2019 FALL PROSE CONTEST RUNNER UP

NORTHEAST OHIO SPOTLIGHT

The Red Panda Effect

Prose by ​Elise Demeter

Imogen never pretended to be a scientist. She’d taken a handful credits to meet the requirements of the Hospitality Management degree she obtained online and, when finding a job prove difficult—back when finding a job was the sort of thing she cared about—she settled with working the ticket counter of Hartland Wildlife Refuge, an endangered species facility located in the dead space between Ulysses and Garden City, Kansas. “We’ll take a shot on you,” the hiring director told her, “though we typically only hire individuals with biology degrees. I’m sure you understand why.” She didn’t.
 
Eventually, though, Imogen learned. Biology majors could navigate the diets of each animal, the nuances of their habitats, the medical conditions they were susceptible to, how to operate on splintered paws and ruptured organs and fractured wings. When the Indian flu landed first on the coasts, then spread storm-like through the heart of the country, and when the lives of keepers and educators and technicians and surgeons and custodians began blinking out like small, doused fires, Imogen lost access to the privilege of their interminable knowledge. She never thought to ask the questions that might prepare her for responsibility—but then, she never thought she’d be called away from ticket sales and thrust into animal care.
 
She should have ceased showing up to work altogether. Her absence would have been felt decisively less than that of any other worker’s. Besides: the loss of support staff was naturally accompanied by a loss of visitors. Overnight, Hartland became a ghost town. Imogen knew her dedication was foolish and ill-advised, that the illness was invasive and virulent, that contact with the disease promised no escape. Still, she clocked in each morning until the time clocks failed. She stayed well past fulltime hours nightly. She slept in vacated offices in the Research and Education building more and more often, became hallway neighbors with a handful of lingering coworkers who had no families and no hope.
 
Those who remained with her struggled to acclimate to the new workload as much as Imogen did. Google searches saved them all, taught them that red pandas were vegetarian carnivores, that there was nothing to fear when pangolins began shedding their scales, that the fourteen species of animals housed at Hartland Wildlife Refuge were—ironically—native to India, a country whose name tasted like an overpopulated blister at the back of Imogen’s throat. Had people brought the Indian flu to America? Or had an errant monkey bite, a festering wound inflicted by a bat, something animalistic in nature carried it in? Had the disease originated with a distant relative of Hartland’s animals?
 
The Indian flu crept through the vacancies of America, its sparsely populated lowlands, its rural boroughs. When the Internet went down—had it been days or weeks after Imogen thrust herself into her new role?—they lost access to digital records, Wikipedia articles, online listicles. The dissolution of communication happened almost simultaneously. Phone lines puttered, fell. The good-hearted people who’d continued delivering trucks of warming meat and wilting produce to Hartland ceased showing up. Cars disappeared from roads when gas stations emptied. The few who’d remained at the facility finally turned their backs on Imogen, on the animals they strove to preserve. Relationships staled, family names went extinct. It took only a matter of days—nowhere near long enough to memorize the specificities of animal husbandry—before Imogen found herself alone in a zoo whose electricity winked, sputtered, failed.
 
The generators kicked on. Imogen had the foresight to leave the lights off indoors, peed in the brush rather than flush toilets, refused to enter the giant walk-in refrigerators more often than necessary out of fear that she’d let the last of the cold out. She didn’t know how long the generators would run for, what she would do when they failed. Desperately, she scoured the Research and Education building for answers, but Imogen found no books, no articles, no care protocol, no technical manuals. Instead, she found fourteen binders stacked full of menial trivia on each of Hartland’s fourteen species, scrawled in a sharply-angled loping hand Imogen could hardly make out in places.
 
Imogen learned to improvise again. Darwinism: develop the backbone it took to preserve, or else perish. Imogen adapted.
 
 
Panthera uncia. While the snow leopard is a large cat, it does not have the capacity to roar. Snow leopards bear no relation to leopards, but in fact are more closely related to cheetahs.
 
 
 
“I thought I’d find you here.”
 
Imogen startled, the blade of the knife she aimed at a heap of green skating against a knuckle. She hardly felt the sting of skin shearing from bone. She turned. Behind Imogen, her face framed by violent copper curls, her face and clothing smudged with dirt-spatters, giving her the look of someone who’d walked miles without rest, stood Tallulah. Her eyes were sunken in, her cheeks gaunt, her body self-cannibalizing. The whites of Tallulah’s eyes were streaked with red.
 
Tallulah was seven years older than Imogen and half a century wiser. She worked—or had worked, Imogen supposed—as a forensic pathologist for a razor-sharp goldmine of a company located some twenty miles away from Hartland. Tallulah was maddeningly patient even when she was pressed, intuitive, convincing. She used to cut her hair jaggedly short and dress in oversized men’s clothing before her body matured. Imogen had always thought of her—thought of everyone—in terms of spirit animals. Tallulah was a mute parrot, a finless dolphin. She thought of herself as a prairie dog, a bowerbird.
 
