Free Night of the Animals by Bill Broun Page A

the bloody fuck out of you and drag you half-dead before an EquiPoise P-Lev, and it’s St. Clements after that. Please, Cuthbert. Please. Let’s try the hospital—just one last time! Just one—”
    But before he could finish the phrase, Cuthbert was gone.

pentecost in the trees
    THUS IT CAME TO PASS THAT, ON THE LAST DAY OF April of 2052, as an enormous comet began to smear streaks of light above the Northern Hemisphere, the aged Cuthbert found himself stuck in the zoo’s boundary foliage beside a floaty green blob of trouble.
    For the six previous months, Baj had tried to protect him from the Watch and from EquiPoise, but the doctor had been no match for Cuthbert’s drug addiction (nor for talking otters), and now Cuthbert had a case of Flōt withdrawal shakes in his muscles, a bizarre plan in his head, and an arboreal phantasm beside him. He seemed, to all appearances, beyond human aid.
    The yew creature, a kind of botanical steam, was soaking into his very skin, and Cuthbert felt himself breathing in sweet fogs tessellated with long green leaves. There was still fear, but the sense of shock had passed. His pulse puttered in his ears. There was a minted, pennyroyal scent and a whiff of roses, and a wildness and warmth, like an unexpected kiss from a dodgy stranger. He’d encountered, over the years, many figments in the tumbling-downexperience of Flōt withdrawal, but none that felt so intimate or so peculiar.
    The closeness came with strange timing. The Red Watch was now quite actively looking for him. In the last weeks, Cuthbert had more or less abandoned his IB flat to avoid detention and gone back to his old habits of sleeping rough, panhandling, and thievery. His dole payments, of course, had stopped, as had his meetings with Baj, whose perceptions of the old man’s perils had been, after all, quite accurate. Cuthbert had rarely felt so vulnerable and lonely.
    But not alone. As the yew tree covered him with its sparkling emerald plasmas, Cuthbert sensed that the being (him, her, it?) knew him deeply—too deeply. He wanted to crawl away, into his grotto, but his sore limbs wouldn’t budge from their integuments of age and exhaustion.
    â€œWha . . . what do you want?” Cuthbert asked it, his teeth a’chatter. “You want me to get caught? It ain’t even dark yet, is it?” His heart began palpitating oddly—flipping over, trotting, bursting into double beats. It felt like a broken propeller in his chest. His lips and hands went numb. If he could just reach his grotto, he thought, he would get his Flōt, and all would be OK.
    â€œYou do not need to do this, Cuthbert,” the being said, in a nearly melodious whistle, a sound like the breeze being inhaled by all the trees around him through mouths the size of flute holes. “You will never be the same if you do.”
    â€œNot topple the zoo, you mean? Bloody no way,” Cuthbert slurred. “Oi won’t be packing it in now. Oi’m here for the beasts. They’re what’s called me. And my brother.”
    Cuthbert squinted. He made out a kind of mouth, opening and closing in the vernal vapor, blowing lunar moths from lips as tender as a small boy’s. Is this me, he wondered, from half a century ago? Was it Drystan? One of the green moths flutteredabove him, then flashed into a little pentecostal flame over his head.
    â€œ Gagoga, ” he said. “ Gagoga .” He tried to touch the flame’s fern-colored cloves, but they stung his hand. He jerked it away. His heart suddenly galloped a few times and settled into its normal, pulpy hwoot-dub hwoot-dub . The haze was beginning to thin, and the simple, pinnately veined leaves of the hedge itself were reemerging. It was nearly dark.
    â€œDrystan?” he asked.
    â€œNo,” said the creature. “But he is part of me, as are you, and you are blessed, Cuthbert. Before this night is over, you will see him. But