2027 Best Small Fictions Nominee: A Night at the Zoo by Kate Tooley

A Night at the Zoo

by Kate Tooley

from Issue 23

Morning trickles in between the half-pulled blackout curtains. Her head feels knotted with last night and she’s naked except for a huge, faded zoo t-shirt, the kind of tacky thing she hasn’t worn since she was a kid. The gorillas are washed dull grey, and the tiger’s left eye is so faded it reminds her of Great-Aunt Rhonda’s — all cataract and malice. A long drip of last night’s chocolate-chunk ice cream streaks between her tits, fencing off the gazelles from the lions. It’s embarrassing, she’s not some snotty brat with stained clothes anymore, she’s almost thirty, well, close anyway. She has the impulse to sneak out of the bed and flee, leaving the woman and her loaned, nostalgia t-shirt to their own devices. Instead, she stretches the fabric over her bare legs, careful not to shake the bed or the other woman in it. Upside-down, she puts the goofy neon letters together one at a time: “Houston Zoo Naturally Wild”. 

The woman beside her stretches and snuffles, flinging a leg over Carri’s and settling. Carri freezes as if that could protect her from the unconscious intimacy. She imagines what this sprawl of woman beside her was like when she was nine years old on a trip to the zoo — how she would have grabbed the nearest adult, and dragged them to see what? — the showgirl parrots and peacocks, the vivid-skinned creatures in the reptile house?

Last night, this woman had grabbed Carrie by the wrist, pulling her first outside the bar, then into bed.

 Last night, Carri was wearing a neon blue body suit that was more like her skin than her skin, and a lemon-yellow harness. At Luckyz, a crew of strangers in beautiful eyeliner screamed along to Gaga and Chappell; they circled her, hands worshiping the impossible-not-to-touch sleek fabric, fingers stroking the straps of the harness and for a while it had felt the way it did on good nights: like testifying in church, or howling with her brother as they bolted between deer blinds in the back woods.

This zoo shirt is a kind of soft she associates with people who save second-place trophies from field day and still follow their high school glee club on Facebook, but under her fingertips it also reminds her of her Nana’s old housecoat just back from the laundromat and a pipe-cleaner angel atop a Christmas tree.

She looks over again at the curly hair and freckled shoulders, breaks her mind over an absoluteness of sleep she could never achieve. Last night, when she’d seen this woman, whose name had caught and released in the ripple of the bar, she’d thought “Brooklyn Hipster,” because really who else would show up to the club in overalls and a 90’s zoo t-shirt; she’s seen enough people playing at hick in this city. But she can still hear, in the quiet of her memory, how the woman climbed up on stage for piano karaoke, opened her mouth, and out rolled Mississippi — all the sounds Carri flattened from her voice years ago.

She can feel the echo of strong fingers hooking her by the harness, the weight of a voice that takes all the syllables it needs saying, “you any good when that thing’s loaded” tugging, turning — the already painful tension of arousal becoming unbearable. Then later, the hands and voice coaxing her out of the bodysuit like calling a scared dog, her back on the bed and the spackle of grease burns from the diner bared across her arms and chest, the tongue that didn’t discriminate between the scarred and unmarked flesh. Then, even later, those hands, pulling her through the dark house to be surprised by cold tile under her feet and colder sweetness in her mouth. Chocolate ice cream and the taste of a kiss, burn and freeze, unexpected and known.

Any other time she’d have kept the bodysuit on and gone home after fucking instead of making out and letting someone strip her naked, instead of eating ice cream under the dishrag glow of the kitchen light, instead of falling asleep in the softest shirt she’s ever worn. Carri shifts, considers the body suit now, its shimmering blue fabric all curled on the floor like a shed snakeskin. It looks like something outgrown, impossible to crawl back into.