by Eurydice (c) 1999

 ZOO FEVER  

  Ela thinks: "Everywhere I look I am in the zoo: no matter whether I am caged behind the bars, or whether I am outside them, in either case all I can see are animals behind bars."  This realization depresses her.  She closes her fan and steps off the subway windswept by the passing train.  Dressed in a black sequined flapping cape with pink satin lining, a red lace mini dress, an usher's goldbraided cap, baroque pink velvet boots and impenetrable Wayfarer sunglasses, Ela comes out of the gray subway crypt and slowly pulls herself along the way like a phantom dragging an invisible ball and chain from her ankles, but the world sees only her beauty.
     Ela has never been to a zoo and is at a loss for the appropriate savoir-faire.  But as she enters the malodorous premises, she shudders with a sense of recognition, a distant murky memory that threatens to seize her, like a monster lurking inside a lake.  She stops before the first dusty cage and thinks: What are these animals staring at? 
     For, as usual, Ela finds herself under obsessive public scrutiny.  The animals turn around, stop everything abruptly, grunt and stare at her in awe.  Do they find her strange?  Do they stare at every visitor as if they have never seen a species so interesting?  What do they want from her?  Who hides behind them?  Who came here to look at whom? 
     She takes off her dark glasses and tries to stare them down.  But her gaze, piercing the glazed eyes of this crowd, only helps to keep them fixed on her.  The animals seem fascinated.  Ela wonders: Is it my clothes?  I am glad I didn't wear my dress of roses, though spring is the perfect time for it.  It would have started a riot. 
     Now Ela walks fast as if pursued, looking straight ahead of her. She reaches the monkeys.  She stops dead: All the monkeys are fucking, in random mix-and-match couples.  Those without mates are jerking off.  They drool openmouthed, reach through the cages and help each other come.  They give out chopped choked sounds like broken tape recorders.  As if on cue, they interrupt their orgy and present to Ela their upturned asses.  Their pink swollen ripe asses are open like smashed watermelons.  These asses look like separate beings, with soft sexy skins and exaggerated pouts.  The monkeys sit on them like on scarlet round oversized cushions.  The monkey smell is strong, stifling. 
     They are so near that Ela can see their veins.  They gaze at her with wrinkled foreheads like bearded old men, they jump around like children at play, they press a hand on their hips like tired housewi-ves, all the while fucking.  These confusing messages intrigue Ela. 
     Did she actually come here to witness a vulgar sex show hoping to save herself from craving sex?  Ela leans on the bars, crosses her calves and smokes, smirking with self-mockery in her naked eyes.  For, as with everything exciting in this world, the monkeys' fucking is both repulsive and stimulating.  The monkeys screech.  She gasps.  The monkeys stare at her breathlessly.  One of them winks. She winks back.

————————————————————

     Ela stands in front of another cage, watching baboons fuck.  She feels an irrepressible certainty that her cunt will come here, attra-cted by the spring-fever.  And at the same instant, she also feels jealous of the baboons, of their bulging puckered soft assholes which remind her of enlarged vaginas.  She thinks: Can I participate in this miracle?  Can I join in?  Typically, the busy heated baboons interrupt their frantic loud fucks to stare at her dumbstruck from their ascetic enclaves.  They can't take their beady eyes off Ela.  Now Ela recognizes that expectant look.  Love!  Adventure!  She knows these faces.

————————————————————

     It is in the baboon cage, right now, she can see it, spanking the monkeys, literally!  It is jumping excitedly from baboon to baboon.  She must track it down!  Help!         

————————————————————

     Ela asks a big-bellied red-nosed bowl-legged fish-blue-eyed lemon-skinned middle-aged green-uniformed guard: "Have you had any unnatural incidents in your cages lately?  I am interested in strange unexplainable sights people have actually witnessed in zoos.  I look for a small but noticeable creature, silver or pink.  Aren't you the man I am looking for?"  She fans herself passionately. 
     The guard slurps and warbles: "For 20 years now, Miss; yes; I am Bob; I support the I.R.A. and enjoy sharing my gruesome experiences as a part-time paramedic, but now my heart beats like a bewildered bird as, sexy and comfortable, you smile at me from across the years, invi-ting me to screw you right here in front of the animals.  But what is the use of what I say if the sounds finally touch your half-naked body?"  He stops abruptly and resumes only after Ela nods permission. 
     Bob tells her a story: a beautiful shiny pink insect was bother-ing the monkeys this week.  At first everyone thought it was an expen-sive windup toy that some child threw into the cages; but it did not stop dancing, especially around the mammals' peckers, and when they went to clean the cage, it cunningly slipped away; so the guards modi-fied their conclusions.  They agreed it was a tiny slimy frog that had the ability to twist its body into a circle; or else it was an except-ionally agile slug.  But when Bob threw salt on it, it didn't disinte-grate, as a slug should.  Now the zoo workers feared it was a Martian, an alien visitor studying earth life. 
     But Bob did not believe in the supernatural.  Bob was sure it was a tropical insect that came over on a boat from overseas and found its way to the zoo by instinct.  Probably an unknown bug that had not yet been classified in Western annals.  He informed the zoo entomologist, but they could not even identify the overall species of the creature. 
     Only last night, thanks to the zoo authorities' generosity and Bob's watchful eye, was the invader removed from the cages before it did any permanent damage.  It took 9 men to get it out.  Bob and his colleagues succeeded because they knew the creature's Achilles' heel: the zoo hired the services of professional gigolos to entice it away! 
     The 9 hired men stripped, danced and groaned, and thus walked out with it jumping all over them.  They bellydanced into a waiting wagon and drove off.  The plan was that they should trap it in a special sealed container and deliver it to the biologist in charge of top secret research at Columbia, but they were never heard of.  The FBI had been alerted, in case they tried to sell the alien for ransom, but their tracks had disappeared under most unusual circumstances.  They had made no contact with anyone as yet and were feared to be dead. 
     "Where can I find it?  What is your guess?" Ela interrogates Bob.    In her place, Bob would check out the prisons, these unrestrained creatures usually end up in prison soooner or later, he explains.  At his paramedic rounds, he caught a rumour that a mini-Linda Lovelace is being passed around in the city jail, causing unprecedented agitation.  "The men's jail?" Ela repeats, in anxious childlike apprehension, thinking: What will remain of it after all this mishandling?  In what shape will it be when I get it back?  What strength will it have left? 
     "What do you expect?  Women are too sane to fall for that sex-maniac act.  Besides, what use would that hollow thing be to a woman?  What would she do with it, wear it around her neck?  She'd be choked in a second," Bob replies, laughing at his own joke.
     Ela thinks: So from the zoo, I go to the prison.  What company it is keeping now that I am not there to hold the reins! It pushes itself too far.  She considers paying first a quick visit to the aquarium, to search for it among the polyps, and jelly-fish; or to the Botanical Gardens where it may be hiding among the orchids.  But she realizes that if her cunt is indeed in jail, it constitutes an emergency she can't postpone.  For once, she must prioritize. 
     She takes the subway back.  She likes to travel underground when she is depressed.