Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories

FAME

You’ve seen the viral video of the zoo lion, in its enclosure, trying to eat a toddler girl through the observation glass, right?

I was there, at the zoo, and watched it live.

Three million people think it’s the cutest thing ever. And the toddler’s mother, as she filmed the scene, laughed and laughed.

I didn’t think it was funny. I kept thinking, Shit, that lion wants to eat that kid’s face. But, yeah, yeah, laugh at the lion. Laugh at the apex predator trapped behind glass.

I was only at the zoo because I was trying to impress a woman who made balloon animals. She worked part-time near the primate enclosure, but I met her when she worked my niece’s birthday party at the local community center.

Her giraffes were great; her elephants were passable; her tarantulas looked like tarantulas so nobody wanted them.

She made fifty bucks for each party she worked. The zoo paid her minimum wage plus commission. But who comes to the zoo for balloon animals? If you’re going to buy something for a kid at the zoo, then you’re going to get a stuffed animal.

So she was a beautiful woman with an eccentric skill that was financially unsustainable.

I liked her well enough to think about being in love with her. We’d been on two dates.

Later that afternoon, over coffee, halfway through our third date, she told me I had a great face but weighed thirty pounds too much.

Get skinny, she said, like we could wear each other’s jeans, and then maybe I’ll have sex with you.

I knew I’d never be thin enough. So we dumped our coffees and I walked her home. We didn’t talk. What needed to be said? I probably should have let her walk home alone, but I faintly hoped she’d change her mind about me.

It was a security building, and she didn’t revise her opinion of me, so I said goodbye on the sidewalk.

She apologized for rejecting me.

I said, Apologies offered and accepted are what make us human.

She laughed and walked into her building. Through the lobby window, I watched her step into her elevator and disappear behind the closing doors.

I knew she was rising away from me.

I wasn’t angry. I was lonely. I was bored. And I half-remembered a time when I’d been feared.

Nostalgic, I pressed my mouth against the glass and chewed.

If somebody had filmed me and posted it online then I would have become that guy with the teeth. I would have become a star.