“Maybe not here specifically,” Tallulah corrected. She moved across the once-sterile commissary, the metallic surfaces of sinks and stoves and cookware dull as cardboard around them. “You never struck me as domestic.” Tallulah looked around, first at the wide silver tabletops, then at the cavern-bellied refrigerators. “But here, at work. It’s just like you not to know what else to do with yourself.”
 
Imogen wasn’t sure whether to take that as an insult. She wasn’t sure it mattered anymore. Once, there had been a thousand things Imogen wanted to say—hurtful, vengeful things—but the will to say any of them vanished at the sight of her sister. It was so much easier to hate from a distance. Imogen turned back to the cutting board layered with leafy vegetables, surrounded by more of the same, to her scraped-red-but-not-bleeding hand, and began to slice again. The leaves were going soft, wilting. “Someone has to take care of them,” Imogen said. The animals. The innocent, the unaffected.
 
“That someone is you?” Tallulah came near enough that Imogen could see her sister’s head tilt and curls shudder out of the corner of her eye. “Imogen,” Tallulah said, “do you even know what you’re doing?”
 
“Everybody else is gone.”
 
“And you should be too.” Tallulah rested a hand on the table’s surface. Her nails were dull and dirtied, the beds caked with mud. “You should’ve come home. Mom and Dad—"
 
“How did you get here?” Imogen interrupted. She scraped the back of the knife across the cutting board, pushing the newly sliced leaves off it. She stooped to grab another tepid bundle of something half-purple and frayed-edged, snapping the rubber band that held the vegetation together, and sliced. “Why are you here?”
 
“To make sure you’re okay,” Tallulah said. She pulled her hand from the table, reaching out to cradle Imogen’s bicep, until Imogen twisted and pulled away.
 
 
 
The dirt under Tallulah’s nails turned quickly to blood, the liquid that oozed from thawing chunks of cow and goat and rabbit caking over old filth. Tallulah hadn’t asked if Imogen wanted help, but rather, what she needed help with. She took orders agreeably, but then, Tallulah had always been compliant, malleable.
 
Imogen remembered overhearing stories of how bright and well-behaved and simple-to-raise Tallulah had been, that she was the perfect child. Imogen, on the other hand, had been forfeited to a foster family before she was two. As an infant, Imogen was fussy at best, downright nonresponsive at her most frustrating. She escaped the womb with her umbilical cord wound painfully around an ankle five-and-a-half weeks premature and found herself comfortably situated in the niche of daughter scorned. She cried incessantly for her first month, then fell into a habit of staring vacantly at walls, her eyes refusing to follow the movement of her parents’ fingers. She would let milk spill out of the corner of her mouth, or otherwise spit up everything she drank. Her mother tried to love her—her father, too—but something didn’t click.
 
Nobody ever told Imogen that, not in so many words, not even years later when, well into the tail end of her high school career, her parents suddenly reversed their decision, decided they wanted Imogen in their lives after all. Was it because the difficulty of child-rearing was out of the way? Was it because the only parental work left to do was usher Imogen to school, feed a mouth that was reluctant to open? Was it because guilt finally gnawed at their marrow, sinking into hollow bones, the crevices between each swollen knuckle? Imogen never knew. She resented them all the same.
 
“Where should I put these?” Tallulah asked. She was crowded by a half-dozen buckets stacked with proportionally guesstimated heaps of vegetables and meat, roughly hacked into mismatched sizes. “In the fridge?”
 
Tallulah was halfway across the room, her fingers curling around the door handle, when Imogen stopped her with an abrupt, “No!” Tallulah recoiled. “I mean,” Imogen corrected, scooping three of the buckets against her chest, “I don’t want to keep opening the door. In case—you know. The electricity. We’ll just go feed them. I’ll show you.”
 
Imogen led the way out of the commissary, Tallulah following obediently at her heels. You should’ve come home throbbed in Imogen’s thoughts with every footstep on blacktop. Mom and Dad rattled inside her like disturbed paper hornets in an agitated hive. She didn’t care. Maybe, five-ten-fifteen years down the road, if the Indian flu didn’t claim them, if they somehow came out the other side of the plague unscathed, Imogen would let them back in: but only after the difficulty of caring for ill parents passed, once the work of emotional and physical labor was no longer a burden she’d have to bear. It felt only fair.
 
 
 
Panthera tigris tigris. Bengal tigers have better memories than any other animal: it is one hundred times better than dogs and dozens of times better than primates. Moreover, tigers have the capacity to rationalize action. Combined, this can be deadly. Records show Bengal tigers witnessing their kin being shot, seeing a man pull a gun’s trigger (causing pain and death), and remembering the shooter’s face for as long as it takes to hunt and kill him.
 
 
 
Imogen led Tallulah around Hartland one exhibit at a time, taught Tallulah second-hand the ways she’d been shown how to feed each animal prior to the disappearance of her coworkers. For this knowledge, at least, Imogen was grateful.
 
