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    Zoo and Crowbar
    Zoo and Crowbar
    Zoo and Crowbar
    Ebook81 pages1 hour

    Zoo and Crowbar

    By Paul F. Clark

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    About this ebook

    The Wind has mysteriously caused the death of all people on earth -- except for Zoo. As the last remaining person on earth, he must deal with this extraordinary situation, and the result is a series of dreams, shocks, hallucinations, events, explorations and the final outcome in the light of his changing understanding.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGuernica
    Release dateMay 15, 2015
    ISBN9781550719376
    Zoo and Crowbar
    Author

    Paul F. Clark

    David Zieroth’s The Fly in Autumn (Harbour, 2009) won the Governor General’s Literary Award and was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry in 2010. Zieroth also won The Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award for How I Joined Humanity at Last (Harbour, 1998). Other publications include the trick of staying and leaving (Harbour, 2023), watching for life (McGill-Queen’s, 2022), the bridge from day to night (Harbour, 2018), Zoo and Crowbar (Guernica Editions, 2015), Albrecht Dürer and me (Harbour, 2014), The November Optimist (Gaspereau, 2013), The Village of Sliding Time (Harbour, 2006), The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill: A Country Boyhood (Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002) and Crows Do Not Have Retirement (Harbour, 2001). His poems have been included in the Best Canadian Poetry series, shortlisted for National Magazine and Relit Awards and featured on Vancouver buses three times as part of Poetry in Transit. He watches urban life from his third-floor balcony in North Vancouver, BC, where he runs The Alfred Gustav Press and produces handmade poetry chapbooks twice per year.

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      Book preview

      Zoo and Crowbar - Paul F. Clark

      David Zieroth

      Zoo

      and Crowbar:

      A Fable

      GUERNICA ESSENTIAL PROSE SERIES 109

      TORONTO – BUFFALO – LANCASTER (U.K.) 2015

      After so much disbelief,

      will something be beyond us to receive us?

      – C.K. Williams, Le Petit Salvié

      Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different – unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

      – Karen Thompson Walker,

      The Age of Miracles

      Table of Contents

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      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      Copyright

      ☐

      DRIVING ON THIRD, HIS CAR FILLED WITH THE smell of orange peels he chucked on the empty passenger seat, the radio on, Zoo was half- listening. And when the reporter in Africa stopped talking and fell with a thud to his studio floor, this was the beginning of Zoo’s separating from himself, which soon started to feel like a cut, like wretchedness coming after actual hurt, but instead of building immediately into pain, the leave-taking turned into soft dulling. He slowed the car to stop, suddenly faint, thinking he might be sick to his stomach, confused by his own reaction, sweat now on his forehead and hands. He decided to drive on; he was nearly home after all, asking himself what could happen here? He kept up the question. It helped him drive. His arms felt prickly, as if touched by thin needles, and then came a passivity he was grateful for. He switched off the radio and thought, I’m having an allergic reaction.

      What could happen here? The answer came at home when he pulled out an old portable TV from where it sat in the corner of the second bedroom, plunked it down on the coffee table in his living room, plugged it in and began surfing through the half dozen channels he could still pick up without Netplug. The French network had sent in an air device to record what was happening to people in Africa. Blown off course, it had missed the major population centres and drifted over the countryside where the commentators were shocked to see dead animals, the elephants that didn’t make it back to their famous burial ground the most obvious from that height.

      One pundit from Disease Control speculated that a new phenomenon, a fatal wind-blown virus like a malaria that mutates rapidly, was sweeping the continent. His idea was picked up and, before midnight, the announcers were speaking of ’The Wind.’ Banners ran across the bottom of the screen: Toxic Wind out of Africa Blows toward Israel. As it turned out, the banner was right: a rabbinical student in Haifa fell over, dead, and then within minutes, if the reports were right, a busload of Palestinians also died, most of them leaning, apparently, against one another, none of them panicked, although there were no pictures to confirm this. Zoo could no longer tell if these events were really happening or if he was witnessing an elaborate deception by the media, intended perhaps to produce mass hysteria – for reasons he couldn’t imagine.

      For a moment he thought he was watching an updated version of The War of the Worlds, and then he turned back to the screen, waiting for the event that would bring something home here in the West. He flipped channels, saw one announcer begin to stutter, the camera cutting away from her awkwardly. The webcam in Cairo showed a strangely calm city before the continent went dark once again. Seven hours had passed since he’d first heard of the Wind, and his phone hadn’t rung once. Neither had he thought of calling anyone.

      One plan he almost believed: the British government was prepared to bomb the first place affected in coastal Europe or anywhere close across the Channel. They argued that, if they blasted the Wind with nuclear force, it would be annihilated. When asked, a think-tank of European physicists said that the Wind was a force of non-dimensional anti-matter, emerging from behind the 90% of the universe we hadn’t yet been able to grasp, and that possibly a nuclear explosion could alter its makeup and send it back into a realm we knew nothing about.

      The spokesman said we were dealing with phenomena beyond our understanding, of an entirely unimagined nature. But perhaps a bomb would still work. Zoo sat on his couch and watched these men talking as if they were discussing the gravitational pull of the moon or some force that had been safely assigned its place. Their composure was broken at least once when the man with the large white moustache, his eyes wide with excitement and disbelief, wiped his brow with a crumpled blue handkerchief. One scene showed travellers in Heathrow shouting, and what looked like dancing, and then slumped along the walls. Shortly afterwards, Zoo fell into an abeyance of sensation almost like sleep.

      Later, he reached out and turned off the TV, not wanting new information about new death places, wanting instead to turn toward that non-dimensional anti-matter force that was now the only necessity. From the kitchen table he looked out on sunshine, and the city across the harbour was dreamy in its wintry light. He could see tiny corporate flags flapping at the tops of towers, and he wondered about the others who might be feeling this new way, for surely there were others ...

      He remembered scenes of panic, everyone wanting to be home, but finally any place sufficed because

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