“No! Did this just happen? Was it an uprising? Which aquarium?” The lemur clutched a mug, her eyes wide. Her machine hissed, temporarily forgotten. In the short line behind Alfonzo, a German shepherd was tapping her tail against the counter and a raccoon was fiddling with his newspaper.

Alfonzo had imagined more banter around the joke. He hadn’t anticipated her seriousness. He stumbled. “I mean. It didn’t happen in reality. I just—I heard it was otter chaos.”

The music that had been playing reached its conclusion, leaving a silence for Alfonzo to squirm in. He felt like he’d shoved a used tissue into her paw. He watched the barista take his pun, turn it over and around in English until she saw what it was. “Oh. Utter like otter.” Finally she bestowed upon him a slight nod, releasing them both from this snare of awkwardness.

Alfonzo added a wheatgrass cake he didn’t really want to his coffee order and left a large tip as a mea culpa. Slinking toward the door, he heard the lemur apologizing to the shepherd for the wait.

These jokes were his hiccups. They came on without warning, spasmed through him, then departed. There was no repressing them, although his former fiancée, Vivi, insisted he could if he tried. Vivi said one should at least be good at punning if one had the indecency to say them aloud, and she even went further, suggesting that Alfonzo told bad jokes to humiliate himself because he was afraid of intimacy and craved judgment. Rather than responding to her comment, Alfonzo had searched for a good rhyme to pun with intimacy: nutritionally, illiteracy, idiocy? But Vivi’s criticism returned to haunt him, at times like these, with its accuracy. He couldn’t guess why he wanted to alienate the barista.

Alfonzo entered the park. It was 8:46 a.m. He had fourteen more minutes of freedom, and he could feel the building counting. City Hall knew the minutes and the seconds even for the most insignificant of its animal workers. Alfonzo thought of his dream from this morning and hummed the words The End. He had a pressing task to complete, but for the moment he wanted to let his thoughts float as he sipped his coffee. Taking a bench beside the central fountain, he basked in the sound of the water and in the yellow of the flowers. Shaggy green linden and thornless honey locust trees arched above. Beyond the trees towered Woolworths and the municipal building with its golden top. These old buildings dwarfed the trees just as the corporate towers dwarfed the old buildings. Traffic snaked along. The rhythmic mélange of sensations soothed, like a cool stream.

Baseball-hatted tourists milled around the park, oblivious to the space they took up as they waited for the morning tour of City Hall to begin. Workers darted around the clustered creatures as Alfonzo pondered and judged.