Free Night of the Animals by Bill Broun Page B

there is great danger now . . .”
    The old man’s arms were beginning to shake in mild fits. He was sweating badly, and his aged Adidas weather-buffer made it worse.
    â€œAre you . . . an animal , at all?” he asked. He felt starved for air. “Is you the one that’s called me here?”
    There was no reply, yet the breezes he’d felt before suddenly seemed to puff out from everything around him in a plangent gaaaaaagooooooogaaaaaaa! The wisps of minty green vapors grew as thin as hair. When he looked for the astonishing yew tree in his midst, he saw nothing but the usual hackberry leaves.
    The yew was gone.
    â€œJesus,” he said. “Jesus fuck.”
    Something was jabbing his kidney now, and it wasn’t the finger of common sense. It was the broken spoke of a hackberry shrub, of which there were thousands in and around the zoo.
    â€œShittin ’ell,” he whispered. “ That one hurts.” His heart started a new round of scary, trilling beats. The Flōt half-life was only a few hours, and the withdrawal for someone as old and long-addicted as Cuthbert could be lethal.
    â€œThis is it,” he said, panting. “This is how I go winkers.” Darkness suddenly encroached on his peripheral vision. He felt broad, crushing chest pain, a python coiling around his chest, and the classic proprioceptive sensation of falling, literally, down from on high.
    If he didn’t get Flōt, he was going to die, and he could not allow that.
    ROLLING TO THE side a bit, still held up by the hazel branches and a few tough hackberry boughs, Cuthbert put his hands over his eyes and bulldozered deeper yet, shoulder first. All at once, a thick mat of branches that had been impeding him came apart, and he crashed a few paces farther in. He was just a foot or two now from his grotto, but knackered. He turned again and lay with his back against a new layer of branches, allowing all his weight to be supported. He was hidden now, at rest, gazing again back out into the park. His legs ached and felt stunted—another symptom of Flōt withdrawal—and he was banged up a bit, but he felt a little better, for the moment.
    I will stay off the Flōt, he said to himself halfheartedly, even if it kills me. But Cuthbert’s body screamed for it—that purple orb of relief, concealed somewhere in sedge-grass in his grotto. Cheap enchantment. He could nearly taste its smooth, oak-charred flavor of rum and licorice, and the secret ingredient that gave it all a peppery edge: a set of alkaloids, derived from the white larvae of England’s leaf-miner moth.
    â€œCanna I have one last moment of my life without spiring?” he asked aloud. “If I’m a dead man, let me die sober with my eyes upon Drystan and animals and lovely trees that smudge * my skin.”
    He shook his head. “No, I won’t touch it!” he cried.
    Oh but yes, he thought, I bloody must. It will calm matters.Even as he fidgeted there, caught in the hedge and vacillating about Flōt, he could hear the zoo’s animals again, pulling him into their own more unruly set of traps. And while he still didn’t know what they meant, he felt compelled, once again, to say aloud, in a voice as tremulous as dreams written on clouds, “ Gagoga .”
    He closed his eyes. He burrowed now into this last, densest part of the shrubbery, grabbing at and deflecting branches like a blind man under attack by hornets. He ducked down to the right and felt the blunt, hard top of his liver nosing up inside him like a shark. He jerked back in agony.
    â€œFuck me,” he said. Need to keep my back straight, he thought. He knelt down and sunk his fingers into the loose, mulchy loam.
    Just then, not unexpectedly, a very familiar voice snarled at him.
    â€œMr. Handley!”
    â€œNo, I don’t want to talk,” muttered Cuthbert. “You canna see I’m bloody busy?”
    It was one of the