Dave:

One afternoon I was driving in downtown Lexington and saw a raccoon running along the sidewalk. Actually it was less a run and more a determined walk alongside the feet of the lawyers and businessmen who populate our downtown during the day. Men and women wearing suits and ties (as opposed to the burglar’s outfit of the raccoon), but ever in a hurry, knowing where they’re going. And the raccoon certainly knew where to go, straight to a city trash receptacle, disappearing inside, I assume for a bite of lunch, probably discards from the many lunch diners who line our streets. So, our lunch was also the raccoon’s.

When Sherry and I were discussing a theme for this issue, that event resurfaced. Talking of the way certain animals have made homes beside us, invited or not, we decided it would be worthwhile to call for work that considers the way man has unwittingly created urban environments where certain animals thrive, often just out of sight.

And it seems to us that the imagination and sensitivities shown in these fine poems, narratives, and artwork have captured this accidental coexistence very well. There are animals beside and within us. Either inside or outside our houses, on the streets, on the roof, in the air, seen or unseen. Escaped lab rats, rock doves, alligators (perhaps in certain cities), coyotes, roaches, more. None really belong and yet they all do. So here they are, in words and artwork which draw a range of meanings from these urban animals, uncovering the sometimes startling ways that they intersect our concerns and reflect the human world.

Sherry:

When Dave suggested “Animals in the City” as the theme for our issue of qarrtsiluni I was skeptical. After all, I live in the country. My experience of urban animals is limited to the chipmunks that burrow under the decorative boulder in front of the clinic where I work. Those and the occasional unfortunate bug that survives the poison spray to raise screaming panic among my co-workers, women who are calm in the face of disastrous human illness. I was charmed, however, by Dave’s tale of the enterprising raccoon and I trust his instincts as an editor, so I agreed. The result outstripped my fondest expectations. I was surprised by the variety of animals who live among our urbanites and suburbanites: Birds — from choreographed grackles to a cowboy cattle egret — and squirrels of course, and a wide variety of cats, but also bears, coyotes, rattlesnakes, a lion, possums, mice, skinks, box turtles, a stag, bees, mayflies, an aardvark, and a pantheon of Greek gods masquerading as dogs in Athens. In addition to Athens, these animals live in Los Angeles, London, Glasgow, Vancouver, France, Sweden, Germany, The Philippines, Nigeria, and Australia. These animals charm and they witness disaster. I was impressed by the way our furred, feathered, scaled, and exoskeletoned cousins adapt to what we’ve done to their world, and I was gratified at the variety and quality of the submissions we received. Thank you to Dave for the suggestion and for sharing the hard work of choosing, to Dave Bonta who gave us this opportunity, and to everyone who afforded us the privilege of reading and featuring their work.

For bios of the editors, see the call for submissions.

