We trek to the zoo every day, impale a koi or a python or a guinea fowl with our arrows and take the meat back to the kitchen. One of my jobs is to recycle the food scraps, the scales, the claws, the lizard-leather. Pluck them. Tear their skin off. Find a use for whatever bloody dripping smelly bits and pieces I can.
My Hopey’s birthday is coming up in forty days. Will I even be out of here by Hopey’s birthday? Please, God, let something change. You’re listening, right? I mutter prayers as I work the kitchen. I think about my life and how I got here.
That whole thing with the monkeys? It’s a memory, now. So much has been taken from the zoo across the past month. The parakeets become a meal, then the newts and axolotls, then the poor snuffly little skunk. The 185-year-old Galapagos giant
