After my father died I started working at Carl’s Menagerie. The company of animals and the calming blue atmosphere of the aquarium section especially soothed me. Carl had installed a set of theater lights above the tanks of colorful fish, which cast undulating shadows on the concrete floor, mimicking wavy bands of sunlight on a seabed. Performing my daily rounds, I imagined myself as a prehistoric leviathan, moving stealthily among shoals of prey, melding with shadows as ancient as time and death.
I was late the day the shipment came in from Europa. Mornings in particular had become difficult, having to shake myself awake from a recurring dream in which my father was standing on the ocean floor, his hand outstretched as though he were calling out to me. Broken sunlight rippled across his face, revealing an expression of deep repose where blue shadows had not reached. Underwater, his dark skin was as black as outer space.
“Sorry I’m late.” I squeezed past a burly brother chomping on a cigar while awkwardly carrying a long tank into the store. A lone eye like an obsidian stone ringed with gold studied me from the watery haze. Inexplicably, I was flooded by visions of my father on the seafloor. I shook my head and they faded as quickly as they had come.
Carl grunted, didn’t even look in my direction as he conversed with a bored-looking guy standing by the counter. More men trooped in and out, ferrying tanks and strange equipment, large chrome cylinders and spools of translucent tubing. Each also wore the same bored expression, as if this dingy pet store was the last place they wanted to be.
Boredom was the mood of the times. The first half of the 21st century, with its dizzying technological advances and worldwide political upheaval playing out against the quiet horror of ecological collapse, had worn people out. Widespread anxiety over the future was sublimated into apathy for the present. The terror had been normalized, mass produced, sold at clearance. Not even the discovery of life lurking in the global ocean beneath the cross-hatched surface of the icy Galilean moon Europa was enough to bring people out of their ultramodern ennui.
“Can I do anything to help?” I asked, turning sideways to let one of the guys pass. I tried peering into the tank he carried, but I couldn’t make anything out through the cloudiness, neither an eye nor a tentacle.
“Yeah,” said Carl, although it sounded like another grunt. “You can start working. Thirty minutes late and standing around ogling like a damn fish. Go on, girl, git!”
At least the parakeets were happy to see me, bright as tennis balls and trilling cheerfully as I refilled their drinkers and feeders.
The aquarium section was off-limits for the next several hours until the stone-faced men filed out of the store for the last time, the lead guy offering only a grunt for services rendered, which Carl imitated for his reply.
Around noon I was in the herpetarium, tucked away in a grimy corner under incandescent bulbs that burned with the sickly warm heat of the desert sun. A sad, lethargic bunch, mostly geckos, skinks, and anoles. There was a tortoise at least half a decade older than me, its shell scrawled with apocalyptic slogans. Our albino Burmese python, an illegal clone, died in her sleep last autumn.
Carl’s greasy, bald head popped around a rack of tanks containing nothing but gravel. I ignored him, pretending to inspect a coat of arms Sharpied on the shell of the tortoise—two dolphins leaping over a mushroom cloud.
“So you wanna see ‘em?” he said impatiently, although there was a rare softness to his voice.
I looked up and saw he had been crying. It made him look like a boy, and not at all like the grubby, pear-shaped man brimming with hate that I had known him to be. I followed him to the aquarium section, propelled by invisible currents and wanting to make sense of my earlier visions.
We stood in front of rows of long tanks, the same ones that had been brought in by the men, in a separate section cordoned off by a black velvet curtain. Enclosed in this small, dark space, the constant babble of flowing water from the tanks, I felt as though I myself were deep below the surface. The spectral glow emanating from the tanks barely pierced my illusion. If anything, the soft, milky light only augmented the otherworldly atmosphere.
I searched the liquid fog for the eye that had shown me my father to no avail. Somehow sensing my frustration, Carl said, “You can’t want it. They’re shy. Works best if you just let it come. I mean, you’re thinking about him all the time anyway, right? You’re living in his loss, like a fish in water. At least that’s how it worked for me. Oh, Mama . . .” And then this mean, ugly man began to weep.
I did what he said and allowed my mind to go blank with grief. It was easy. Even before my father died, I had already been walking around with his death for so long, ever since I was a child. If history weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living, then so does the inescapable knowledge of the impermanence of our parents.
The last thing I saw before my father came surging back to me were penetrating raptor eyes, drawn to my raw grief.
***
When I arrived at the store the next day, on time and still shaken from yesterday’s visions and Carl’s oversimplified explanation, there was a line outside the store. An actual line. People didn’t even line up for superhero movies anymore.
“What’s going on?” I asked the nearest person, an older man with sad, shifty eyes. The abysmal sadness gave in to fear, and he ran off.
Inside it was chaos.
“June!” Carl yelled over the heads of just about everyone in town. I’m sure there were folks from the city packed inside our store, too. The air reeked of sweaty desperation, the funk of Earth’s wildest creature. The other animals, the ones inside their tanks and cages, had retreated to their hiding places, spooked by the human commotion. Even the parakeets were silent.
“Help me out here, will ya?” Carl pushed his way over. “Just start taking folks’ money, and tell ‘em to be patient.” He handed me a large envelope. “Twenty bucks a head for three minutes. And no one gets to see without paying!”
