“Let’s turn the hoses on them,” said the groundsman who had called the zookeeper. He was no longer hysterical.

“They might be sick,” said the zoologist, “or depressed. We should bring in a psychiatrist.”

“I’m a psychiatrist,” said one of the adults without children. “And it’s plain to see these giraffes have been abused. I’m going to contact the SPCA and have them removed from this environment immediately.”

The zookeeper closed his eyes. He thought of Matilda. He tried to imagine what he would do if he came home and found her pretending to be dead. He pictured her enormous body supine on the floor of their kitchen, her legs twisted beneath her and one eye open, gauging his reaction. How furious he would be! How dare she pretend to take herself from him! For the first time in his life he felt pure rage with no lingering fear or trepidation. He was about to tell the groundsmen to blast the giraffes to pieces with the hoses, when one of the zoologists moved slightly, and he saw into the pen.

Lulu and Doë were on their sides, their necks bent forward so that their heads rested on their hooves. Both had their tongues hanging in the dirt, and every few moments Lulu’s tail seemed to twitch. Francesco was balanced on his back—his neck straight—his two front legs curled into his chest, and his two back legs sticking eight feet into the air in a V formation. Francesco had his head turned toward the spectators behind the fence and his lower jaw twisted in what he supposed was an accurate representation of the anguish of death.

The giraffes’ bodies extended across their pen. They seemed to take up every inch of earth. They were enormous, prehistoric. The zookeeper looked at the animals prostrate in the dirt and was reminded of pre-Darwinian concepts of evolution—that the length of giraffes’ necks was determined by stretching to obtain what they desired. He wondered if this kind of despair was inside Matilda. In his mind he picked her up from the floor of their kitchen and laid her beside the giraffes. As he imagined Matilda on the ground before him, her feigned death became horribly real. He felt a sharp pain in his left arm, spreading through his shoulder and across his chest. His eyes filled with tears. He flung himself from the golf cart and onto a patch of grass.

Reporters arrived on the scene. They had received dozens of calls regarding the collapse of family entertainment. They snapped photos of the zookeeper sobbing on the grass. They snapped the zoologist and the groundsman wrestling over the hose. They snapped a portrait of the psychiatrist looking grim. Then they snapped the giraffes.

The reporters rushed out of the zoo to make the evening paper with their headlines: