You stare at the tiny enclosure.
“It’s a zoo.” You pick at your arm. “You want me to live in a zoo.”
“It’s a new home. You’ll love it.” Your mother squeezes your hand, so tight you think her thin, bony fingers could do battle with the boa constrictor you saw in the previous exhibit. It hung from the skeletal, white branch of a concrete tree, coiled around the trunk, and stared at the glass you stood on the other side of with a malevolence that convinced you it hated the unkempt mossy walls that loomed over its confinement.
“This is jail.” You turn your back to the muddy ponds and automated vegetable feeder.
“This is your future.”
“I didn’t choose this!” you shout. People turn toward your anger, but they shouldn’t be surprised. I’m not the only child struggling to incorporate all this.
“It’s for the best, it’s the only solution we’ve been able to come up with.”
A thousand children would move here tonight. The wailing would be worse then, you think. They’d straggle in with their binkies, blankets, and memories from their homes.
The younger ones wouldn’t understand. Their parents would lock them away into the enclosures with the robotic feeders, the turtle huts, and the scummy ponds.
Will you be munching contentedly on a ball of lettuce tomorrow morning while sunning yourself on a fake rock?
Mom has invested everything she has in getting you a spot in the post-change residencies.
You remember once, a few years ago, when mom got a job at a new firm, the sort of thing that meant she had to wear suits and put that serious look on her face before she got in the fancy shiny new car that looked like the bubbly red car in the talking cars movie. You’d had to pack up everything, leave your room, and leave your friends. You’d moved into a grey, monotone house with sharp edges and stone facades and a gardener who came by once week to trim the bushes.
No friends next door, just older people who spent all day mowing their lawns or cleaning old cars that once ran on gas.
You hate moving.
Even to a zoo.
It should have been pretty cool. Your uncle tried to play up the benefits. “You might see some tigers!”
“There aren’t any tigers in the enclosures,” mom had hissed at him.
Nothing that could eat you, she reassured later.
There was nothing fun in the zoo. Just lines of children looking into the glass-enclosed safety zones that would become your future home.
“Turtles can live a very long time,” a case worker told the two of you a few months after the great panics happened. “The enclosures have a triple redundancy backup food system. The pellets are a one hundred year supply.”
No game consoles in a zoo.
“What am I going to do for a hundred years in there?” You’re mad. You’re not even a book reader, but a collection of stories, maybe even a novel, could make the time pass better.
You stare at the small, turtle-sized play equipment.
“I don’t want to be a turtle,” you tell your mother. You hold your hands up in the air. They look human. Plain, slightly browner than normal after a summer running wild on the beach. You wriggle your fingers. “It’s a special vacation,” mom had said.
But it had sucked. No one at the restaurants. No one at the stores. It looked like a zombie movie had passed through. Eerie, empty facades where tourists and window shoppers had strolled past, eyeing shirts that said things like “LIFE IS BETTER AT THE BEACH” and “LIFE’S A BEACH.”
Even a kid knew everything had gone wrong.
Now we were going to move again.
It was profoundly unfair.
Even mom thought so. You could hear her when she cried in the bathroom. Deep, deep sobs that sounded like they broke her.
You don’t know how to fix her.
So you do the best you can. You stare at the zoo enclosure and imagine yourself as a turtle, plunking about the small fishbowl world your mom put everything she had into buying a spot for you in.
You put a hand on the thick, bullet-proof glass and stare at your warped reflection.
Human.
They could all be wrong, those scientists who spoke about the coming Change in almost hushed, worried tones. But they always did that. Global warming, pollution, pandemics. They’d come on and soberly warn, and people would rage against them.
“My mom said they’re idiots. Leftist panic mongering idiots.”
But you’d also seen reports on the burning forests, glaciers sliding into the ocean in ponderous slow motion, and people dying in the streets of bacterial strains impossible to stop with modern medicine.
Seems like they were usually right.
So, this thing that has been rushing toward you, this inevitable change, you think it probably is coming. Like puberty, but sooner.
At night you strain your arms trying to reach your back and touch it to see if there’s a shell yet.
“Not until The Date,” the doctor says. Before he shut down the office and left for Mexico with that one really nice secretary who always gave you the purple lollipops.
***
At home, after the tour, you get to pick three favorite things to take with you at midnight.
How can you reduce what you’ll have for the rest of your life to just three things?
“Will I even recognize them? I’ll be a turtle. Nothing will be the same.”
That sent mom into another crying jag, and she started drinking from the wine bottle, not even bothering to pour it. “I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “I don’t know.”
The adults always seemed like they knew all the answers. But it’s becoming clear they don’t know much at all, really. They have no idea *why* we’re all going to turn into turtles tomorrow.
Change is harder for them, in some ways, you’ve come to learn.
You have even more important things to you packed away in your backpack, even though it’s been a year since you’ve been in class. What’s the point of school if you’re going to be a turtle?
What’s the point of anything, really?
But mom says ‘on-wee’ isn’t useful in our situation, and every time she finds me hiding under my bed crying.
Tonight she’s the one fully on wee, drinking cup after cup of strong-smelling wine, the deep red stuff that leaves her grimacing and blinking in the morning when you it takes you two to three times to wake her up.
