The Shot

Working as a historic interpreter has me wondering: do giraffes ever want to whack zoo visitors? I’ve watched tigers pace in a pit, turning pronounced shoulder bones toward nonconsensual camera lenses, and now I feel sorry for pressing my nose piercings to aquarium glass to stare at sharks.

*

“Smile.” I’m portraying a soldier in a historic firearm demonstration, standing a foot across the safety line from an old man while my colleague explains British army land pattern muskets, and he keeps commanding me to perform for his iPhone.

Though I look like a tropical bird in red wool with mustard cuffs and lace, he has mastered the repetitive vocalizations of a trained parrot. “Smile.” He reaches, lenses probing, as I pass to show spectators the flintlock mechanism on my gun, bayonet fixed. We say the safety line protects them from us, but I’m not so sure.

Oh, to be a tiger and not lose my job if I turned around and showed him my butt hole.

*

Do polar bears ever go postal? I can picture the trial. I didn’t want it to come to this. I just wanted a little dignity, a little privacy. I just wanted the right to say, no photos, please. I mean, I thought we learned that lesson from Princess Diana. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that’s not too much for a bear to ask, is it? He stuck his arm through the fence, and…

But bears do not have the right to innocence until proven guilty, and the zookeeper has a gun.

The Central Park Zoo in New York City kept an orthorexic, depressed polar bear in the ’90s and early aughts. His name was Gus, and they prescribed him Prozac. His therapist said he was sad because he was a New Yorker.

Does Pesto the penguin have elevated stress levels? The naked mole rats probably get off easy.

When my colleagues and I (infrequently) wear modern clothes and not historical kit, we become the squirrels stealing curly fries from children: everyone wonders why the zookeeper keeps us around.

Oh, to be a zookeeper. No one wants pictures of the zookeeper. No one tries to touch the zookeeper.

*

“I got you. Look. Look!” I’m returning my musket to the locked guard room after the demonstration, and he holds his phone six inches from my face, walking backward and laughing — laughing that I didn’t want him to photograph me, and he did anyway.

I have unfixed my bayonet. I am declawed — just a bird with one word: “okay.”

On a trail I hiked in Alaska, a sign warns visitors about moose interactions. “If you can’t cover the moose’s whole body with your thumb when you fully outstretch your arm, you’re too close,” it says. It sports a picture of a moose wearing her ears like earmuffs, pulled down toward scrunched-up two-ton shoulders. “Upset moose. You’re in danger now.”

My shoulders rise. I can’t control my ears. If I outstretched my arm, I would punch him. Would he call my boss or animal control?

Oh, to be a moose behind a thumb.

*

This election cycle, I voted for a Colorado ballot measure that would have outlawed hunting big cats. It included exceptions for mercy and for ranchers protecting their stock. Had it passed, it would have prohibited trophy hunting for pelts.

I always read the Blue Book cover to cover, and I mulled the argument against the measure: wildlife managers are already managing populations. They can decide to implement protections as needed — or not. They can draw the safety line.

Oh, to be a game warden and not the game.

Oh, to have a chalk pen, plain clothes, and a pocketbook to fill.

Oh, to be a bobcat skin rug and get it over with.

Who manages the wildlife managers?

The man at the demonstration paid a lot of money at the admission booth, and he wanted my photo.

(first appeared, JMWW)

Kira Córdova is an emerging writer working on an MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University. Their poems and essays have appeared in Troublemaker Firestarter Magazine and Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social.