The Bing by Gordon Gibson

When the Fox Comes to the City by Patricia Fargnoli

Escaped Lab Rat by Eileen Malone

Mice of the London Underground by Robert Peake

On the Wires by Karyn Eisler

Coot in Kentucky by J. Stephen Rhodes

The Cockroaches by Ann E. Michael

A Night in New York by Christina Cook

Coyote Pack Sparks Fears by M. L. Brown

Natural Confrontations by Changming Yuan

When Bears Fall From Trees by Elizabeth Aquino

Opossum by Elizabeth Schultz

Witness by Lissa Kiernan

Among the Orchids by Cher Holt-Fortin

Aphids by Laura Shovan

Crocodile Tears by Akumbu Uche

All-Together Scent by Coco Owen

Pigeons by Marilyn Zelke-Windau

Cat and Pigeons by Monika Andersson

Woodpeckers? by Dennis H. Lee

The Captive Improvises: Channel Six News by Nancy Fletcher Cassell

Massacre in Maguindanao by Jonel Abellanosa

Trick-or-Treat by Erin Murphy

The Butcher Dressing Chickens by Lisa J. Cihlar

Half Past Four on a Lurid August Day by Joseph Harker

How To Explain The Birds That Sing At 3 A.M. by Daniel Hales

The Stag by Patricia L. Scruggs

The Cattle Egret by James Brush

Study in Tawny Brown by Deb Scott

Rattlesnake Bites Man in Walmart Garden Center by Laura Shovan

Wild animals, come to the porch by Rosemary Starace

Co-Evolution by Robin Chapman

Coyote in the Backyard by Frederick Garber

Good Friday Aria by Gail Eisenhart

An Ode by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming

the egrets come to Downey by Lorine Parks

Chironomus plumosus by Steve Tomasko

How cats find homes by Phyllis Klein

F/light by Dorothee Lang

Low Rent Urban Housing by Margaret S. Mullins

Aperture by Karen George

You, Cardinal by C. E. Chaffin

Strix Nebulosa by Mari-Lou Rowley

Parakeet by Rafael Miguel Montes

The Order of the Forest by Valerie Loveland

Syntagma by Dawn Nikithser

Nocturne (VI) from the Bed Bug Diaries by Joanie DiMartino

Recognizable Trappings by Katherine Glatter

Wildlife graffiti: Hummingbird in Oaxaca, Mexico by Steve Wing

Skink by Francesca Sasnaitis

Autumn Equinox Creature Song by Uche Ogbuji

Mourning Dove by Louisa Howerow

Via Negativa by J. Stephen Rhodes

The Shepherd by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee

Surveillance by Ellen Birkett Morris

Squirrels and Injury by Jenny McBride

Putting Up by Christi Krug

Single-Minded by James Burgett

From Here by Maggie Rosen

Wherever There Is Water There Is Wild by Timothy Walsh

Spring, Dripfisted by Sarah Stanton

Wakeful by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

The Hawk by Ronald Pickett

Fox in the Shard by Sarah Burke

On a Beech Branch, Noon by Anna Lena Phillips

Let There Be Water For All by Nicole Holovinsky

Animals by Liz N. Clift

At a Traffic Light by Warren Baker

Playing Chicken by Betsy Packard

Intercession by Kristin Camitta Zimet

Foxes by Tammy Ramsey

Backyard Event (with a chorus for jays and bees) by Rosemary Starace

Urban Biology Bingo by Rosemary Mosco

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Rosemary Mosco (website) is a field naturalist by training who is interested in connecting people with environmental science through field experiences and creative communication projects. She has worked in diverse science communications roles with organizations such as the National Park Service and Mass Audubon. Her science cartoons have appeared in many publications, including The Globe and Mail and Torontoist. Other projects have included science-based videos, web sites, podcasts, and games. She holds an M.S. degree from the Field Naturalist Program at the University of Vermont. She completed her thesis work on web-based and place-based climate change communication.

by Rosemary Starace

The rosemary spills from the clench of the pot
the flux and the sex
of a gravelly musk.

Necessity sniffs at those ravels of leaves
and leaves her with flowers,
cerulean, mute.

In the spice and the peace of the sprawl of the morning,
her joy ruffles up,
the bee from its bloom.

HKYE! HKYE! HKYE!
Huhzzuzzah, huzzah.

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Rosemary Starace (website) lives in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a small city in the middle of a big, hilly forest. She’s the author of Requitements and co-editor of Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-po Listserv, with Moira Richards and Lesley Wheeler. Her work has appeared in Orion, Blueline, Studio, and elsewhere, including other issues of qarrtsiluni.

Each night
against city ordinance
she serves up dinner.
The foxes prefer bread;
raccoons, peanuts.
Possum will eat anything
except cucumbers,
which will lie in the yard
untouched by any animal
until sun and decomposition
take them away.

She began counting in July,
keeping coded track
on the kitchen calendar:
MR+5B when the mama raccoon
arrived late pulling, like moons,
her five babies;
3F for the brother fox,
a new litter still traveling together;
1P+1P+1P for the three possum
who might really be just one
arriving over and over again.

