Petting Zoo
By Amy DeBellis
I haven’t been to a zoo since I was a child—not for close to eighty years now—but last night I dreamed I went to one. It kept shifting, as things in dreams often do: sometimes it resembled a laboratory, sometimes a castle. Sometimes an endless tent, propped up by sticks and stretching clear to the horizon.
“This is no ordinary zoo,” my tour guide told me. “This is the world’s first wild petting zoo! A zoo where we exclusively feature dangerous wild animals.” This seemed an oxymoron to me, but I followed him inside anyway. He and I were the only people there.
The first things I saw when I entered were birds of prey swooping around overhead—hawks, eagles, vultures, ospreys—but I noticed within moments that something was wrong. Their heads all ended in soft, rounded slopes, like cliff faces from which the ridges and juts had been sanded away. They had been stripped of their obsidian-sharp beaks. Their legs, too, had been removed — “Of course the claws had to go, think of how easily they could pluck out a visitor’s eye,” whispered my tour guide— so that when they needed to rest they had no choice but to flutter to the ground and flop in a terribly undignified manner onto their bellies. They glared at me sideways.
“Don’t be intimidated,” my guide said, noting my hesitation. “If you try to touch them, they can do nothing to harm you. Nothing other than fly away.”
But at least they could move. When we progressed to the next room, I saw that the elephants had no such freedom. The three great gray beasts stood in chains. More than in chains: their feet were immobilized, caged in metal buckets screwed into the floor.
“To protect you from having your feet stomped on,” my guide said with a wink.
Their tusks had been removed. They did not look at me. I knew that they were sad, although I could not see their eyes—hidden in wrinkles, recessed deep into their faces.
I didn’t want to pet the elephants, either.
But the worst was the tiger. Alone in the center of its room. Unlike the elephants it needed no restraints, no cuffs or buckets. All four of its legs had been amputated, and it rocked and twisted on the ground, straining to move more than a few inches in either direction. At first its face seemed untouched, but when it raised its black lip to snarl at me I saw that its mouth was a cave of soft pink gums.
Its eyes were gold. Gold flaring in the hollows of its face, gold flaming into me, gold searing my retinas. This animal was not sad. It was furious, and hungry, and it longed to devour me. Even with its teeth and claws gone it wanted this one very simple thing: to kill me and eat my flesh. To tear my limbs apart the same way I had torn chicken drumsticks from thighs, hundreds of them over the course of my life. Its longing was fierce and unquenchable and its gaze did not leave me even when I blinked, when I looked away, when I squirmed as though I, too, had no limbs. Heat filled my body slowly, a reluctant flush. And I realized that this tiger wanted me more, in its own way, than any human ever had.
The dream ended. I woke before dawn with a ragged throat and eyes that burned as though I really had stared into liquid gold. I took two pills, and then a third, and my hand shook as I lifted a glass of water to my mouth. I would never again lift anything heavier than a water bottle. I would never again walk as far as I had in that dream.
I looked over the instructions I had written for my daughter, and scribbled them out. I turned to a blank page.
I wrote: I do not want to be put into the earth.
I wrote: I want my corpse to be placed in a remote forest, far away from the fields and the roads and the prying eyes of hikers and farmers. I want it to be left for the animals. And I want their teeth and claws to rip apart my body, to consume me with all of their wild and beautiful violence, to gnaw me down to the marrow until there is nothing left.
THE END
Author Bio: Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York. Her writing has appeared in various publications including X-R-A-Y, Pithead Chapel, HAD, Write or Die, Fractured, Ghost Parachute, and Pinch. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books (2025).