Free The Midnight Zoo by Sonya Hartnett

said, “Why don’t you ask the eagle?”
    “It won’t answer,” warned the bear.
    “Why not?” Tomas frowned. “Can’t it speak?”
    “It’s not that it can’t, only that it won’t. No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can’t answer anything except
I cannot
. And those words are so painful to its feathery spirit that a caged bird prefers to say nothing.”
    The llama was cleaning its face with a fastidious tongue; pausing in its ablutions it said, “That eagle has been in that cage since the day it hatched from an egg. I remember when it was hardly bigger than a mouse, the ugly tiny thing; the zoo’s owner used to feed it mashed lizard from a spoon. It’s never flown through the sky, that eagle, never once in its life. Yet it broods and mopes over something that’s never been. It is a very silly bird.”
    The bear didn’t comment, only raised its eyes to the night. Andrej followed its gaze into the sky. “Can you see it?” asked the bear.
    “I can,” said Andrej: an empty place amongst the stars, where the eagle should have been.
    “I thank you for the cheese,” said the bear.
    Andrej told his brother, “Give the eagle some pieces of ham.”
    “And what about the seal?”
    “Don’t worry about that seal.” The wolf had lain down to groom its legs and didn’t look up from the work. “That seal isn’t hungry. It doesn’t think about food. It thinks about nothing except the empty hole in the sea.”
    “It wants to fill its place!” yapped the monkey.
    “Alice,” breathed the kangaroo.
    Wilma whined, and Andrej stroked her head. He looked at the circle of cages and at the inmates inside them. He thought of the life he had lived with his family in the caravan, roaming wherever they’d wanted to go. “The whole world is your home, Andrej,” his father had told him. “We Rom are not like the
gadje,
these people you see building houses and hoeing fields and fencing off what they claim is theirs. We Rom are closer to the animals than to people like that. Unburdened, unowned, and free.” It was something to be proud of, the state of being free. It was something animals had that humans envied and respected. And yet . . . these zoo animals weren’t free. Dust was more free than they were. The gnats that landed on the surface of the water had more liberty than the seal that swam through it. The iron bars stole away from them the one great gift they were born to have. In sudden frustration and anguish Andrej said, “It’s not right to take a bear from the mountains or an eagle from the sky or a monkey from the jungle or a seal from the sea. It’s not
right
to lock you in cages where there’s no grass or rivers or trees. It’s a
terrible
thing to do. The owner of this zoo must be a
wicked
man!”
    The llama gasped. “Don’t say that! The owner is good! When the owner was here, we weren’t hungry. We weren’t lonely. I wasn’t confused. There were no bombs dropping out of rumble-things. All those bad things only started happening
after
he went away. So he must be a good man, you see? You see, you stupid child?”
    “The owner is not a wicked man,” the bear agreed. “He is just a man, with the peculiar ways of man. You are a mysterious animal, you know. A bear does what a bear must do to keep itself alive. But a man does many things that he has no need to do.”
    Andrej thought about the day the soldiers found the caravans in the clearing and admitted, “Yes, that’s true.” He looked into the moonlight that lay everywhere over the zoo, wishing he had water to give the animals or something more to feed them, wishing he had . . . 
the keys
. One cage was still cloaked in deathly dark and silence, a silence that was lurking, a darkness like the edge of a disquieting dream. “What about the boar?” he asked. “Is it hungry? Will it eat biscuits? Is it even