Underwater New York

This Is What Happens When You Stick Your Neck Out by Rebecca Resnick

The giraffe is staring at him. All Johnson wants is a little peace and quiet, and this is the only tent where there isn’t an elephant raising hell, where he can escape the rank smell of horse shit and the constant screaming of children in juvenile amazement. Johnson doesn’t care if it is the circus – he had to find somewhere to take a break. And the blue tent of the giraffe enclosure is like walking into church when he was five, wrapped in utter silence as if God himself came and duct-taped Johnson’s two lips together. It is where he comes to think. But now the giraffe is fucking staring at him.

Johnson stands and walks over to the animal, roughly pushing his sleeves up as if walking into a fight. But the cuffs of these godforsaken coveralls are so tightly elasticized that the rough beige material rides up only to mid-forearm before abruptly cutting off his circulation. He yanks them back into place and looks up over the wire fencing and into the face of the giraffe, who towers almost five feet over his head. Johnson’s not a tall guy, damn his father’s genes. The giraffe blinks its big brown eyes and seems to frown in disapproval.

“Not you, too,” Johnson says to the silent animal, then swiftly turns and plunks onto a wooden crate, the motion kicking up tufts of hay. He was not expecting this. He joined the circus to get away.

Outside the tent Johnson can hear the Jack in the Box music, a sign the show’s about to start. He pictures parents ushering their sticky pink children into the bigtop, the clowns already in the ring honking their horns and doing aerial flips, caked on make-up cracking with every elastic face they pull. Johnson’s got an hour left to make a decision. He digs the toe of a crusty sneaker into the earth. The enclosure has been erected on a summertime athletic field, and the dry dirt is turning his shoes diarrhea-orange. Sandwiched between Manhattan and Queens, the circus set up shop on one of those piles of land New Yorkers call an “island” but is really just a swath of concrete slabs turned into a space to build condos and ballfields and make more money. Johnson doesn’t understand why  this hell-hole is called the greatest city in the world – it smells like trash. And it’s cramped. Johnson’s already spent enough time in cramped places. He needs space now. He needs freedom. Here, people move around on top of one another, in each others armpits, connected to one another without somehow ever really connecting. Smallest big city in the world. He shouldn’t be surprised that he ran into her.

› Continue reading

Share on Facebook

Tags: Giraffe, Lower New York Bay, Rebecca Resnick