Behavioral Husbandry When Butch opened a zoo it was no surprise people called him crazy. Opening a zoo for African wildlife on private property encouraged that kind of attention. He tried to explain by saying he had the resources, the time, and the inclination, and that when those three came together you might as well go with your instincts. But even then the first of his questions had already pinned itself to his heart. Which of the animals would be his ancestral uncle, aunt, grandfather, grandmother? It was for Butch that he believed in common ancestry, and thought that if all humans could learn to accept this and work with this, so much would be explained that had been a mystery. He read all the naturalists, not just Darwin. He read of the scientists who set forth the last universal common ancestor or simply LUCA, he quickly learned. They said this organism lived some three billion years ago. Others, even more curious and with even more questions, later said studies revealed the remains of biotic life going back four billion years ago inside an ancient slab of sandstone in Western Australia. A year after this find, still other scientists, still more curious, told the world they had identified a set of three-hundred fifty-five genes from the LUCA of all organisms living on Earth. Curiosity, questions, seemed bound to eventually provide outright revelation. Eager to begin close studies of his own, in his own way, Butch opened the zoo to the public. He would study the wildlife; he would interview the visitors; he would keep records. However, in the first hour all good intentions went incredibly sideways and fast. He heard the gunshot from his carport where he planned to greet visitors. A young woman shot a gorilla. Butch had put no security measures in place and the young woman, a student at the local college, entered without so much as a pat on the shoulder. After shooting the gorilla, the young woman fled into a nearby copse of oak trees and was gone. The police located her the following day, but she never fully explained her actions. The report was she didn’t even know a Butch Rutherford. People called the shooter crazy and then the press made up names for her when they ran their stories. The strain of the whole affair was wearing Butch down. While he should have been giving his full attention to the animals, he thought mostly of the young woman. At night he lay in bed thinking of what she had done and listening to the nearby giraffes - normally as silent as the edge of a galaxy - grunting and whistling in their sleep. This, of course, until the questions began to well up from inside him. Each morning he woke himself with his own nervous words pounding out into the room, seeking and seeking through past eons of common ancestry. Butch began the process of breaking down the zoo the following week. The animals went first, onto trucks and various other vehicles. It felt as if his arms and legs and been ripped from his body, both his purpose and means. Each night during the evacuation he spent reading his books. In March of 2017, researchers reported evidence of possibly the oldest forms of life on the planet - putative fossilized microorganisms discovered in hydrothermal vent precipitates in the Nuvvuagittuq Belt of Quebec, Canada. These microorganisms, Butch read, had broken into the light just one-hundred million years after the planet itself was formed. The numbers and the implications, the totality of proof, made Butch’s head feel waterlogged. He spent the next week mostly sleeping. When the animals were gone and his home and property again fell silent, he thought of the young lady and her unknown vendetta against the gorilla. On a slow and rainy Tuesday his front porch became too quiet, too invasive in that way that silence can become, and so he left finally to visit the young woman, now on probation and living again with her mother. The mother apologized endlessly as she brought Butch through the foyer. Inside he saw the young woman, the crazed shooter, the confused young student, standing behind the couch, her face floating in the background just above her mother’s shoulder. He saw in her eyes a bubbling largeness, feral tics that pushed her pupils at high speed from one side of her eye socket and then back again. Here, more than anywhere else in his life, Butch saw both human and animal, a hybrid of both and nothing that was exactly the same as either. As he and the mother eased themselves into their seats, the young lady’s skin seemed to shudder from the tensing and relaxing of the muscles beneath it. She pushed and sucked in air rather than breathe in the usual way. Each angle of her body seemed to shift in slow motion, rising and falling, positioning, settling into place and as sensitive to motion as a dust mote in the wind. So Butch readied himself likewise and then called out his questions to the young lady, the mother, the wind, the long ago ancestors, and the future generations. He asked one question and then another and then another outloud into the wide awake world while the mother’s eyes searched the room for something close to sanity. It was as if she was watching the first breaking of wild things only five-thousand years ago and counting. ----------------------------- Image - Jennifer Boyer www.flickr.com/photos/jenniferboyer/188865385/in/photolist creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ Bio: Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of four books, most recently the novella A True Story: A Novella (Shivelight Books, 2017). His recent fiction and poetry can be found in Unbroken Journal, Wigleaf, Gravel, New World Writing, Live Nude Poems, gobbet, Vending Machine Press, and elsewhere. He was cited in Best Small Fictions 2015 and Best Small Fictions 2016. 5/2/2017 06:18:29 am
Sheldon-You drew me in and kept me thinking about the story for a while after I finished. Good work. 5/6/2017 04:15:45 pm
Thank you Paul. So grateful you stopped by and read it.
Steven Gowin
5/3/2017 07:06:21 am
"He spent the next week mostly sleeping." Yes. 5/6/2017 04:16:45 pm
I've had weeks like that for sure, Steven. Thanks for reading, buddy!
Faustine A. Guerrero
5/24/2017 01:57:51 pm
Short and sweet---like my homemade gherkins. Oh, and like my penis, too. Not to gherk yer chain or nothing but I also read yer piece that the Great Jones Street site featured, "Drugs, Rock And Roll And Sex Or Three Things That Go Together Like Sex, Drugs And Rock And Roll", and I thought then as I think now, uh, well actually I'm thinking about snatch, but if you are too then maybe you'd like the flashy trash I extrude. I'd be happy to send you a (very) short story to appraise. ---FAG 5/27/2017 01:58:34 pm
Hey Faustine - Yeah for sure send me something along. I'm always up to read good stuff. And thanks for reading this piece and my work at GJS!
Elisabeth
7/20/2017 02:05:11 pm
This "crazed" girl, her mother, and this Butch "asking question[s] outloud into the wide awake world" ! Man, you literaly bring concepts to life : humanity/animality, our (desperate) search for sanity... David Joy sure was right to tell me to read your work. 9/24/2017 07:10:57 am
Wow, just now saw this comment, Elisabeth. Thanks so much. So often readers like yourself will wake me up to certain things about my work I wouldn't have thought of before. That is always awesome, like yourself.
Elisabeth
9/24/2017 12:42:17 pm
I'll sure keep an eye on your "crazy" characters. Crazy's so good for us all. Comments are closed.
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