By the time she’s fallen over on the couch and snoring, you’ve found your backpack again. Under all the winter gear (you think about never seeing the snow again, or at least, never understanding what it is, or what the weather cycle is, because you’ll be a turtle) you find the backpack and dump it out.
All that stuff that you used to think was so important.
Or at least, you were told was important. You always suspected getting an A didn’t matter. It really was just an ink mark on a piece of cheap paper.
You fill it with things you think turtle you might like:
-One jar of peanut butter, opened (turtle claws are useless on Jif)
-Three apples
-A bag of spring mix salad dumped in
-Your three favorite toy cars
-A single roller skate (you’ve seen a video of a turtle pushing itself along in one happily, like a turtle Tony Hawk. Turtle Hawk.
-Three issues of the latest Cereal Apocalypse comic, including the limited edition in the protective ziplock. Your most prized position.
-A gift card your dad gave you before he left for California because life was too short and he wasn’t going to spend his last months as a human with you or your mom.
***
Once, you watched a show about people who got trapped in the wilderness. The survivors all had to learn how to come to terms with what was happening to them. The show said that younger kids often survived in the wild longer than older children and adults because they focused on making themselves comfortable with what they had.
Adaptability.
Find a place with clean water, and make an enclosure that’s nice and warm. Find some berries.
Dad used to take you fishing down at Multmont. There’s a stream that runs through the backyard of Mr. Bischoff’s cabin property in the Multmont Woods that you enjoy. You think back to the soft sunlight scattered through the gaps in rustling leaves often, and the whirr of the line when you cast.
A peaceful place, with the old remains of an apple grove nearby, freshwater, and comforting memories.
You lace up a pair of dad’s old boots as tight as you can. He can’t yell at you taking them anymore, he’ll be a turtle sometime tomorrow.
That thought leads to you sneaking into your parent’s bathroom and dabbing a bit of dad’s cologne on your neck.
Now you smell of whiskey and cedar. Backwoods sap and crushed leaves.
“Not for little ones like you,” dad always said.
Now it is. You’ll be an amazing-smelling turtle tomorrow.
“Where are you doing?” Mom asks from the door. She leans against the doorjamb, eyes closed.
You don’t have to answer that.
She’s going to be a turtle tomorrow.
You run.
***
When you were a little kid, I’m talking really little, just a bit past toddling, you did something stupid. You don’t remember what it was. You remember mom looking down at you and shaking her index finger.
“Don’t do that again.”
You met her eyes, you firmed your spine up, and you did it again.
Then you took off running.
Back then, you thought you had a solid head start. You thought you’d figured out all the angles, and had an escape. All you had to do was run. Run as fast as you could, the air deep in your lungs, panting, the world tilting this way and that as you put every bit of your soul into a sprint.
But when you turned around and looked back, your mom was right there, looming over you, face furious.
You realized, dimly, that you’d miscalculated.
Horribly.
You have that same feeling in the pit of your stomach now as you sprint. Your backpack hops around, slapping the back of your neck, digging into your lower back, back and forth. You should have tightened the straps.
“Why are you doing this?”
Mom is distraught, and mad, but also uncoordinated. She stumbles and falls down the deck stairs as you hit bushes and disappear (you hope) into them.
Leaves slap and tear your face. Twigs snap.
Your mom crushes through the bushes after you, but you find the path out toward the trail. It’s almost midnight, and you have a five minute run ahead of you. Dad left you tying your shoes on the deck once, you’ve made the run before to catch back up.
But it’s dark. And hard to see. Your eyes haven’t adjusted fully. You bite the ground a few times, hard.
You don’t cry. You grimace and bear it.
“Please don’t leave me alone,” Mom cries out to you. “Please.”
She would have driven you drunk to the zoo. Kissed your shell, and put you in a glass room for the rest of your life. The adults changed later; bigger bodies, older DNA or something. She would have been hung over, and sad, and overly weepy.
Even as a turtle, you know it would have been embarrassing.
And she never listened, did she? Never heard you when you talked about the spot in the river you and dad fished at.
Never.
She never truly listened when you screamed you didn’t want to live in a zoo for the rest of your life.
But they had to let go.
It wouldn’t be when you left for college, or got married. It wouldn’t be because you had some horrible cancer and passed, like Jamie across the street.
It’s now.
You can feel the pit of your stomach twist. Something’s happening. Something big. There are alien feelings growing inside of you, things you’ve never noticed.
There are edible leaves, large and succulent, low to the ground. There’s a smell in the air. It’s sweet water.
Sweet like Jolly Ranchers.
You splash into the water. You hear your mom, shouting for you. Getting closer as your bag floats off down the river. You lost it somehow when you fell into the river. It came right off your back, the straps far too large for you.
The black, strange mass of it grows larger, and larger, and turns the corner around a stone boulder and disappears.
You find a place under massive roots to crawl into.
It’s okay, you want to tell your mother as she stands by the bank of the river, crying. You’ll have everything you need to have a happy, satisfied life.
Far from the glass windows and sad eyes of the adults, you retreat into your shell and watch the world go by.