Free Krakow Melt by Daniel Allen Cox Page A

house, taking inventory of your combustibles and sniffing cracks in the wall, but it’ll only be a phantom scent. Furniture will smell like campfire, and the sulphur in your shit will make you jump off the toilet seat. This will happen repeatedly, but there will never be a pillar of smoke to guide you. Perpetually lost, I’m afraid.
    Magpie (is “girlfriend” better?), I’ll have to transcribe the remaining chapters of The Legend of the Smok Wawelski some other time.
    I’m getting sleepy.
    Love,
    Radeki

KRYPTOZOOLOGY
    “Poland is clearly in Eastern Europe,” I told Dorota as we walked through the main gates of the PoznaZoo.
    “It used to be Eastern when it was Eastern Bloc,” she said. “But the map was redrawn after free elections. By 1990, we had become Central.”
    “Central is nowhere,” I said, buying us two tickets. I noticed that my wallet was dangerously empty; I was going to have to destroy another city soon to pay the rent.
    “And Eastern is somewhere?”
    “It’s extreme.”
    Our train excursion to Poznahad been fun because we’d found a thrilling new way to claim a cabin to ourselves: taking off our shoes and hanging our funky socks on the curtain rod.
    “Let’s find the Elephant House,” she said.
    We had come to see, with our own eyes, what Rzeczpospolita had once described as “the wild beast of the Book of Revelation.” Elephants weren’t very biblical animals, but evil apparently took many forms. It appeared that Ninio was gaga over the other male elephants, and wouldn’t “mingle” with the resident female, even when the keepers— it was rumoured—sprayed her pussy with peanut extract. He had to be an envoy of Satan.
    Poznacity counsellor Michał Grzeof the right-wing Law and Justice Party was beside himself. And he was beside a UK Daily Mail journalist when he said, “We didn’t pay thirty-seven million złotych for the largest elephant house in Europe to have a gay elephant.”
    Only they did .
    Grzehadn’t planned on building a shrine to the biological basis for same-sex attraction, but that’s how it turned out. And they could spray all the peanut extract in the world, but Ninio would still be a fag.
    I planned to whisper into Ninio’s ear never to lumber away from a 93.3 millilitre ejaculation of semen. That the fastest way to male pachyderm orgasm was a prostate massage through the anus.
    The macaws tore a complaint as we passed them. A wake of buzzards were gnawing on a pile of rat carcasses.
    Aside from Ninio, I was excited to visit the namesakes of the songs on Pink Floyd’s Animals album. Unquestionably, 1977 was a good year for disobedient “Sheep,” “Dogs,” and “Pigs on the Wing.” Yes, these are farm animals, but far from ordinary. I couldn’t wait to point out their quirks to Dorota.
    A float of crocodiles chattered their teeth. Capybaras brayed. Really? I probably had the sounds mixed up.
    When I was a kid, my wind-up Animal See N Say went wonky all the time. The recorded animal sounds rarely matched the pictures. “The pig says ‘moo.’ The dog says ‘ribbit.’” I pulled that cord thousands of times and learned again and again that life in the animal kingdom was a fluid affair.
    We continued walking through the menagerie of tourists and found the sheep pen. I was lucky the zoo was proud to showcase barnyard specimens because we caught the woolly bastards in full rut. The rams were tearing each other into pieces of souvlaki, fighting over the right to mate.
    “Dorotka, look. They’re wearing marking harnesses so they can draw on their fucks with a crayon. The keepers have to know who did who.”
    “How stupid and territorial,” she said.
    “Think of it as art.”
    Granny Smith Apple green means, “You’re my slut-hole.” Wild Blue Yonder means, “I like looking at the sky when we fuck,” and Razzle Dazzle Rose is, “Love you, too.”
    A gulp of cormorants flew overhead, shitting on strollers and stealing ice cream sandwiches. The