The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  I am the only human who lives on the grounds. I can almost see the whole park from my bedroom window. The Wildlands are a sanctuary for me as much as they are for my lions and dogs. We are the creatures who don’t belong anywhere else, the ones who have ended up outside the Classification of Wildness, neither one thing nor the other, without a place in the world. We are the true casualties of the Age of Humans.

  I am older now than Tucker ever got to be. I think about that nearly every day.

  Decades have passed since the summer I disappeared, but I was never quite the same after. I have been a vegan since childhood. I buy local produce, compost my trash, and dry my clothes in the sun. My arms and legs are mottled with scars, the bite of a lion etched into my forearm and the kick of a horse gouged through my thigh, healed and shiny and pink. (Other scars can be traced back to Tucker. The stroke of his knife blade still crisscrosses my palm.) I wear my hair in a boy’s cut, now embroidered with gray. I misplaced my vanity during that summer on the run. I have made my will and sent a copy to Darlene, my executor, with instructions that all my assets should be given to the Wildlands. My organs will be donated, my body returned to the earth without embalming, and a tree planted over my remains. In every way, I try to move through the world without damage, leaving behind no carbon footprint, casting no shadow, and creating no ripples, as light and immediate as an animal.

  This is Tucker’s fault, of course. I have become his legacy.

  In the afternoon, the heat picks up, burnishing the landscape of the Wildlands. The lions sprawl in slumbering heaps. One of the tigers takes a dip in her pond, drawing a crowd. Above my head, people jog along the walkways to take pictures of her swimming. I continue my work. I have been making bloodsicles for my predators and saving them in the big freezer for a sweltering day like this. Now I haul a few loads of frozen, basketball-sized chunks of blood and viscera back and forth on a dolly, distributing them among the bears and big cats. The grizzly is thrilled, rearing up on her hind legs so she can use her front paws to carry her treat into the shade. The lions spar with swats over who will get the first bite. The snow leopard dyes his paws and throat crimson, licking away in a daze.

  Tucker would have loved this. There are moments when I would give anything to talk to him again. I would tell him about the Wildlands. About the family he never really got to know. About Jane, now a soccer coach living in Oklahoma City. About Darlene and Roy and their children, different in size but identical in coloring, their skin like honey, their wishbone bodies lighter than air. I would tell my brother that I am still discovering what it is to be human. I would tell him that I learned about love not from him, but in spite of him. Without parents, my models of affection and adulthood were Tucker and Darlene. My mother gave her life for mine—the most dreadful and wonderful epitome of love. I don’t remember my father, but he taught Darlene how to love me, how to find me, and that tells me all I need to know. My brother, on the other hand, showed his devotion to me through an ardent kind of make-believe, the creation of a private universe. He adored me fiercely and remade me completely. During our summer together, I was his work of art, his brother, his changeling.

  I don’t know if he loved Cora. I don’t know if he ever knew Cora.

  I have told the story, written down everything that happened to us that summer, and in this way Tucker lives on in me. The strangest things remind me of him: the jingle of car keys, the smell of woodsmoke, the tang of root beer on my tongue. Many years ago, I took possession of Tucker’s ashes, removing the urn from Darlene’s mantel. He now rests on my kitchen windowsill, overlooking the lions’ paddock. We both made it to the Wildlands in the end.

  This is all true, you know. This really happened.

  Even now, so long after my brother’s death, there are times when I still find him in my dreams. I will feel the vibration of wheels on pavement. Oklahoma rolls out before me, the grass baked yellow from the heat, the sky as taut and dry as parchment. In that moment, I feel the freedom I felt on the road, something I have never experienced since—disconnected from all the bonds that circumscribe a life, unhooked from family and society, apart from morality and the possibility of consequence, beyond even the flow of entropy and time.

  Behind the steering wheel, Tucker guns the engine and laughs, a bark of unfettered joy.

  And just like that, we are gone.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Scott, the love of my life. Thanks to Milo, my someone and my sunshine. Thanks to my mother, who taught me to love words and live with passion. Thanks to my father, who taught me that science is beautiful, learning is lifelong, and that something else will always happen. Thanks to Patsy, who makes magic wherever she goes. Thanks to Joe, who shares part of my brain and who always texts me back. Thanks to Laura Langlie, the best agent in the universe, my champion and my friend. Thanks to my editor, Dan Smetanka, who knows everything. Thanks to Megan Fishmann—I was told before I met her that she walks on water, and it’s true. Thanks to all the splendid people at Catapult and Counterpoint Press. Thanks to my beloved Oklahoma family, who welcomed me into their remarkable homeland. Thanks especially to Christie, Brooke, and Andrea. Thanks to dear Bendix, the inimitable Rebecca Makkai, and Laurie, my guide. Thanks to my amazing, nearly centenarian grandfather. Thanks to Steve, who shares my poetic sensibilities, and Keven, who understands my feelings about dogs. Thanks to StoryStudio Chicago, my literary home away from home.

  ABBY GENI is the author of The Lightkeepers, winner of the 2016 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction and the inaugural Chicago Review of Books Awards for Best Fiction, as well as The Last Animal, an Indies Introduce Debut Authors selection and a finalist for the Orion Book Award. Geni is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the Iowa Fellowship.