The king cobra, the keeled box turtle, the red pandas, the pangolins were all easy enough. She could reach overhead into their exhibits, or else step inside to deposit bowls filled with soupy protein mixtures, squirming larvae, diced fruit hunks, heaps of grasses, frozen carcasses. Some of their diets—the ones that made Imogen feel particularly squicky—felt tattooed to the gray matter of her brain. She knew to heft a pair of giant rats into the cobra enclosure once a week, maybe every other. She remembered to heft whole wheelbarrows full of pellets and grass to the barasinghas—though she didn’t remember which grass was the right one. The timothy hay? Sorghum? Bamboo shoots?
 
She couldn’t remember ever feeding the gaur, which left her gut churning with anguish as she passed by their exhibit. “I don’t know anything about them,” she told Tallulah, warily eyeing their hulking masses, the swan-neck shape of their horns. “I’ve never gone in there. They have—" Imogen shrugged, eyeing the pool of inky water, the flatland of grass.
 
She led them to the snow leopard enclosure, shoving a wheelbarrow before of her. Tallulah lagged several steps back, sneezing violently. “I can push that,” she offered, but Imogen continued to plod forward determinedly like she hadn’t heard her sister.
 
“This is where it gets dicey,” Imogen announced, shoving the employee gate open with her hip. She’d stopped locking doors what felt like ages ago. They all had, when there had still been others.
 
Imogen strode into a building that housed the snow leopard’s off-exhibit pen, decorated with a wooden hollow to sleep under and a wide water basin. It was connected to the outdoors by a series of gated shifts and chutes designated to guide the animal into the night house. Imogen had never tried to usher the cat inside: she didn’t know how. She refused to even try to bring the more harmless animals indoors.
 
Imogen climbed a short set of stairs to reach an opening in the wall that led to an angled tunnel, through which Imogen dumped a bucket of meat. She used the back end of a shovel to push the chunks through the chute until they fell through to the outdoor exhibit. There was no sound, then abruptly, a yowl like a person crying out in pain and the soft huff of earth post-pounce. Tallulah, who had crept close behind Imogen to watch, let out a clipped-short scream and jumped back. It startled Imogen enough to do the same, and she nearly toppled off the steps.
 
“Don’t do that,” Imogen admonished her sister. “You’ll scare it.” Scare me, she meant.
 
“I didn’t—" Tallulah started, then stopped. “Sorry. Is that all we do in here?”
 
Imogen side-stepped around Tallulah. Up close, her sister’s face looked gray, sickly. Imogen swallowed back what that must have meant. “Almost.” She moved toward a hose coiled along the wall and turned its tap, dragging the rubber serpent closer to the off-exhibit cage. (Imogen hated that word—cage—its cold solemnity, its finality. She felt like a traitor even thinking it. These were the animals’ homes, barren and poorly cared for though they were.) She wedged the end of the hose between the slats of the pen and let the water flow into the basin, refilling it from as much of a distance as she could maintain. It was slow-going, the water pressure slacking, then gushing forcefully, then weakening again. Was water flow tied to the generators? She hated how little she knew.
 
“What about cleaning them?” Tallulah asked. Her arms wrapped around her torso, her gaze piercing the feeding trap in the wall. “Outside. Shouldn’t you go out there and take care of the mess?”
 
“Did you want to do that?” There was a bite in Imogen’s tone she hadn’t permitted of herself. Her teeth caught her lower lip, stifling words at the time as she stoppered the water.
 
“It just seems like—"
 
“I’m doing everything I know how to, Lula.”
 
 
 
Imogen was surprised by the willingness with which Tallulah curled up in the empty corner of a vacant administrative room, refusing to both go home (to Imogen’s abandoned apartment) and to go home (to Tallulah’s own place, to Mom and Dad’s, to whatever hovel called to her). Instead, they made pillows out of old binders and stacks of unfiled paperwork and fashioned blankets out of left-behind jackets and ponchos. It wasn’t particularly cold out, not yet, but Imogen’s fingers longed for something to wind around and squeeze.
 
At night, she could hear the unrest pronounced high on the roars of Bengal tigers, carried audibly on the wind from the other side of Hartland. She imagined the longing that may have stirred relentlessly inside the spirit of the barasinghas, or the desperation with which the keeled box turtle might have been toeing the glass of its exhibit. The turtle’s exhibit was embedded in the front of the Research and Education building, making him—Imogen wasn’t actually certain whether it was a boy or not, but pronouns made their way into her head regardless—the closest thing to a roommate Imogen had had in a while, until Tallulah’s arrival.
 
She’d heard somewhere that animals could feel things in the environment, that they knew when storms were coming, that they picked up on grief. Imogen imagined them pent up in their manmade prisons, aware inexplicably of the slow fog of the Indian flu settling dangerously across Kansas, lingering there, but unable to act on their latent fear. Were animals susceptible? Imogen told herself it would be simple enough to find out: she could look it up in the morning. But just as quickly, she remembered the Internet had failed them. Easy answers were a thing of the past, maybe indefinitely. All she had were binders full of useless facts.
 