For a time it was unclear how many —
at least three, she thought,
but maybe even four or five.
Then one night
six appeared at once,
her eye not quite registering at first
from behind the curtain’s edge
just how many there were.
She counted and recounted,
the six foxes playing like happy puppies.

She had wanted, just then,
a witness to turn to,
someone else to see what she saw,
but with no one else there,
she watched until they left,
then recorded: 6F

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Tammy Ramsey teaches English and journalism at Bluegrass Community and Technical College. Her poems have appeared in New Growth: Recent Kentucky Writings, The Louisville Review, and Kentucky’s Twelve Days of Christmas. She earned a master’s degree in English from the University of Kentucky and a master of fine arts in writing from Spalding University.

Cages stuffed with finches swung
in bunches at the shrine
on the jammed Bangkok street,
and on a bench below them
sat a girl, sunken-eyed, lap
crammed with jewels she put on
only when passersby would pay
to make her dance their prayer up
before the god. She shrank, lips
parted, panting, like the birds.
I had coins for one cage—
the scuffle, snapping bones,
the bursting out the door,
the lucky ones flung skyward.
But not enough for her.

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Kristin Camitta Zimet is the Editor of The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. Her poems are in the full-length collection Take in My Arms the Dark and in many anthologies and journals, including Lullwater Review, Poet Lore, and Crab Orchard Review. Once a city girl, she is a naturalist in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

She nests in a sprawling tulip poplar
on a street of rental properties,
fast cars and fire crackers
peopled by many colors and tongues.
She scolds me
if the dogs and I venture too closely.

Yet I anticipate her dashes for acorns,
pine cones, pizza crusts and potato chips.
An adept tightrope arialist,
she escapes neighborhood cats
by zipping across power lines.
Watch her run, she hypnotizes—
contracting, expanding
as that bad-hair-day tail flexes
at every stride.

She has become bolder
perhaps knowing my dogs and I
pose no threat. These days
she brazenly watches us cross her path,
trespass on her domain,
our gazes locked in a daily stand-off.

Since we keep moving
avoiding confrontation or chase
I suspect she thinks
she’s won.

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New Englander by birth, Kentuckian by choice! My undergrad and graduate studies were at the Ohio State University, then I went and pursued a fun degree in in Fashion Design & Clothing Construction. My original designs (clothing and accessories) are available at The Bazaar, a juried portion of The Lexington Rescue Mission Thrift Store at Limestone & Louden in Lexington, KY. I have had poetry, creative non-fiction and flash fiction published and won multiple awards including one from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. In addition to my writing and creating wearable art, I’m a watercolor and a fiber artist. Many of my contemporary tapestries include yarn I have spun myself.

I look up
from my phone
to see a gray fox dart
across the road,
its black-tipped tail
sticking straight out,
running from the remains
of a meal scavenged
from garbage, a primeval
agenda set by a forebear
who crossed this
then-dirt road
with the warm body
of a Rhode Island Red
clenched in its jaw,
blood slick in its throat.
From henhouse
to woods it ran
beyond rifle range
of the farmer.
The light turns green.
My phone rings.
I dart ahead.

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Warren Baker is an assistant professor in the Professional Writing Program at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. A former journalist and copywriter, he holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine. His poems appear in Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and Chocorua Review.

When the first goat came into Jasper’s — it walked on its hind legs — we thought it was a joke, something we could talk about at our day jobs. When the second one came in, we stopped scattering topping on pizzas, and stared. We watched Tina, the hostess, look flustered and then speak to the goats. We looked at each other, and muttered about the freaks that come in after 10 pm. We wished again that Jasper would put up one of those signs that said “Service Animals Only.”

When a cougar joined the goats a few minutes, we went back to checking on our tables. We wanted to distract our customers — even though most of them had already noticed the animals. A thin man in a pinstripe suit asked, loudly, “Is this one of those places where anything goes?” He didn’t seem angry.

Another man, one of our regulars who always came with a different woman called back, “Indeed man, it is.”

We laughed, and we could hear nervousness in our laughter.

