Menagerie. Rachel Vincent

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       Delilah

      On the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday, I woke up to find that Brandon had left four glossy red tickets on my nightstand. They were made from nice card stock—definitely keepsake quality—covered in glittering, scrolling black script. My hand shook as I picked them up. I knew what they were before I even read the print.

      Admission For One

      To Metzger’s Menagerie

      The Largest Traveling Zoo

      In The Northern Hemisphere

      I left the tickets in the glove box during my shift at the bank, where I spent most of the day trying to tune out the excited chatter of my fellow tellers. About half of my coworkers also had tickets. The other half couldn’t afford to go.

      Nothing pays very well in small-town Oklahoma, and usually that’s okay, because there isn’t much to do in the land of red earth anyway, until you get up to the capital or out toward Tulsa. Hell, you can’t even get full-strength beer with your dinner unless you pay for an import.

      But the menagerie hadn’t been within driving distance of Franklin County in nearly fifteen years, and it might never come back. Everyone who could borrow money or call in a debt would be there to see the spectacle.

      Including me.

      Brandon had spent a fortune on the tickets, and it didn’t really matter that I would rather drive to the city and spend my birthday at the ballet, or a concert, or even a baseball game. As my mother had told me all my life, the true gift was in the intent, and my boyfriend had meant well.

      He always meant well.

      That evening, Brandon took my hand as we wandered down the fairground midway behind my best friend, Shelley Wells, and her boyfriend, Rick. Barkers cried out from both sides of the path, challenging us to pin the tail on the centaur, or knock down pop-up silhouettes of satyrs with a rubber-tipped archery set, or shoot the shell bras off mermaid figurines with water guns. Calliope music played at a volume only small children and the near-deaf could actually enjoy.

      The noise scattered my thoughts and scraped my nerves raw. We hadn’t even gotten to the menagerie section of the carnival yet and I was ready to go home.

      “Hey, Lilah, did you see they have a minotaur?” Shelley pointed to a twenties-style poster tacked up next to a spinning ride advertised as “guaranteed to make you hurl.”

      “They didn’t have him when we were kids.”

      I nodded, and she turned to walk backward, facing me while she shouted above the jostling, buzzing crowd. “You see a minotaur in school?”

      “No. They’re pretty rare.” We’d seen very few live cryptids in class, and minotaurs were among the least likely to ever be studied by undergrads. They bred slowly in captivity and gave birth to only one offspring at a time. Most experts believed they’d be extinct within a century—a tragedy few in the U.S. would recognize.

      “You shouldn’t have quit.” Shelley turned to face forward again, taking Rick’s arm, then called to me over her shoulder. “You would’ve been a great crypto-vet.”

      “I didn’t quit. I just didn’t go to grad school.” For a while, though, that had been the plan. I’d finished my crypto-biology degree and had already been accepted into two crypto-veterinary programs before I’d realized that the only jobs legally available in the U.S. for crypto-vets would have required me to lock up my patients. Even the ones with human faces.

      Those jobs were at places like Metzger’s Menagerie.

      Or worse: research labs, in which scientists tested everything from cosmetics to biological weapons on creatures protected by neither human law nor ASPCA regulations.

      Disillusioned by those prospects, I’d moved back home to Franklin, where the median income was less than two-thirds that of the national average and my best guess on the median vocabulary looked even less promising.

      A jewel glittering among small-town clods of red clay, Brandon was a newly minted pharmacist with a future in the family business. He read books and spoke in complete sentences. We’d been together since the month I’d come home from college, and—poor gift-giving skills aside—he was a very nice guy. And he truly loved me.

      The only part of me that had been relieved to find such a morally ambiguous birthday present on my nightstand was the part that had half expected an engagement ring.

      I wanted to be more than a small-town bank teller married to a small-town pharmacist. But I had no idea what “more” might look like, and the certainty that I’d know it when I saw it had faded with each day spent in Franklin. All I ever saw was Brandon, and all he seemed to want to see was me.

      And a traveling zoo full of bizarre beasts.

      The actual menagerie was behind a second gate at the end of the sawdust-strewn midway, a design no doubt intended to pull people past countless opportunities to spend money on their way to the main attraction—the only part of the carnival not offered on a yearly basis by the county fair.

      Brandon and I caught up with Shelley and Rick at the menagerie gate, where another line had formed. I recognized several of the people in the crowd as account holders from the bank, but without my name tag—Hello, My Name is Delilah. Can I Interest You in a No-Fee Savings Plan?—they didn’t seem to recognize me. The family in front of us had three small children, each clamoring to touch the shifter kittens and phoenix chicks in the petting zoo. At the gate, the parents were reminded that certain areas of the exhibit, namely the succubus tent, would be off-limits to anyone under eighteen.

      Rick snickered like an overgrown twelve-year-old and Shelley elbowed him. I thanked the universe for my mature, stable, predictable boyfriend, then realized that I’d just found three different ways to call Brandon boring.

      When we got to the front of the line, an elderly man in a red sequined vest and a black top hat took one look at Shelley, then bowed low and pulled a bouquet of real daisies from his sleeve. He presented them to her with a flourish from one knee, heedless of his cracking joints.

      Delighted, Shelley returned his bow with a curtsy, spreading the hem of an imaginary skirt, and even I couldn’t resist a smile. Then she and Rick helped the poor old man to his feet.