The night draped its pincushion weight over her, creeping down the hallway of the Research and Education building, sliding its brittle tendrils into each individual room. Outside, a lion-tailed macaque screamed, a noise Imogen was so used to that it had become a lullaby in its way. The door to the office she’d claimed as her own stood open, as did the one across the hall, where Imogen heard her sister twisting on the floor, either uncomfortable or afraid. Tallulah was a body molded by pillow-top mattresses and memory foam, ill-suited for the cold ground and the sounds of night-terrors. “Lula?” Imogen called out, just loud enough for her voice to carry a room over and slice across the howl of Old World monkeys outside their building.
 
Imogen was met with silence. She thought Tallulah may have fallen asleep despite the macaques, but then, hardly loud enough to traverse the hallway: “Yeah?”
 
“How did you get here?” It was a question that nagged at her throughout the day, was slaughtered under the business of wheelbarrowing buckets filled with hacked fruit and vegetable chunks, bales of hay, souring meat to pens that started to stink. Waste piled in inconsistent streaks over grass, across stone and concrete. She could hose the areas down, but she feared the process of coaxing the Asiatic lions through their transfer tunnel. How could she safely climb into these cats’ proxy homes, or, how could she lure them out of their displays? Was there water enough to clean their exhibits? She was overwhelmed: the more she thought about it, the more the lack of solutions suffocated her.
 
Tallulah’s voice—the answer delayed, the words meditated upon—jerked Imogen back into the office, where her skin felt sticky against the plastic of several cross-layered ponchos. “I walked. It only took about a day.”
 
A day. Imogen cheeked the word, the total hours, flattening the taste of it between her tongue and teeth. She wondered at the blisters and callouses that might’ve hardened over the soles of Tallulah’s feet. She thought of the way her sister had doubled over at the waist that night, after hiking the hill that wrapped around the big cat exhibits, clutching her sides pathetically, and how Imogen had insisted Tallulah take a break, that she wasn’t obligated to help. How Tallulah, pale-faced and sweating, asserted she would anyway.
 
“Why?” Imogen asked at last.
 
“Why what?” Imogen could hear Tallulah shifting again. Something hollow thumped near the hallway wall. Tallulah coughed: a wet, brackish sound that woke paranoia in Imogen.
 
“Why’d you bother? You’ve never come out this way before. I didn’t even know you knew where I worked.”
 
“Of course I knew.” There was indignance to Tallulah’s voice. Imogen could imagine the scrunch of her sister’s forehead, the way Tallulah’s eyes grew hawkish and bright whenever she was offended. “Now’s as good a time as ever, don’t you think?”
 
Imogen didn’t answer.
 
“Besides,” Tallulah offered, “Mom and Dad are—"
 
“No,” Imogen interrupted. “I don’t care. I don’t—"
 
“You should know,” Tallulah protested.
 
“No.” Imogen jerked one of the poncho’s higher, its plasticky heat sticking to her shoulder. “I shouldn’t.” Outside, the macaques screamed their death song.
 
 
 
Ailurus fulgens. Red pandas are clever escape artists. The Rotterdam Zoo gained attention after a fallen branch pressing on a security fence deactivated the electrical circuit, allowing a red panda to flee its enclosure. The red panda was found deceased shortly after, but an excess of one hundred individuals reported spotting the red panda across the Netherlands throughout the next year, leading to phrase “the red panda effect” entering psychologists’ and cryptozoologists’ discourse.
 
 
 
The eyes see what the brain expects them to see.
 
 
 
Gavialis gangeticus. Like most crocodilians, gharials do not have the capability to chew food. To compensate, they swallow solid, chunky objects such as rocks to aid in crushing food in the stomach. While gharials do not hunt humans, some scientists posit that they will scavenge bodies sent down the Ganges River during funeral rites, intentionally consuming human jewelry for this purpose.
 
 
 
“How long will you last?” Imogen asked the water at her feet. She climbed into the industrial-sized sinks in the commissary nightly, warping it into a makeshift bathtub. Its metal was cold against the backs of her thighs. The icy water pooled in the plugged sink basin, and it was quick to wash dark with the dirt she scrubbed from her calves and feet and forearms.
 
These provisional showers were the most Imogen afforded herself: her thoughts were too consistently cast toward the animals, even at the detriment of her own existence. The most generosity she spared herself came when she ate the darker green leaves of lettuce bundles and the fleshiest hearts of fruit, forcing handfuls at a time on Tallulah when her cough became more pronounced, her complexion more pallid, despite Tallulah’s frequent protesting that she had no appetite, that the thought of eating made her queasy. They hydrated with the water bottles stocked in the back of the food court, because Imogen was still too unsure about how city water worked, how long it would take for tanks to run dry, what happened when the world wasted everything that sat purified in reserves. She could calculate produce (two days’ worth, at most, sat in the walk-in refrigerator) and meat (enough for a week-and-a-half, two weeks if used judiciously) and dry stock (pellets, feed, and hay for a month), but she had no way of knowing when the water wells would run dry.
 
