“Easy baby,” her mother’s voice, in the hyper-calm tone she saved for the worst emergencies, like the time Daddy had been carving the pumpkin and ended up carving his thumb. A firm hand kept her from lurching upright. “You’re okay- you fainted and hit your head on the way down. Can you look at me?” Sallie looked at her, trying to bring her memories into focus. She frowned as she mentally bumped up against a fuzzy darkness.
“Follow my finger,” her mother said, moving it back and forth in front of her eyes. “Does anyone have a flash-light?” Sallie realized she was surrounded by a small crowd of people. One of them, an older girl with long braided pigtails and a backpack, produced a thin black flashlight, which Mommy proceeded to shine in Sallie’s eyes while holding open her lids.
Sallie wasn’t entirely certain what the point of that was, but she knew Mommy had been in school to be a nurse before she’d met and married Daddy, so she figured it had some weird medical purpose.
“I’m okay,” she said, which was mostly true. Her head ached a little, and her stomach felt like she’d been riding the upside-down roller coaster, but she didn’t feel like she needed quite so many people staring at her. Maybe if they’d go away she could remember whatever it was that was buzzing about her brain like an irritating fly…
“Probably, kiddo, but let’s get you checked out just in case, okay? I think you may have given yourself a mild concussion when you bonked your head,” Mommy helped her up, dusted her off, and gave her a reassuring smile. “No big deal- and then maybe we’ll get some ice cream on the way home, okay?”
Sallie felt the urge to laugh; an offer of ice cream on the way home was Daddy’s favorite form of bribery, usually to get her not to let Mommy in on too many details of an outing that had not gone according to plan. She’d never thought her mother would resort to something like that.
***
The doctor did indeed pronounce it a mild concussion: nothing to worry about. He told Sallie to take it easy for a day or two, but said she would be just fine. Later that night, when Sallie asked Mommy what had happened, her mother hadn’t been able to tell her.
“I’m not sure, sweetie. We were looking at the lemur, and you made a strange little gasping noise and fell over. I thought maybe your blood sugar was too low- that’s why I had the doctor take a little blood.”
“But it wasn’t?”
“No, baby, it wasn’t. Maybe it was just the stress of being… at that place.”
“I didn’t feel stressed out,” she protested.
“Sometimes a person can be stressed out and not realize it,” Mommy began. Sallie rolled her eyes.
“That makes no sense,”
“Maybe not. But I think maybe we’ve had enough of the menagerie, don’t you?”
Sallie didn’t respond.
***
In her dream she was standing in a dense mist, looking for something. She was certain she was looking for something, but she could not remember what- or maybe it was a who? As she ran searching through the mist a shape began to take form in the distance. She angled herself towards it, and before long it resolved itself into one of the menagerie cages. She drew closer to it (or maybe it drew closer to her) and peered inside at a bundle of grey fur. Someone said a word-
…zenith…
The lemur looked up at her and blinked its blue-grey eyes.
Zeb’s eyes.
It scrambled over its black-ringed tail to get closer to her, put its little hands on the bars between them, and then cocked its head and made an odd cartoon-spitting noise.
Pbwit pbwit pbwit!
Sallie felt herself falling…
***
…she woke up screaming.
“Zeb!”
Her parents both burst into her room, Daddy flinging on the lights and looking ready to rip something apart. Then Mommy had her in her arms, rocking her and making soothing noises. Daddy came to stand beside them, pushed the hair back from her face.
“There now, Sallie-girl, it’s okay. You’re okay. We’re here, we’re both here.”
“It’s alright, baby,” Mommy said. “It’s alright.” