prompt

Can I even begin to say how awesome it is that Elizabeth is doing this? Take chances, get messy, make mistakes...

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Behind her the noise escalated.

Turning around didn't seem like a particularly appealing option, really, not when she knew the simian house hadn't been cleaned yet today. The second the capuchins saw you (as they'd seen her a minute ago), they started kicking up an incredible racket, like a bunch of tiny lunatics in a 19th-century mental institution. They would swing menacingly from the roof, smacking each other with those weirdly human hands and opening their weirdly human mouths. Sometimes they'd even fling things from their cage at you -- toys, food, their own shit. Needless to say, the whole cleaning crew at the zoo left the simian house until the end of the day, hoping that some emergency would come up (a barfing kid that needed the clean-up mop in front of the giraffes, an agitated panda that had topped over its bamboo stand, anything) and make it impossible for them to go back to the goddamn monkeys, leaving it for the next shift.

Instead, blissfully, Gloria walked toward the sea otter enclosure.

It was a new part of the zoo, built recently on the heels of some craze involving a children's book that told the story of a sea lion needing glasses and having to make a visit to the optometrist. Sea otters and sea lions weren't the same, of course, but sea otters had been a lot easier for the zoo to acquire and none of the visitors seemed to differentiate, particularly. Gloria slipped into the door of the back of the enclosure and pulled the special mop from the small supply closet, went into the humid main part of the enclosure, and began to work in the corner farthest from the glass pane separating her from the crowd. The people were dim and foggy behind the glass; the sea lions swam back and forth in their shallow pool, presumably. Gloria didn't take much notice.

Behind her, someone knocked on the door and she stood the mop against the wall. It wasn't unusual for another zoo employee to come in at the same time, either to share the cleaning or feed the animals. She hoped it was her supervisor, Big Joe, who sometimes brought her an elephant-shaped ice cream from the gift shop.

But it wasn't Big Joe. Instead, a little boy, probably about six, stared up at her mutely. He was unaccompanied by a parent or guardian -- against the zoo rules, of course -- and he looked scared.

Gloria, who didn't have kids yet and didn't know how to talked to them, just looked at him for a minute. She knelt down.

"Hi," she said. "Are you lost?"

The boy shook his head.

"Well, I bet you're not supposed to be here by yourself, right?"

The boy just stared past her, trying to see into the enclosure, when suddenly a woman rushed up behind him, loudly proclaiming her relief. The boy started to cry. Gloria noticed he had glasses, blue plastic frames now knocked a little crooked by the force of his mother's hug.

The woman began to apologize to Gloria, looking up at her and explaining they'd been at the monkey house and the boy had wandered away, and thanking Gloria for keeping him safe.

The boy, crying harder, spoke for the first time: "I hate the monkey house."

"Me too," Gloria said. The mother looked vaguely offended and Gloria suddenly resolved to do something she'd never done before. It was something strictly against the rules, and Gloria was not a rule-breaker.

She beckoned the two of them inside the sea otter enclosure. The mother looked doubtful, but still holding the boy, followed Gloria into the back and then the main part of the great, humid room, which blossomed with plants. Gloria put a finger to her lips even though silence was not really required.

Gloria led the two of them, the mother and the boy, toward the water and, still with her finger on her lips, peered down. Below the clear surface, the sea otters swam obliviously like Olympic champions, sleek and perfect, not noticing them at all. The boy looked up at Gloria, his mouth open and his eyes shining behind his steamy glasses.