoolchildren spill out from a yellow bus in front of a rustic farmhouse. It’s a gray October noon and most of them would, to their own surprise, rather be in the classroom. A collie bursts from the patio in pursuit of a tennis ball gnawed bare, homing in on it like it’s the only thing in the world, returning it to a teenager who throws it back while scrolling with his free hand. The children watch this process a few times over before getting bored.
They are soon greeted by a young woman still in the process of tucking her shirt in, who introduces herself as Amy, who’s in her third year volunteering as a tour guide but is this close to walking out if they don’t start paying her something soon, a fact that is naturally omitted from her introduction. Over the whir of a cold wind she explains a little about what they do here, her audience the age where winter coats always look too big and silly bundled up over their tiny bodies, the bulk of them huddled together in front of her like refugees or something. They sniffle and shiver sporadically, stealing looks toward the bus and its warm memory. Amy gives an abridged version of the typical introduction to get everyone’s blood pumping as soon as possible.
She leads them through a complex of cages and coops that are empty for various reasons, the happy ones she tells and the sad ones she doesn’t. One boy asks if they ever had a cheetah, presumably out of some personal fascination with the world’s fastest animal, to which she says no but they do have a jaguar. Excitement stirs at her back but they aren’t picturing what she is. They’re picturing a jaguar from a cartoon, one they saw on a nature documentary, maybe their cat at home. Those aren’t the kind of animals they have here.
Amy learned that the biggest challenge of a place like this is that it must appear as much as possible to be what it isn’t in order serve as what it is. “This isn’t a zoo,” her boss announced to a group of them during a particularly bad drought about a year ago, “but it can’t be a hospice ward either. No one wants to walk through a damn Sarah McLachlan commercial."
And he was somewhat right. Amy worked through more special initiatives than she could count, all centered around the goal of monetizing rehabilitation. She tended bruises and a broken rib during a disastrous week of goat yoga in collaboration with a questionably licensed local guru, sustained second-degree coffee burns while risking and committing serious health violations as part of an impromptu Petting Café, even dodging the bullet of national news when a former circus bear named Alfred broke out of his enclosure during a black-tie fundraising banquet. She never knew what costume she was going to have to wear, what role she would have to perform to make sure the animals could eat next month, but she did because she loved them. After she gets her Master’s—just one more semester—she hopes to be in a position to actually help them. She questions sometimes if that actually happens here.
They make their first stop at a chickenwire pasture enclosing Bubba, the sanctuary’s first and only Bactrian camel. He’s where he usually is, toward the back fence as far away from the main path as possible, craning his neck even further that way when kids started pressing their faces and fingers through the mesh. “Why do his humps look like that?” asks one. “Like all weird?” Because he was severely malnourished, Amy thinks. “Will he come over here?” No. He’s still afraid he’ll get hit. “I want to ride him. Does he like being ridden?” He’s here to make sure no one will ever again. When it’s clear that Bubba has no interest in performing for them, turning around and lifting his tail to shoot what Amy recognizes as a big, airy fart in their direction, she gathers them up and ushers them along to their next stop.
She takes them to a place she knows to guarantee liveliness in Mocha’s enclosure. Mocha is a seven year-old, 350-pound jaguar who was rescued two years ago from her life as a neglected pet somewhere in rural Brazil, where their best theories infer she was raised and socialized around domesticated dogs. How she ended up there is too morbid for Amy to consider, but the result is an evolutionarily engineered killing machine which has lost its primordial instinct for that of a golden retriever, something she occasionally reminds herself is neither cute nor compassionate to the animal stripped from its ability to live in the wild. Yet Mocha is a crowd-pleaser nonetheless. Amy whistles, and from the depression of her den Mocha emerges, shoulder blades razorous mountains between the sleek strip of her spine, yawning in the valley of her stretch to reveal teeth still stained with scraps of morning feed. The kids crowding the fence take a step back, a sound that rouses Mocha from her midday drowsiness, snapping onto them with those amber eyes whose pupils tighten into slits. In a flash she’s up against the fence, the length of her body stretched upright by claws that curled through the metal, tongue lashing and teeth gnawing to break up the sound of a low growl. It’s hard to explain in the moment that these are signs of excitement—see, look at that tail wagging!—because about half the class seems to need a new pair of pants. The kid who asked about the cheetah earlier starts to cry, his whole fantasy shattered at a moment’s notice. The teacher looks at Amy in the way she might look at one of the kids—like she should’ve probably known better than to take them here. Amy apologizes by way of a weary smile. It is the teacher who leads them on to their next destination.
