But there’s no time for that. The slithering crunching crawling howling metal-on-metal metal-on-bone grinding mopped guts grates bars bending blood and fog

ENDS.

The path ends.

No more bars. No more cage.

Dirk drops the lamppost. They don’t need it anymore.

They’ve reached the end.

And the children scream.

Dirk is confused. What he sees is beautiful. A landscape fans open before them, small withered shrubs far from one another, open space, colors so bright Dirk squints.

A boy says LOOK just as Dirk sees a costume of some kind on the ground. His eyes adjust and he sees it’s a gorilla suit, unzipped, left behind.

How could you do this? a child yells.

There is a white wind. It blows through Dirk’s hair and he brings a six-fingered hand to shield his eyes from it. He sees a child rendered dust by the gust.

How could you show this to us!

Dirk’s eyes are open and he is trying but he can’t find the children in all the white wind.

How could you! they yell.

How could you show this to us!

Dirk’s eyes water from the wind. Tears run down his face. He reminds himself to remember every detail. He hears the children taken in the wind. He hears the wind above all else. And he is blinded by it. What he sees is beautiful.

Ten feet beyond the gorilla suit, crouched behind a shrub, is a naked woman looking back at him.

Eula, Dirk says. You escaped.

22

To see Dirk then, standing still as the sky unloaded, his stoic face wet with sweat and rain and tears now, too, to see him at the precise moment of comprehension, would have been enough to change any Gobliner’s opinion of the face of the zoo and the House.

He stepped forward at last, his boots heavy and wet, and headed back to the tour’s starting point. A sign there said:

this is the place alright!

Dirk stared at it. How many times had he seen this sign? When was the last time he read it? A profound sadness filled the infinitesimal spaces of his brain like grout. He touched the sign, as though saying goodbye to it, and headed inside.

Once there, he approached the tools. He had his end-of-the-shift duties to take care of before leaving to meet up with Patrick for the much-needed night out. He had to take some trash out. Mop up a bit. Wipe some surfaces. Clean some glass. He performed these tasks quietly, hardly thinking of them at all. The place was empty as his co-workers were either already on their way home or beyond Dirk’s range of hearing. Dirk didn’t speak. He kept his eye on his work. Whatever he was feeling could bloom, if he let it, into relief. He had a vague idea that he’d been through Hell and was now making the right changes. But he was worried that if he wasn’t careful, the feeling could snap back at him, blossom into something blacker than the Hell he’d already been through. He had a vision of himself falling down a flight of stairs in that darkness, all mixed up and broken on the floor of Hell’s cellar.