The Zoo

I drink my coffee from my new white mug. On the mug are pictures of a lion and a giraffe. The lion is on one side and the giraffe on the other. When the lion is playful it chases the giraffe round the mug. The giraffe lollops along, its neck swaying backwards and forwards; the lion bounds behind, huffing and puffing and growling, but it never catches the giraffe. They are always on opposite sides of the mug.

I used to have a mug with a picture of the queen. In a bright red military uniform she sat sidesaddle on a horse and looked straight ahead. I suppose she’d be about 30 or 35. My husband broke the mug.

I asked him—Why did you break the mug?

—I dropped it. It was an accident.

—There are no accidents, I said.

That’s why I divorced him. Friends said you can’t divorce someone just because they broke a mug. I said—It had a picture of the queen on it. Breaking it might be treason. I don’t want to be around when the secret police come to arrest him and put him in the Tower.

I’d read about the Tower. Awful place. They found bones under a flag-stone; the bones of two princes who had been murdered and buried there. Why would anyone bury princes under the floor. If I was going to murder princes I’d bury them in the garden and plant a tree to say sorry I killed you. But it’s probably better not to murder people, whether they are princes or not. The Tower is not a place I would want to be locked up in.

I look out of the window. Rain. I put on my coat, leave the house and drive to work. My hair is wet, and as I drive rainwater trickles down my neck because I couldn’t find my umbrella and when I left the house I had to run through the rain to get to my car because it was parked down the road because another car had parked outside my house. The windscreen wipers squeak.

Giraffes have long necks so they can eat the top leaves of the tree. But how did they know the top leaves were the nicest before they had long necks? I suppose when the tree was small the giraffes ate the top leaves and thought, mmm yummy, and as the trees grew the giraffes grew with them. The number of bones in a giraffe’s neck didn’t increase, they just grew longer. If giraffes had more neck bones their necks would be more flexible. But I suppose that might be awkward if an angry gorilla came along and said, What are you looking at? and tied the giraffe’s neck in a knot so the giraffe couldn’t swallow and had to have all her food put through a liquidizer first.

At work I pull a lever and chocolate pours out of a pipe into a vat. Dials on the vat tell me what temperature the chocolate needs to be before I release it into the conveyor belt below. This week it’s Easter eggs.

Apart from Easter eggs we make chocolate bunnies, kitties, parrots, and giraffes. They will stop making giraffes next month; the legs always break.

Lions can eat anything. They cut open a lion once and found a canoe with three skeletons and an outboard motor. When they tried the outboard motor it still worked.

Lunchtime I sit in the canteen and watch my ex-boyfriend laugh at his girlfriend’s jokes. I loved him once but he preferred someone else.

Driving home I look for somewhere to park because I want to buy Cottons. Cars are everywhere. America has more cars than people. In Germany ghost cars drive fast through city streets at three o’clock in the morning. Police chase them but they disappear into air. The first car was the Benz Motorwagen. It traveled at 9 mph. A giraffe can run faster than that. If God had been human he would have given...