Tina, the hostess, shot the bartender — who doubled as the bouncer — a look. He shook his head and shrugged. According to Jasper, we served anyone who didn’t appear drunk or high.

We gathered in the kitchen area and watched Tina seat them at a corner table – the discrete one we usually used for our significant others if they came in to wait for our shifts to end – then motioned her over to us.

“Did they talk to you?” Lisbeth asked. She looked at the table. Her table, tonight.

Tina nodded. “They’re expecting two more.”

“But they’re animals,” José said. He tossed a crust, and we could see it stretching too thin in the middle. “Fuck,” he said when he noticed. He frisbeed the ruined crust into the corner where we kept all the ruined crusts until someone had time to haul them to the dumpster.

Tina nodded again. “I thought at first that they might be theater kids,” she began. “In really realistic costumes.”

We nodded at Tina, even though we thought costumes that realistic would belong in a CG movie. Even though we’d all seen Intelimals around town over the past month. Together1, the lab in town had issued a press release at New Years. An experiment in intelligent design that took an unexpected turn. We’d heard people complaining that intelligent animals just weren’t natural and speculating angrily that between gay marriage and intelligent animals it wouldn’t be long before bestiality was made legal.

We nodded at Tina’s wish about costumes because you can never tell about the theater kids. Because we didn’t want to lose faith, whatever that amounted to for each us. Because we still didn’t want to believe Intelimals lived among us and even acted like us. Because we didn’t want to talk to animals.

“Anyone want my table?” Lisbeth asked. She smiled, but her voice wavered. She looked each of us in the eyes. We looked away.

“I’ll give you all my tips for the evening,” she bargained.

We continued to look away.

Lisbeth sighed. “Do I even give them water glasses? How will they pick them up?”

“Straws,” the bartended said. He wiped the bar carefully, and we couldn’t tell if he was making a joke.

Lisbeth shot a pleading look at all of us once more, then turned and started filling glasses.

We watched as Lisbeth placed the red glasses in front of each of the animals, and tossed a handful of straws on the table. We watched as they spoke to her, and as she spoke to them. We watched her dark ponytail bob as she spoke, the way she touched her left wrist three times — one of her nervous habits. We’d seen her do the same thing when she flirted.

We couldn’t hear what she said to the Intelimals or what they said to her over the kitchen sounds, and the Grateful Dead music Jasper insisted on playing every day. We all hated Grateful Dead after a couple weeks at Jasper’s. Three of us ignored our own orders as they came up, and we speculated on how many Intelimals existed.

“How’d it go?” José asked as Lisbeth came back. The muscles in his forearms ran patterns as he kneaded dough for tomorrow’s set of crusts.

“The goats want to start with a house salad,” she said. “Surprise, surprise. And the cougar wants to know if we can do a pizza without the crust.”

“Does he want the meat raw, too?” José asked.

“Nope,” Lisbeth replied. “Apparently she is on a low-carb diet.”

“A pizza without the crust is a custom salad,” Katie said without missing a beat. She was Jasper’s niece, and his assistant manager. She’d been at the restaurant since he opened it thirteen years ago. We all liked her because she’d help in the kitchen if we were shorthanded, or hostess, or placate angry customers, or jump in when the waitstaff got busy. She picked up a knife and started slicing red onion paper thin, without looking. “We had that back with the Atkin’s craze too. And the Paleo diet, come to think of it. Such BS.” She shook her head.

Katie never actually swore. She called it a vapid habit, and said if Jasper heard the language most of us used, we’d end up cleaning the grout with a toothbrush. His military persuasion coming through, she told us, even though he’d never served a day. We liked her because she laughed about Jasper too.

We checked on our tables. We’d seen a few people eyeing the Intelimals. We offered one table after another complimentary ice cream sundaes – what we always offered to placate upset customers. We wanted to head off problems before they started. We watched as the last two animals arrived – a small black bear and another cougar. We watched Tina seat them, and as Lisbeth brought them water, and then extra lemons for the bear.