She didn’t know what would happen when the food ran out. She’d been guessing at proportions, maybe blowing through provisions too quickly, maybe tossing the wrong combination of vegetables and kibble into exhibits only for the food to lay out under the September sun, wasting, rotting. How long would the animals be able to live off their enclosures, ripping leaves from high-up branches or sucking dew off the ground? At what point did it become a risk that the trio of Asiatic lionesses would cannibalize one another? When was it time to consider fishing a red panda from its enclosure to sacrifice to the snow leopard? Who was Imogen to determine the value of one species’ life over another?
 
Her heart lurched. She hunched over the half-filled sink, cradling her midsection. Across the room, Tallulah appeared in the doorway, her arms black with dirt. The thin light of the setting sun made Tallulah’s hair glow like hearty embers. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
 
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” said Imogen to the motionless reflection of her face, staring disapprovingly back at her. How many days had it been? Not enough to justify the skin around her eyes looking like it was receding into her skull.
 
Tallulah moved closer. “You’re doing your best.” The words rang empty.
 
Imogen tightened her arms, the bare skin of her sides sucking tightly to the corrugation of her ribs, hardly padded by the band of her bra. “They could be dying. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
 
There was a rustle of fabric. Imogen looked up to see Tallulah pulling her shirt overhead, approaching the sink and leaning in to ladle murky water into the bowls of her palms. She ran the water along the length of first one arm, then the other, hands sliding along the band of her bra to clean the sweaty skin beneath the underwired cups. “Aren’t we all?” she asked at last.
 
Imogen tried to meet her sister’s eye but couldn’t. The harder she stared at Tallulah, the heavier the bezoar that settled in the back of her throat felt. Her airway grew constricted. Her heart couldn’t keep up with the beat it tried to tattoo-hammer into her sternum. “You’re sick,” Imogen said. Tallulah refused to look up. “You’re sick, aren’t you?” Imogen pressed. “And Mom and Dad—"
 
Tallulah shook her head. “They’re gone, Imogen. The flu. Maybe two weeks ago—"
 
“Two weeks?” Her body felt punctured. “And you brought it here? To me?” Imogen scooted back along the edge of the sink and swung her legs over its metallic edge, water draining from the planks of her shins into a wasteful pool that inched in inky rivulets toward Tallulah’s feet. Imogen didn’t know whether she was angry that she’d stifled her sister from telling her sooner, or that Tallulah had waited for so long before traveling to her, or that Tallulah had only come to abandon her permanently, or if it was something else entirely that bloated inside her like a pufferfish.
 
“Imogen,” said Tallulah. She reached a dripping hand to wind halfway around Imogen’s wrist before Imogen stepped back
 
Imogen stared hard at Tallulah, looked for rosy blemishes molting her arms and back, or a languishing pallor that might turn her face ghastly-ancient, or the jut of bones straining unnaturally against flesh. She thought of her sister coughing, panting, breaking frequently as she toiled. The signs were all there. Tallulah arrived at the Hartland Wildlife Refuge, offering to form a relationship that never existed growing up, and just like that, she would be ripped away before anything could blossom. There was no reason to get attached. Tallulah would die, and soon after, so would Imogen. It was the way of the Indian flu.
 
But the animals...
 
 
Imogen scooped her clothing from one of the workstation tables and fled. She didn’t know why she stayed at Hartland. The thought back-and-forthed in her mind persistently, a seal perpetually ping-ponging across its water cell. She had no idea what she was doing. She didn’t know what weight-block of goat meat should have been thrown to the striped hyenas (was it a chunk at all, was it a whole carcass), or how many times a week it was okay to supplement a pangolin’s fresh diet with pellets and mixed feed, or how there were still so many frozen rabbits left in the freezer when everything else around them continued to deplete. Was she confusing what lions and tigers ate? Did it matter? Would it ultimately be that egregious of a crime if she boiled a dozen eggs and inhaled them gluttonously when she woke up the next morning? She would have to improvise the animals’ diets soon anyway. What difference did a carton of eggs make in the grander scheme?
 
She collapsed outside the Research and Education building, her head leaning back against the glass front of the keeled box turtle’s display. Imogen wrapped her arms around her stomach, her fists tight around her clothes, squeezed her elbows in as hard as she could, until everything from her shoulders to her coccyx ached dully. Her body craved protein. Her mental wellness did, too. Wasn’t it true that your immune system grew compromised when you were physically wasting? She thought of Tallulah and her belligerent refusal to eat so much as a fistful of jackfruit and sobbed.
 
Behind her, the turtle slow-stepped his way toward the glass, rutting the heft of his shell against the front of his exhibit.
 
 
 
Imogen wandered the length of the binturongs’ night house, her steps slow and methodical, plodding back-and-forth along its length. She eyed the door to the chute—a slender, boxy tunnel wide enough to fit a single binturong through at a time—attached to a wider shift that burrowed into the wall.
 
