Sunday Morning Giraffe
A Lombard Alchemist Tale
by J. Daniel Sawyer
AWP Fantasy
A division of ArtisticWhispers Productions
Copyright © 2012 J. Daniel Sawyer
All Rights Reserved
Book Design by ArtisticWhispers
Digital painting “Sunday Morning Giraffe” © 2012 J. Daniel Sawyer
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.
This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.
Sunday Morning Giraffe
A Lombard Alchemist Tale
by J. Daniel Sawyer
It was 3AM on a Sunday, in December, and Aldo wanted a giraffe. If Aldo had lived in Kenya, this wouldn't have been a problem. A broken-down gambling boomtown on the edge of nowhere in the high desert of Nevada, though, was less conducive to browsers.
But if Aldo didn't get a giraffe, he wouldn't sleep. And it couldn't be a toy giraffe either—it had to be a proper, three-stories tall African savanna cow with an ultra long neck and brown spots. It might be enough to get him in close proximity with a giraffe, convince him that it was his, but housed at the zoo for safe-keeping. Too bad the zoo was closed for the winter.
If Aldo didn't get his giraffe, nobody else in the house would get any sleep either, and they knew it. He'd scream, and cry, and wander the house all night in his slipper-foot PJs picking up knick-nacks and shaking them, as if he could evoke their inner giraffe-ness. That's what he'd done before when he wanted a submarine, and the time before that when he wanted a dinosaur.
His parents, Bob and Judy, weren't given to indulging him. When his strange requests started—it was water balloons at Thanksgiving—they told him not to be silly. They were proof against his preschool manipulation techniques. His mother, particularly, was 85 proof gin against his manipulation techniques, while his father's resolve was borne of a successful military career, from which he retired with a full pension. They'd become parents late in life, after raising an orphaned niece and nephew had hardened them against childish desires. If the boy was unreasonable he deserved to meet with frustration. Water balloons at the Thanksgiving dinner table were absolutely unreasonable.
They'd put their foot down. There would be no water balloons.
Bob's boss was over for dinner that day, and he'd worn a very formal, and very old, serge suit. A suit so old that it wasn't fireproof. When passing the mashed potatoes, he'd lingered too long over the silver candelabra that Judy had set out as a centerpiece. The poor man went up like a torch. By the time they put him out, he had burns over his whole left side and had to be rushed to the hospital, but that was nothing to the steel-eyed anger in five-year-old Aldo's eyes when the paramedics left.
"What's wrong, Aldo?" Judy had asked.
"I said I wanted water balloons. You wouldn't listen. You never listen." Then he stormed out, and they didn't see him again for several hours. After the afternoon's excitement, they didn't bother to follow him—they had other kinds of fretting to do.
It wasn't until the incident with the submarine that they learned to indulge him when they could. He'd come in to his father's study one Saturday night, insisting that he wanted a submarine. The next day, terrorists bombed the reservoir dam.
At that point, they got the idea: when Aldo wanted something totally inappropriate, they'd better listen. They didn't know how he knew—they were very sure that he was too young to understand.
So, at three in the morning on a Sunday, when Aldo woke up his parents clutching his teddy bear, pulling at its ears, and demanding a giraffe in that half-absent way, Bob rolled out of bed and tried to find his pants without mooning his son. They drove immediately to the zoo, even though it was closed. On the road, Bob tried to pry details out of the boy, but all Aldo would say was "It is the will of Almighty Flarn."
Flarn. The rodent deity on the boy's favorite cartoon, some claptrap with talking barn animals. Bob gave up his probing.
The overcast which hung low in the winter lit the night red with reflected light from the city's preferred industry. The zoo's entrance, out on the north edge of town, was overgrown with long-dead ivy. The wan sodium streetlights did it no favors, splattering it with light the color of bile, making skeleton-finger shadows grow from the tangle on the ancient brick walls and wrought-iron gates.