We watched for hands to float to people’s sides — concealed carry laws are a bitch, we all agreed, especially in the service sector – and asked the bartender to call in the three plain clothes cops whose beat included Jasper’s. We didn’t like cops. We didn’t want trouble.

When the cops arrived — as a bro-pod, how they traveled most of the time — we sat them at a table where they’d have a clear view of the restaurant. Three men who looked more like prom kings than cops. We knew them well, because they spent too many hours profiling our clientele. We knew that one of them had an infant son, and that one used to be on the bowling team, and that one spent the better part of eight years marching across middle eastern deserts before getting out of the army. We’d watched one of them eat a whole Jasper’s Jumbo pizza by himself, on a dare from the other two, when all three were off duty. We’d each been offered bribes to inform on customers. All but one of us had turned them down. At least that’s what we told each other.

We knew the next time they saw José on the street, they’d stop-and-frisk him, on the excuse that he had priors — a prior, more specifically, he’d tell anyone who’d listen: a protest in New York, where the NYPD had pulled him off the sidewalk and into the street, and then arrested him after roughing him up pretty bad. He’d spent two nights in jail, under bogus charges, before being released.

The next hour passed and we fell into our normal routines of taking orders, refilling drinks, and running cards. We kept one eye on the corner table, and passed gossip to each other through the kitchen staff. The Intelimals each ate a salad, and then all of them except the first cougar split two Jasper’s Jumbo pizzas — both vegetarian, one with vegan cheese. We watched long tongues clean lips and fur, and the way that even the cougars and bear ate their food daintily, pausing to chew each bite thoroughly before swallowing. Like they felt self-conscious.

After they’d been there an hour, and mostly finished their meals except the bear who’d asked if we could do a fruit plate, Lisbeth told us they were discussing books and indie rock, like any of the twenty- and thirty-somethings that mostly populated the restaurant.

“What books?” José wanted to know.

“Doctor DooLittle?” Katie asked. She stood with a clipboard, taking inventory.

Lisbeth shook her head. “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” she said. “They’ve even got copies on the table.”

Lisbeth and José started talking about the book. They were English majors, working their way through school. They talked about books whenever business was slow, and sometimes they’d pass books of poetry back and forth, exchanging furtive looks, as though a deal was going down. We speculated that they reserved study rooms in the university library, where they met and fucked. Once, we took Lisbeth out to the bar after work, just to get her drunk, hoping she’d be a talker. She wasn’t.

We kept an eye on the bro-pod, too. They got comped drinks and pizza, Jasper’s rule. He liked to stay on good terms with cops, because then they wouldn’t look too hard into his supply orders and what else was coming in with those supplies. Or at least that’s what we told each other. He didn’t like for any of us to open boxes or put supplies away — one of the only things he came in for regularly. The rest of the time, if we saw him, it was because he’d decided to spot check us — to keep us on our toes, he said.

The bro-pod downed soda like they’d never had it before, and traded slices of ten inch pizzas. We could tell they were bored and agitated. We watched them walk, one at time to the restrooms and linger just a second too long at some tables, on the pretext of letting one of us slide by with food. We watched them repeat the process an hour later. We overheard them talking about the animals — they said the freaks — as we waited on our tables, and two of us mentioned to the bartender that they sounded pretty angry. He shrugged. We wished for closing time.

When the Intelimals finished their meal, cash appeared on the table. Enough to cover the meal, plus a thirty-percent tip for Lisbeth. Juliana said she should’ve taken Lisbeth up on her offer to work the table that night. Juliana only worried about money. We speculated that she had a son with an acid habit who stole from her, or that she was taking care of an elderly parent, or that she was a materialistic bitch, or something worse, depending on how charitable we felt.

Usually we didn’t feel very charitable. Juliana was the newest addition to the wait staff and was the only one of us who never pooled her tips, or passed any off to the kitchen staff. She was the one who took bribes from the bro-pod, and let them know if she thought a customer was nefarious—her word. We’d talked to her about it, and she’d gotten angry and stormed out.

