Henry of Atlantic City by Frederick Reuss

Author:Frederick Reuss
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
Published: 2009-11-29T21:00:00+00:00

There were lots of places in the zoo to hide, and it was easy to fool the guards by following along behind a family and pretending he was the straggler. Then the zoo closed and Henry found a room with buckets and mops and stayed in it for a long time. When it got dark he left the closet and snuck around. Most of the animals were asleep but there were plenty awake too. Henry read all the plaques. In the zoo things were scary only when they didn’t have a name. As soon as they were named they weren’t scary anymore. That was the power of names. Even Myctophidae was less scary once you knew its name. Henry tried to imagine what the scientist thought who saw Myctophidae for the first time. He imagined it was as scary as anything that had ever happened since the beginning of the world before anything was named.

When it was morning Henry found a telephone in the office near Gorilla gorilla. He used it to call Sy’s sister at Mitzi.

“Oh my God! Henry, where are you? Are you all right?”

Henry said he was at the zoo.

“The zoo? What are you doing at the zoo?” Before Henry could answer she said, “Never mind. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Meet me at the front entrance. Do you know where that is?”

Henry said yes.

“The whole world is looking for you, Henry. Everyone is worried sick.”

Henry said promise you’ll come?

“I’m leaving this minute. Be at the front gate.”

Henry hung up the telephone and went to say goodbye to Gorilla gorilla. There was a whole family of them but one was in a cage all by herself. The man who fed her called her Big Nekkid. Henry felt sorry for her because she was all alone. He watched from a hiding place when the man went to feed her. “C’mon here, you Big Nekkid,” he said and left food for her. While Big Nekkid was eating in one part of the cage the man closed it off and cleaned up the mess in the other part. The plaque on the cage said, The relationship between gorillas and human beings, as measured biochemically, is so close that if they were members of any other group of organisms they would almost certainly be classified as members of the same genus despite their morphological differences.

Big Nekkid was lonely. Henry could tell by the way she chewed, slowly and as if she didn’t like the taste. After the man left Henry came out of his hiding place and opened up the door of the cage. Big Nekkid looked at Henry and picked some things off her leg. She was so surprised that she went and sat down at the other end of the cage and put some branches in her mouth as if to say that she needed a minute to think. Henry said there are two trees in Paradise. The one bears animals, the other bears men. Adam ate from the tree that bore animals.

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