Wrought-iron, chained against entry. Bob coaxed Aldo up onto his back and hiked around the side, looking for some kind of service entrance. Maybe they wouldn't be worried about security this time of year—the only thing on this end of town in the winter were the snow plows, and the wolves.
Around the back they found a loading dock, and a garbage truck, and a custodian doing his late-night rounds with earphones on. Not hard to sneak past for a former infantry officer. Inside, Bob took his son to the tallest of the big barns in which, judging by the smell, the animals sheltered for the winter.
And in the tallest, there were three giraffes—two adults, tall as trees, and a juvenile. Bob let Aldo down and pranced up to the tall chain-link fence that cordoned off the entryway from the pen. "There you go, Aldo," Bob said, "three giraffes."
Aldo held the fence like a spider monkey. He didn't respond to his father's voice, but after a moment his hands came off the fence and folded over his chest. He turned around, stamping the ground with great purpose.
“I said I want a giraffe.”
“Aldo, those are giraffes.”
“I want a real giraffe!”
“Those are real giraffes.” And so it went, round and round, until Bob gave up and took Aldo around to all the other barns that weren't locked. Maybe Aldo meant an elephant? A hippo? A parrot?
No such luck. He meant a giraffe, alright. But he seemed to think that real giraffes were smaller, and nothing Bob could say would make a difference. “Real” meant whatever Aldo said it meant, and Bob was already frightened enough of the boy that his pride kept well out of the way.
And so an early morning excursion in the name of getting the kid to shut up and go back to bed turned into an all day journey. First, they got caught by the custodian and kicked out of the zoo. Then, they visited animal shelters. Then, they visited pet shops. Nothing remotely fitting Aldo's personal definition of “giraffe” came to hand.
Parents were stupid. Pretty much all adults were stupid, but parents especially. Okay, sure, they could read thicker books than he could, but only because they made him turn his lights off at nine o'clock and he sometimes lost the bookmark and had to start over. They didn't listen to him, either, no matter how clear he made himself, because they thought he was stupid.
At least they were listening a little bit now. Good thing, because according to the word of Almighty Flarn, without a giraffe everything would be ruined. It had to be a particular kind of giraffe, too. Aldo knew that for sure. It couldn't be an imaginary giraffe or a stuffed giraffe, it had to be as real as Legos. But it couldn't be one of those mooking big ones, the ones from the zoo as tall as a building. How did his father think he'd fit that in his room?
He could see it in his head, but finding words that his stupid parents would understand was driving him bonkers, even though his dad got him ice cream for lunch. If he saw the inside of one more pet store or toy store he was going to throw a fit, just to teach the old man to listen. Or maybe he'd just shut up and say he didn't want it anymore, and let them find out what happened when they didn't listen. That would teach them but good.
They were starting to get into parts of town where Bob wasn't comfortable bringing a child. Truth to tell, he wouldn't want to be here on his own, either. Not at his age. He sold life insurance and knew the kind of surcharge they slapped on people who lived south of 50th street. But short of going to the circus in the casino, the place down here was the last place to look.
It was a pawn shop on the edge of the old suburbs, where nobody lived since they did the bomb tests out in the desert when Bob was a boy. Radiation. Only the moron who owned the shop was crazy enough to stay out here.
Bob hadn't heard of the place until the last two pet shops on 45th. The sales girls at both places had told him about it after Aldo started pitching fits. They seemed to take pity—either on the boy, or on him. They both mentioned the pawn shop, saying “If it exists, that guy will have it. He's creepy, though.” Or words to that effect.
If they hadn't said, that, Bob would have gotten the idea the moment he walked through the door and found himself face-to-face with a stuffed, ravening wolverine. He jumped, which made little Aldo roll his eyes and growl. He and Judy were going to have to do something about that boy—these premonitions of his had given him entirely too high an idea of himself. Any self-respecting parent would have given the brat a thorough thrashing. Bob hadn't, and he kicked himself every day for it.
Aldo, meanwhile, had had enough of Bob standing around looking at the wolverine, and scurried past.
“Aldo!” Goddamn kid wouldn't listen. He just ran on in.