Even after they’d paid, the Intelimals continued to sit. Most of the restaurant had emptied out, and we could tell that the bro-pod was getting restless. In between angry grumbles about how unnatural the animals were, they’d talked loudly about sports and cars, and other things they thought would make them seem like normal men just out for an evening with the guys. One had tried again to get Tina’s number, and again, she said no. This happened whenever that particular cop walked in. We wondered why he couldn’t take the hint.

“Closing time,” Lisbeth finally said to the Intelimals, after midnight. The black bear swung his head around, and we watched Lisbeth take a step backward. One of the bro-podders stood, his hand already reaching for his weapon.

“Of course,” the bear rumbled.

We’d all swung by during our rounds, to refill waters and help Lisbeth bus the table, and we’d heard the goats and cougar speak — which we verified with each other, just wasn’t natural. They were animals, we repeated to each others. Animals. But somehow, we agreed, they sounded just as we’d expected. Especially the billy goat, we decided. He sounded, we agreed, like we’d imagined the biggest billy goat from The Billy Goats Gruff. We kind of liked it, we told ourselves later, when we talked about that night. We weren’t sure this was true.

Even José and the rest of the kitchen staff had managed to create an excuse to go by the table. They’d checked on the quality of the food, offered the animals a complimentary dessert. One of the dishwashers went over on the pretext of replacing a fork for a customer at the next table over, and had lingered long enough to hear the animals complaining about returning to Together1. When the dishwasher came back and told us this—he heard something about cages with electrodes built into the floor — we bit our lips.

We wondered what it was like to live in a lab, whether they were kept in cages all the time, if the scientists were ever kind to them. We figured that it couldn’t be too bad, if the scientists let the animals out for dinner. We told ourselves that the animals probably liked it, or that they didn’t know better. That at least in the lab, they had a safe place to sleep and that they probably got regular meals. Certainly, they looked well-fed. We ignored the way the animals all flinched when someone back in the dishwashing area dropped a pile of plates, and how afterward they’d looked nervous for half an hour. We ignored the scars on the side of the doe-goat’s abdomen, and the way the bear had asked Lisbeth to speak up because he was hard of hearing.

The Intelimals stood, and thanked Lisbeth for her patience. The bro-pod stood too, and acted like they were throwing cash on the table. The animals and the bro-pod were the only ones left in the restaurant. We’d cleaned the rest of the tables, prepped for the next day, and cleaned the kitchen. We’d closed out the register half an hour early, and usually most of us would’ve gone home — Juliana’d left as soon as her tables were gone. Katie didn’t say a word about us clocking out if we were going to stay longer.

But we didn’t want to leave Lisbeth and Katie alone with the bros and the animals. We told each other that wasn’t safe. The fact that the kitchen staff stayed too proved it, we told ourselves. Not safe.

The Intelimals left together, and we watched out the window, as they walked — trudged — in the direction of Together1. We tried not to notice the way they hung their heads. We watched as the bro-pod followed them, until they all disappeared into the darkness.

“Well, at least that’s something to tell my co-workers,” Lisbeth said. She was also work-study at the campus bookstore, about fifteen hours a week.

We nodded, and gathered our things. Maybe fifteen minutes passed, we decided later. We’d just entered the parking lot, after watching Katie lock up, when we heard a scream. It sounded like it came from just a couple of blocks away, in the direction of Together1.

Not a scared scream, or a startled scream, but a pain scream.

We looked at each other. We wished the bartender hadn’t bounced as soon as the bro-pod left. He usually carried a gun. He was trained in jiu-jitsu. He’d spent a year in jail after beating the shit out of someone who harassed his partner, and we knew that if he were around, he’d take off running toward the scream. We wanted someone else to take action.

“You think that’s because of the Intelimals?” someone asked.

We murmured responses. Later, we couldn’t remember what any of us had said for sure.

Another scream.

“What should we do?” Katie asked. She had her cell phone out. “Should I call the cops?”

We nodded, as we heard screams again — two this time, and heard them cut off abruptly. Katie put her phone away as she started walking toward where we’d heard the sounds, like it was a siren’s song.