“I thought you said we had to keep a low profile!” I shouted at his sweat-stained back.
By the time local news crews had descended on our town (coinciding with the arrival of an unmarked black van), astrobiologists were at a loss. Biopsies showed that each tentacle contained an individual, separate brain, which did little to explain the Galileans’ psionic powers. Especially baffling was how they sustained themselves; they didn’t seem to require nutrition. Fortunately for the scientists, at only twenty bucks a pop, Carl was more than willing to test their theories.
He sold dreams of the deceased, provoked by the presence of the Galileans. The permanent line outside the store was a mile long. No one had cared about hamsters or goldfish, not even when everything around them started dying. It wasn’t just the plants and animals either; everyone that I knew had lost someone. And all the AI chatbots in the world posing as the dead couldn’t compare to these psychic visions.
Animal rights groups declared World War 3. It wasn’t enough that we were hellbent on annihilating all life on Earth, they said, but now we were importing aliens to sate our barbarism. Nebulous government agencies also began closing in, judging by the mysterious calls and black-suited visits, and the intimidation of the unmarked black van across the street. The religious fundamentalists, however, were the most rabid. They accused us of launching an all-out assault on heaven. Carl had to hire armed security.
Meanwhile, the bereaved kept coming. They swarmed the street, cutting off traffic for blocks, sweating and crying and swaying like a human river of grief. People said you could hear the wailing from several miles away and that’s how you knew exactly where the town was. The drone of news helicopters that circled the spectacle endlessly accompanied the chorus of lamentations.
Once inside, the pandemonium that had characterized the first day and persisted out front evaporated. It was as though a heavy veil had fallen over the entire store, silencing both people and animals into desolation. Customers shuffled in lockstep with their heads bowed as they approached the aquarium section. As they passed tanks of curious fish, they resembled fish themselves, glassy-eyed and lips flapping soundlessly at the ground.
Beyond the velvet curtain, in the dark room housing the Galileans, the air was oddly still, the sound of purling somehow lessened, shattering my previous illusion of being underwater. It felt more like outer space, like the unraveling of a mindless vastness, darker and more menacing than any earthly abyss. A line of five or six stood in front of the starlit tanks, their ashen faces blank, each of them lost deep in an alien dream. For three fleeting minutes they were reunited with their dead. Dispassionate amber eyes watched them as they dreamt.
I wondered if any of the others saw their loved ones in the manner that my father had appeared to me, drowning at the bottom of the sea. That same image came to me every night, and even during the day when I was outside doing crowd control and nowhere near the Galileans. But what unnerved me most was my father’s calm expression being slowly eroded by relentless currents to reveal a look of horror, the bulging eyes and twisted lips of a man who knows he’s drowning.
Feeling ever more disturbed by this morbid transformation, I meant to ask Carl how his mother appeared to him. We were finally closing up for the day, pushing out the last of the still spellbound customers as Carl’s hired goons cleared the sidewalk and the street.
But I thought instead about the Galileans, and if what we were doing to them and to people was wrong, if maybe the animals in the store, who were being more ignored than ever, weren’t getting a raw deal out of the whole thing, too. The Galileans didn’t invade, they didn’t come to Earth seeking asylum or even friendship. We had kidnapped them from their home, transported them across 390 million miles of cosmic dust, and then turned them into commodities after dissecting their bodies out of boredom.
I mentioned all this to Carl. He listened attentively, sweat beading on his bald head as though he were thinking. Yet when I was through with my passionate rant, he simply laughed.
“Look, Junebug,” he said, “when I opened this sad piece of shit joint, no one cared. Silly me for thinking folks wanted something small and furry and easygoing that reminded ‘em of when they were kids and things weren’t so big and scary. Especially with all that money going into cloning. You had all these white coats and billionaires on TV saying how they were gonna save the whales, for real this time. And guess what? No one cared then either. But what we’re doing here? Giving folks a chance to see their loved ones again, to know that in the end we’re all headed to the same place and it ain’t that bad? That means something.”
Then he told me to stop being soft and counted the day’s earnings, ignoring my continued presence. I went to finish my closing duties and left him alone in the store an hour later.
***
I awoke that night to sirens. My drowning father faded from my mind’s eye for the last time. I got out of bed and looked out the window to see an intense orange glow coming off the dark horizon. It was in the direction of the pet store.
By the time I got there, the building was engulfed entirely in flames. My heart sank as I watched the store burn amid a crowd of bystanders, many of whom appeared to be shaken out of more than just mere sleep. But then I noticed our side of the street was lined with cages and tanks filled with confused and frightened animals. Only the Galileans were missing.
The police still haven’t found a motive as to why Carl locked himself inside with the creatures before setting the place on fire.
— Aaron Thorpe is a writer originally hailing from New York. He is currently the co-host of two socialist podcasts: The Trillbilly Worker’s Party and Struggle Session. You can find him on Twitter — still not calling it X — under @afrocosmist, where he shares retro sci-fi art, political commentary, and his love for Star Trek. He currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia.