"What Happened at the Zoo" by David Driscoll
We looked at the ibex. We looked at the baboons. After staring at the backside of the lion for a while, I pushed my daughter’s stroller over to the concession stand. She was burbling. She was little. She was too small for cotton candy or big pretzels. She was just a baby. I had a bottle with me, though.
The great thing about Lincoln Park Zoo is that it's free. Year round. No kidding. We go there in the spring and the summer and the fall, and they put up holiday lights for the season. There's always lots of other kids around, too. My daughter can't play with them yet because she can't walk, but she can't take her eyes off them. All the babies at the zoo watch the older kids, learning their moves. The parents with babies are like me. They look tired. They lean on their strollers and let their hair blow around in the breeze.
“Excuse me,” said a zoo employee. I hadn't even seen him standing there. “Would you mind if I gave your daughter a balloon?”
“Of course not,” I said and looked down at her. She seemed too small for a balloon, but I liked the idea. I felt strongly that she should have it.
The employee slid a green balloon over the nozzle of the tall helium canister at his side, and the balloon began to fill and swell, picking up light and vague shadow reflections from the people milling around the concession stand. I couldn't believe how big he made it. It kept stretching and swelling. I pulled my daughter’s stroller back, as if that might protect her when it popped. The balloon continued to expand until it was big enough for me to crawl inside and curl up like an embryo in a green rubber womb.
“There,” he said and tied the end of the balloon. He slipped a noose of string around the knot and pulled it tight. Then he let the string slide through his fingers and kept paying it out until the giant balloon was about fifteen feet above my head. The employee scissored through the string and tied it to the handle of my daughter's stroller. He gave the string a tug, and the balloon bounced jauntily on the end of its rope.
I looked down at my daughter. The empty bottle was in her lap. Her eyes were closed, and her tongue moved like a lizard’s in and out of her lips. She seemed no more aware of the balloon than she was of the fact that she was with her father and not her mother, or that the zoo was supposed to be entertaining to children, or that it was full of creatures she might never otherwise see, even if she traveled the entire world looking for them.
A mist rolled in. Condensation gathered on the wrought iron bars of the pens. The rhino stood in the dusty, sunlit haze. The elephant blew a trumpet of dirt all over her mighty spine.
The balloon bumped under the arch as we left the zoo. My daughter was asleep. I pushed her to a grassy spot not far from the Shakespeare garden and spread a blanket on the ground. A ring of sun lit up the fog. I locked one hand around the stroller and closed my eyes and fell down into Morpheus’s strange grip, and while he held me there, I saw my daughter rising up in her stroller, being carried higher and higher by the great green balloon. Safely it passed beyond the clutch of the bare branches, as if being drawn by the magnet of the obscured sun.
The bell of a bicycle woke me with a start. My hand was still welded to the strut of the stroller. My daughter was still asleep.
Years later, my daughter sent me a poem:
Those winds, you know.
They blew me here and there,
over derelict cities and vast deserts,
sand like gold and blood.
I crossed the ocean,
worlds old and ancient,
teeming civilizations,
cultures just barely begun.
The ice on the caps of the world,
the storms at the heart of the deepest waters.
At the edge of outer space, I floated along,
mysteries ever intruding upon my sheltered abode.
This journey is painful sometimes,
strangely so,
and I seem to make so many mistakes,
and then I look down and see you waving there,
and I wonder how it would feel
from another perspective.
It seemed late when we got home from the zoo, though it was just early afternoon. I folded up the stroller and carried you up to your room. I changed your diaper on the table and laid you down in your crib.
I took off my shoes and crawled onto bed. I didn't even take off my jacket. I closed my eyes and felt myself begin to rise and then sink, and then from somewhere out there, from what seemed like some precipitous height, you let out a cry.
David Driscoll's fiction has appeared in Mississippi Review, Witness, TriQuarterly, River Styx, J Journal, New Stories from the Midwest, and more. He studied creative writing at the University of Chicago, where he earned a master's in the humanities. He is also a yoga teacher and father to three young girls.