The idea of coaxing a Bengal tiger or a striped hyena or a sloth bear off exhibit terrified her, but the longer she procrastinated it, the worse the exhibits smelled, the more unlivable their conditions became. The exhibits needed cleaning. How hard could it be? The keepers had done it daily, ushering wildlife in and out of the night houses at the start and end of each day, and nobody—that she heard of—had ever died. The equipment was safe. She needed to trust it.
 
Footsteps echoed in the emptiness behind Imogen, bouncing between high walls and ricocheting off a ceiling constructed of hollow pipes and sharp angles. “It’s time,” said Imogen without turning.
 
“Are you sure?” Tallulah’s voice was measured and stoic and throaty. The pressure in her sinuses was apparent.
 
“I’m sure,” Imogen said. “Now or never.” She left the building and pushed the wheelbarrow as close to the door as possible, then climbed back inside around it. Her fingers dug into the edge of the wheelbarrow’s basket, pulling its frame into the hallway until it jammed. Good enough. Imogen hefted a bin full of chopped-down produce chunks, peppered with the squirming bodies of the last of the facility’s flatworms, up and out of the wheelbarrow. She hoped something about the smell might draw the binturongs’ attention; whether or not they had a good enough olfactory system, she wasn’t sure. Purely anymore, it seemed, Imogen subsided on hope.
 
She lugged the container into the room. It felt twice as heavy as she remembered it feeling when she’d loaded it earlier, like a brick-and-mortar building cradled in her arms. Carrying it into the night house was enough to exhaust her. She was Atlas-weary, overworked.
 
Still, she stepped into the open door of one of the pens, where she shimmied some of the worm-and-produce mix into a bowl. What did these specific bowls looked like properly filled? It was all a guess.
 
Behind her, the steel of a pen rattled as Tallulah tested its make under her grip. “They’ll lock securely?”
 
Imogen shrugged. “I hope.” She filled the second dish, the third, each isolated in their own separate enclosure.
 
She backed out of the last pen, swinging its door shut. The echo of steel-on-steel throbbed in her ears, rattlesnaked into her mind, buzzing maliciously. She tested the latches, hooking pins into nooks and throwing her weight first into the door, then digging her heels against the ground and pulling backward. The latches held fast. “Looks like it’s okay,” Imogen announced, though she still wasn’t sure.
 
She turned toward the next enclosure, but before she could latch it, the gasoline-hazy sway of Tallulah’s body drew Imogen’s attention away from the locking mechanism. Imogen turned in time to see her sister’s balance ebb out to sea beneath her. “Hey,” Imogen said loudly, breaking the spell that had fallen over Tallulah: she straightened, curled her hand tightly around a metal rung for support. Imogen approached and pressed a hand to the small of her sister’s back. “Sit. Or better yet, go lay down. Sleep. Get something in your stomach first. You’re really—" Imogen swallowed. “You’re scaring me. You’re sick, Lula.”
 
“I’m not,” Tallulah protested, but her face was white and ashy.
 
Imogen could hardly drop a pin in the time it took for her sister’s eyes to roll back, for Tallulah’s knees to liquidate in their sockets, her body angling forward enough that it melted against the cage rather than allow gravity to pull it backward. Imogen reacted quickly enough to spare the delicate skin over Tallulah’s eyebrow from grating against the concrete floor. She twisted her fingers into the back of Tallulah’s shirt—yanking an errant copper lock in the process—and jerked hard, though not enough to keep Tallulah’s knees from colliding with the ground.
 
“Help!” was the first word from Imogen’s mouth, brash and loud and desperate—but no help was coming. She dropped to the ground herself, scuttled backward enough to clear body-space, and turned Tallulah face-up against her lap. Almost instantly, Tallulah’s eyelids fluttered, but it wasn’t enough to keep the pattering of Imogen’s heart from choking out her airway. “Tallulah,” Imogen pleaded, “talk to me. Lula.” She smoothed a hand over her sister’s forehead, pushed her hair back from where it stuck to her brow, plastered in place by fever-sweat. “Hey.”
 
The saddest of smiles pulled at the corners of Tallulah’s lips. “Hey,” she said meekly.
 
“You fell,” said Imogen. She could feel the worry lines around her mouth, the corners of her eyes. She imagined her face must have carried the same grave stoniness that plagued their father’s countenance for as long as Imogen could remember. Imogen had always taken after him: darker in complexion, strangely inaccessible, unwavering in commitment.
 
Tallulah nodded, started to disentangle herself, to sit up. Imogen let her. “Must’ve been dizzy, is all.”
 
“You need to eat,” Imogen coaxed again. She got to her knees once her lap was vacated, crawled to open the door of the third cage—the nearest one—and reached into the food dish. She knuckled aside a flatworm that wriggled against a browning apple hunk, fisting the fruit and backing out to offer it to Tallulah.
 
The pasty look to Tallulah’s face grew sour. She accepted.
 
