DEAR TAMMY,

I’m sorry that I had to miss our coffee date catch-up. I hope we can reschedule when I’m out of this cast. I think they’ll move me into a boot soon and I should be a bit more mobile. But yes, to answer your question: how did I break my leg? Well, lemme tell you.

Truthfully, it all started last weekend when I went to visit my grandmother. It was a fine visit, I know I’m lucky at almost thirty to have a living grandparent. Still, when I left, I felt out of sorts. I think I had a hard time being around so much age. My grandma is old, obviously. Her dog is old. The house is very old. She releases these enormous sighs into the atmosphere with no explanation. I know I should probably ask why she is sighing with the weight of a hundred disappointments but I just can’t bring myself to do it because I’m afraid of the answer. I don’t want to know if I am one of her disappointments. I am low on possibilities these days and I know this makes her sad. Sad is the warm-up to disappointment for grandmas. When I don't ask about the sighs, they just hang there. There are sighs suspended all over the house like cobwebs. They stick to me. It all stuck to me, the sighs, the guilt of not asking about them, the aging of everything, the possibility that I might be the problem. I tried to pluck the sighs out of my hair and off my clothes. I ended up feeling dusty with a hollow feeling in my chest.

The next day, I knew I needed to up my mood, so I went to the zoo. Tammy, you know I love fake environments. Give me a dining room sized diorama filled with two extinct tigers about to pounce on an unusually large rabbit any day. The zoo has acres of fake environments. I love it. I go to the zoo as often as possible. I even have a membership. The people at member services assume I’m an animal lover. I mean, animals are ok but it’s their living spaces I crave. I love the pathways leading up to the animals in their different habitats, the temperate forests and tropical rainforests with big plants and well-placed rocks.

I got to the zoo just before it closed. I didn’t need much time, just enough to roam the wilds of a far-off land. I ended up in the African Savanna. I felt a little brighter as I walked by the lions resting under their cute fake cliffs. It makes them seem a little bit less ferocious, like a pit bull in a doggy raincoat. The path between the lions and the giraffes has tall thin trees on either side that bend inward. This is where the world becomes a green tunnel. This is where I feel more content. I got to the giraffes just as their keeper led one across the path to her enclosure. What a thing to watch this diorama come to life! Around me the landscape was groomed to look like the Serengeti but in front of me was a real live giraffe. I know that seems weird because all the animals are real in the zoo, in their real fake environments, but this giraffe was standing on the same path as me. Right there! And then the giraffe stopped in the middle of the pathway. She turned her head and looked straight at me with her oddly sultry eyes. The keeper made some kind of tongue-to-roof-of-mouth noise and the giraffe continued on her way. When she was just inside the gate, she turned again. She held my gaze and then did one slow blink. Did she communicate this way with all humans, or did she want to say something to me, the person covered in cobweb scraps? I needed to find out, so I followed her into the enclosure. I say it now like it was no big deal, but I understood the deal. I understood the big-ness of it.

As I crouched down outside of her barn, behind a grassy plant, I realized I had no expectations of what it would be like inside one of my beloved fake environments. My jam was to be outside, to get that warm feeling in my chest as a watcher, as an imaginer. But there I was. I hid, I waited, and I watched the zookeeper just leave. She left! She left the enclosure. Who did she leave inside? Me! Me and a giraffe. Tammy, is that the craziest thing you've ever heard? 

I waited behind the plant, sitting on the ground with my head up against the tree behind me. It smelled so good. You know how there are some smells that aren’t supposed to smell good but they do? Like gasoline or beer? The smell was like that. I mean not like gasoline or beer specifically but something that should be gross but wasn’t. I’m trying to conjure it right now but I can’t quite get it. Anyway, I sat there for quite a while, like an hour. I could see the giraffe’s head over the top of the closed barn door, meandering around her space. I held my breath when she looked in my direction. I don’t know why, it’s not like she would alert the zookeeper or anything.

When it seemed everyone had gone home, I opened the big barn door and wandered inside. Let me tell you, I was not prepared for this legs and neck yoga that was happening in front of me. The giraffe sat on the hay strewn ground. One leg stuck out at ninety degrees, one went the other way, two were tucked under, and she’d wrapped her neck over the top of her body, with her head resting near her behind. How does one approach a resting giraffe? I decided to move in slowly and stand near her eyeball, which meant I stood near her backside. I said, “Hello,” and gave a little wave.  She opened one eye and looked at me. Truthfully, it felt like she looked into me, like into my soul or something.

Then she started to move. As she unfurled, she gently nudged me with her head. I really thought that she was telling me to get on her back. I felt, at that moment, as the setting sun filtered into her barn and made the patterns on her back shine in orangey brown, that I had no choice. So, I climbed on her back. And she stood up. And I freaked out. Holy moly, I was very high off the ground. I held onto the skin on either side of her neck bone and squeezed my knees into her sides. She slowly left her barn and I was able to pull open the gate to the path. I rode that giraffe through the fake African Savanna. We meandered into Explore China, past the pandas, who were inside their enclosures surrounded by bamboo. We stopped so the giraffe could nibble on leaves. This is when, though I was terrified of my distance from the ground, I realized that I felt completely back in my sorts. Any bit of hopelessness had evaporated. I literally had a brand-new point of view. I could see beyond the fake horizons of Australasia and into my future. I didn’t see, like, my “future” with jazz hands, but like, that there was a future there. I could see possibilities. Who could ever imagine having a view like this? I do believe it was the greatest joy of my life, looking at the world from up there.

I leaned back a bit to see even farther out just as the giraffe sneezed. She made quite a noise and it startled me. Floomp. Down I went. I landed on the hard path and heard my tibia snap when I landed. It still makes me shudder and I apologize if this has made you shudder as well. The giraffe turned her head towards me. Now, I cannot claim to be any sort of expert on giraffe facial expression, but I swear what I saw in her face was, “I’m sorry you fell but I can’t help you. I’m just a giraffe, plus, I’m not sure how you work with your two legs and your surprisingly small heart. My heart is huge. I love you. Goodbye.”  She gave me one last deep look then headed back toward her barn. 

A security guard found me. Apparently, he’d gotten to work late and feared for his job. I learned a great deal about this man in the short time we spent together. I imagine that, in general, he is quite a talker and my broken boned existence in a place he was meant to keep clear of the likes of me seemed to ramp up his ramble. I won’t bore you with the details, though I did find his non-stop words soothed me at that moment, but he let me know that he would help me out because it would help him keep his job. He got me into a large wheelbarrow and pushed me to the exit. We passed the giraffe who had made it back into her barn. The security guard went in and closed up her doors while I waited. Once outside the zoo, he helped me onto the sidewalk. I called my cousin, Myra, to pick me up and take me to the hospital.

Now, I work from home with this itchy cast on my leg. I can feel my bone as it knits itself together. It hurts in a way that I feel in my teeth. But I’m so happy. I’m so happy I rode a giraffe and my head passed through the green, green trees and almost touched the sky.

Your friend,

Tanya

Juliet Waller  is a playwright, short story author, and playwriting & theater teacher. Her pieces have appeared in, among others, The Kenyon Review (as a co-author), Gold Man Review, Muleskinner, 3Elements, and Third Street Review. Her work often focuses on small to medium disasters and strangers meeting in unusual circumstances.