“I’m going to go see what’s going on,” José said. He postured bravery, but we knew him well enough to know he was scared. He had the same look he’d had six months before when two men had started a fight at the bar. He pointed at one of the dishwashers — a guy in his late-twenties who’d worked for Jasper for longer than anyone but Katie, and one of us. “You and you, come with.”

We all followed. We weren’t sure we wanted to, but we definitely didn’t want to hear about it second-hand.

When we arrived, just outside the costume shop, we saw twin lines of fur in the road, that turned into twin lines of blood. Someone had a flashlight, and we could see the blood was fresh. We followed it from one street light to the next, saw how the fur almost sparkled in the light.

Four of us puked.

Cougar fur, we learned later.

We heard sobbing around the corner, and some of us went to investigate. We found the goats, their eyes swollen shut from OC. We’d seen the affects before, though never on animals. We wrapped our arms around their torsos. We spoke to them gently, tried to get them to tell us their names. We asked what’d happened. They rasped and wheezed and sobbed. We told them to keep crying.

We wondered what’d happened to the bear.

Later, when we talked about it, we couldn’t decide how long it took us to call the cops. We remembered almost deciding not to call the cops. We knew without being told that the bro-pod of cops had done it.

We found out later that we were right, that the cops had stood within inches of the goats and the cougars — the bear’d run off when the bro-pod approached, according to the goats – and OC’d them. Self-defense, the bro-pod countered. They’d been threatened, they said while wearing blue ties and smiles. What could you expect from animals, they implored the judge who heard the case. They said the bear running off was proof that they’d been threatened. They didn’t explain how this was proof.

They claimed the cougars, blinded by pepper spray, had stumbled into the street and been hit by a semi. No one questioned how a semi could’ve dragged their bodies 300 yards while driving 30 mph through town, or if this was true, how their bodies had been ripped from their heads in the process.

The goats’ defense lawyer – someone hired by Together1 – tried to gain access to the security footage from two cameras near where we found the goats. The lawyer learned that the cameras were dummies.

Convenient, we said to each other, when we learned this. People came into Jasper’s and pressed us for details.

“I hear you were there,” the customers would begin.

Or “My cousin/brother/aunt was here the same night as the animals. Is it true they talked?”

Or, “Did you really get called as a witness?”

We didn’t answer questions. We said we’d been ordered not to speak about it while the investigation was active. A lie.

We waited for people to forget, and for the winter rains to come and wash the blood from the street.

We flinched when any one of the bro-pod came in, even when they were off-duty, or when José came in and said that once again they’d stopped him on the street. We asked him not to walk home alone after work anymore, and offered him rides back to his place.

We spit in the bro-pod’s drinks, when we thought we could get away with it. We spoke about that night in low voices, and small groups, at bars after work. A couple of us, including the dishwasher José had tapped to go with him when we heard the screams, started drinking too much. Sometimes we came to work still a little tipsy from the night before.

Four people, including Tina, quit within the month. Just walked out. We hired new people, who, thanks to Katie’s screening, had somehow missed the news that the Intelimals had ever come into Jasper’s. Things started to feel more normal.

Those of us that were left wondered if there were more Intelimals, still at Together1. We thought we’d seen other animals around town – donkeys and kangaroos and sheep – before that night. But after the incident, Together1 declined to comment about any other animals, or about the goats. We wondered if the goats were still alive or if Together1 had terminated the experiment.

We wondered if the bear was still alive, if Together1 knew where he was, if we’d see him again.

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Liz N. Clift holds a MFA in Creative Writing & Environment from Iowa State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The MacGuffin, WomenArts Quarterly, The Tulane Review, and others. She lives in Oregon. Find her online at Fractals and Frost.

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Nicole Holovinsky describes herself as a full-time vegetarian, part-time vegan, photographer, ocean lover, avid reader, cook, baker, traveler, and moon chaser — “and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I love taking pictures of the world around me and sharing with everyone on my website and Facebook page.”