 
 
Arctictis binturong. Binturongs are one of two known species who have digestive enzymes capable of breaking through the tough outer layer of the strangler fig’s seeds. The survival of the binturong is essential for the survival of these trees. The exact meaning of the word ‘binturong’ is unknown, as the language it was derived from is now extinct.
 
 
 
Tallulah retreated to the offices with much protesting, and Imogen returned to the binturong’s night house. She tied her hair in a knot at the nape of her neck and pushed her sleeves up. The time for fear and uncertainty and hesitance was gone. There was work to do.
 
Whether it was by a stroke of luck or some inherent gift, shepherding the binturongs into their enclosures was easier than she’d imagined, even left to the task by herself. Perhaps they’d been conditioned, the door to the chute opening like Pavlov’s bell. The learning curve came in operating the gates, in jigsawing how to drop each one gently enough that they nudged the animals apart. From there, it was a series of angles, opening doors at the right moment and waiting for the bearcats to notice, to strut on paws that looked only fractionally more intimidating than a cat’s toward the reward of dinner and clean, fresh water. The urge came from nowhere to reach between the narrow slats of the pens and nuzzle one’s cheek. How dangerous, Imogen asked herself, could an animal who ate fruits and vegetables truly be? She could befriend these animals, become Hartland’s very own Mowgli. She was all these creatures had left. She was the final defense between them and their personal extinction.
 
She refrained. Instead, she slipped through the keeper’s door with a head bogged down by a copse of thoughts and entered the exhibit, small and green and offensive to the nose. She brought a shovel, a bucket, a pair of oversized, heavily stitched gloves; she dragged out the utility hose and prayed there was water pressure.
 
It took little time to shovel the droppings and only slightly longer to scour the floor for food left to rot. She struggled to drag the hose as far into the enclosure as she needed it, so that its feeble stream of water—continual, albeit weak—could assault the roots of trees, the trampled grass. How many days had she deprived the binturongs of sanitation out of fear? The sloth bears, the gaur?
 
Not for the first—nor the last—time, guilt consumed Imogen. She didn’t know what she was doing here. And with food supplies dwindling, with no idea how she would continue to provide for these animals when the shelves ran dry, the pang in her chest grew more demanding.
 
The wire of the fences glistened under wayward water jettison. The wire was glossy and black and thick, Imogen thought, but not too thick. A good pair of wire cutters, jerked and twisted and sawed against the cage, could break an area open. Or, just as easily, she could leave the chute open, the shift, the feeding pen doors, the building’s exit. She could orchestrate the binturongs’ escape. She could find a way to free the king cobra, the pangolins, the red panda. With a little more courage, she could even plan an escape for the gharial, the barasingha. The rest, though...
 
When the binturong’s exhibit was satisfactorily cleaned, and once she’d opened the gateways again so the binturong could move freely, Imogen made her way to the Research and Education building, to the keeled box turtle. He was so small, so inconsequential that she’d more than once forgotten about him until she was making her way to the offices to sleep at night. She shared apple chunks with him, and stalks of celery, and handfuls of smashed berries growing fuzzy in her pocket. She spoiled him with crickets, though he hardly seemed interested in chasing after them.
 
She knew nothing of turtles, in as much as she knew nothing about the rest of the zoo. She could do nothing for him. She could do nothing for any of them. She could barely do for Tallulah.
 
Still inundated with overwhelming neglect-based guilt, she climbed the stepstool behind the turtle’s exhibit and leaned over its edge enough that her arms could stretch through the artfully arranged branches. A cricket leapt at her, and Imogen jumped, startled. When she reached again, her fingers just barely gripped either side of the turtle’s shell. His head was lazily lolled outward, its spectacled black eyes half-lidded.
 
How long was his neck? How sharp were his teeth? “Don’t bite me,” she pleaded with him in a whisper. “Please, don’t bite me.” The turtle coiled himself into his shell, his body deadweight. Imogen tucked him into a crate much too large for his size, hugging it tightly against her abdomen.
 
She trekked to the front door, listening down the hall, where Tallulah made no noise. Imogen cleared her throat loudly, hoping it would be enough to garner a reaction from her sister, but still no response came. Imogen cleared her throat again. There was a tickle there, a lingering scratch. The Indian flu in its infancy. Rocks crashed into her lungs, as if she’d swallowed someone’s watch, and it had caught rattling between her ribs, struggling to reach the digestive track. This, she knew, was how it ended.
 
She shouldered the front door open, carrying the keeled box turtle in its crate along a road that curved upward around a hill situated behind the Research and Education building. Trees hedged its crown, as did intermittent fencing between entrance gates that bumped against parking lots.
 
Imogen stopped at the base of the wooded area, setting the crate at her feet. She crouched down, running a finger along the three peaks that crested the back of the turtle’s shell. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she confessed to him, but she didn’t know what she meant anymore. With the animals in general? With the turtle? “I’m sorry.”
 