The next viewings bring little of note. They loiter around in the goat pen for a little bit, some feeding and petting but most opting out to avoid taking off gloves for hand sanitizer. Amy says a few words about the farm cats, most of whom are rescues themselves, from other farms, a lot of them missing eyes or tails or things you can’t see from various equipment or livestock-related accidents. Mostly she just reminisces on what used to be where: “There, we had two giraffes.” “Would you believe it if I told you a chimpanzee used to live there?” “When I first arrived, we could afford to keep a rhino.” These do nothing to inspire curiosity from the class, and only serve to make her sad. Eventually, the children have made the entire round of the complex back to the farmhouse and—with an hour left to spare—find themselves at the end of the tour.
“I think that about does it,” Amy says, bringing one hand against the other in a conclusory manner. “Sorry there weren’t, you know. More animals. Does anyone…does anyone have any questions for me?”
Unsurprisingly, the class, penguinlike in their attempt to stay warm, is zombified by the notion of having to think about anything. “That’s totally okay,” says Amy. “Thank you all so much for coming out. If you ever wanted to bring your friends, your family, you know where—”
She is interrupted by a hand that shoots up from the back. Some kids clear to reveal a girl in a bright pink jacket. “Yes, of course, you in the pink?”
She lowers her hand into a pointed finger at somewhere behind Amy. “Has that dog been playing fetch all day?”
Amy turns around, having long been adjusted to the sound of Heather’s routine. “Oh, yes. All day every day.” She claps her hands at Donnie, who throws her Heather’s tennis ball, the collie immediately rushing over to circle her. Without felt it is more a baseball, a ping-pong ball, than it is a tennis ball. She throws it and down Heather goes, an arrow through the scrubgrass over the hill. “She’s addicted to fetch.”
“Addicted to fetch?” asks the teacher. Her tone indicating she doesn’t appreciate when someone lies to her class.
“Addicted to fetch,” Amy confirms. “Wish we could tell you why. What you’re watching now is a detox, actually. What is it,” she turns back to Donnie, “going on hour two of three?”
“Three of four.”
“Three of four,” thumb over her shoulder. “See, it used to be eight hours a day. She was having heart problems. But she literally wouldn’t eat without it. Refused to. Apparently she had a normal life before this. Her only owner passed away and no one else could take care of her.”
Heather gains the hill and emerges from the grass, drops the ball at Amy’s feet.
“Many tried,” she throws it. “All she wanted to do was this.”
Heather disappeared into the prairie and remembered the world. When she ran was the only time she felt the wind—and feel it she did, it was as though she was made of it, the way it molded to her, how it rang in her ears like thought and music, the music that used to play from the porch, that she never heard anymore, but when the ball was thrown, she heard it again; she heard laughter and children at her heels. When the ball was thrown, she smelled gristle and charcoal in the air. When the ball was thrown, the ground turned into the same ground she crossed in search of the same ball she’d chased after all her life—convinced for the moment she snatches it in her mouth that, up the hill, she will return to the same person who always threw it to her. The hope they might be there is the only one she knows.
Amy shakes her head as she picks up the slimy ball, tosses it up with a cometstreak of saliva into the valley. She usually ends the tour by encouraging kids to consider careers in Zoology or Veterinary Sciences. Today she decides not to.
______
Arthur Aronstein is a writer from Wyoming. His fiction aspires to represent the deep internal lives of surprising unsung perspectives, from everyday heroes to public enemies, even animals and inanimate objects. He is based in New York City.
[GO HOME.]