Carefully, she angled the box. The turtle adjusted to the sudden slant by stretching one of his legs out from within his shell, plodding forward on archaic limbs, just far enough to remain level when the crate landed on its side. “You’ll have to learn to like catching bugs, I guess,” Imogen said. She cradled the back end of the turtle, coaxing him forward, until he took a reluctant step off plastic and onto foreign ground. “I hope you’re smart. I hope you find your way out of here before—before something gets you.” Before you, your bloodline, your genetic code, your genomic sequence disappears.
 
The turtle remained motionless. His head was hidden by his bulky shell, his legs retreated. He was indifferent to Imogen, unperturbed by her harassment.
 
“Go,” she urged sharply. The light of a meager sun pierced through tree branches overhead, stabbing her eyes. Her head throbbed behind her temples: the flu settling into her bones, her tired joints. “You can’t just sit here,” she accused him, and then angrily, “Fine. They’ll get you, though. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
 
The words felt wrong leaving her lips. Guilt tore through her stomach in waves, nauseating and uncomfortable. She didn’t mean it, hadn’t wanted to turn herself against the animals that were all she had left—besides Tallulah, who she only had fleetingly—even if that connection existed only in her own mind. She felt that climbing rasp creeping along the back of her throat again, her senses blocking, her eyes misting. She snatched the crate up from in front of her and stood, staring down at the lumps that rose across the back of the turtle’s shell, imagining them galumphing along with each step the turtle refused to take.
 
Imogen turned, taking the hill down at a double-tempo, her feet willing her quickly back to Tallulah.
 
 
 
Imogen clambered through the door of the Research and Education building with a franticness that rose inside her. The muscles that ran the length of her calves ached. Her head swam. She wanted to lay down, to sleep, to worry about her commitment to the refuge after her headache dissipated—but first, Tallulah.
 
The door to the Tallulah’s claimed office was ajar. Slowly, Imogen pushed it wider, peering into a space that was cluttered with abandoned jackets, a sweater, an unfurled umbrella propped on a table and angled against a window, mounds of papers, a pair of balled-up ponchos—but that was distinctly devoid of her sister. Imogen turned away from the room and looked into the one she occupied and when that proved empty as well began storming a hectic trail down the hall. “Tallulah?” she called, but only silence—eerie, hollow, reverberant—met her. She was acutely aware of the white noise grew louder against her ears. Every room proved as abandoned as the keeled box turtle’s exhibit.
 
Exhaustion clung to Imogen, but fear spurred her on. She prowled the building in case Tallulah was exploring its halls, its exhibits. She circumnavigated its exterior, the twisting paths that orbited immediately around its walls. She checked the restrooms. At length, she came upon the commissary, its doors propped open as if to let the building breathe. Inside, she heard the soft clatter of metal, the low hum of a song. Imogen followed the noise.
 
In the kitchen, Tallulah hovered over the stove, a gigantic pot sitting atop a burner. Tallulah’s back was to Imogen, her hair hanging in damp waves, her posture confidently straight. “Lula?” Imogen said as she neared.
 
Tallulah turned, her eyes bright, her smile warm. Her complexion was rosy, the gray wash of illness’s shadow almost undetectable. “Are you hungry?” Tallulah asked. She held a slotted spoon, which she used to stir the contents of the pot. Imogen drew closer, standing on her toes to get a view of what was inside. A dozen eggs floated in water that rumbled around them; she couldn’t tell if the water was yellowing or if it was a reflection of the walls against steel changing its color.
 
“You look better,” Imogen said. She pulled her tired body up onto the edge of the nearest sink, her legs hanging over its lip, her fingers curled against it to keep balanced.
 
“I told you,” Tallulah answered, her voice patient. “I never had the flu. I was just under the weather.” She ladled eggs one-by-one into an oversized bowl. They could be peeled and diced and combined with the rest of the poorly constructed meals they mixed up in desperation, Imogen thought. They could stretch the feedings another few days, a week maybe, if they parsed out proportions correctly.
 
Tallulah brought the bowl to her, twelve white shells engaging in a silent dialogue with Imogen. She imagined a pair of eyes inside each one, twelve separate pulses, twelve separate heartbeats.
 
 
 
Cuora mouhotii. Depending on the species, turtles will lay anywhere from fifty to one hundred eggs in a single clutch. The keeled box turtle, however, lays no more than four eggs at a time, often no more than twice a year. Once the eggs are laid and buried, the mother abandons the nest, leaving the newborns to fend for themselves upon hatching.
 
 
 
Imogen glanced from the bowl to Tallulah and took an egg.
 
 

Elise Demeter

Elise Demeter is a recent graduate of the NEOMFA program through Cleveland State University. Her previous publication record includes work found in Chaleur Magazine, Jumbelbook, and Still: The Journal. You can follow her across social media platforms at @elisendemeter, where she'll inundate you with commentary on outdated television shows, Lin-Manuel Miranda retweets, and pictures of her puppy and hedgehog—and, of course, updates of her work.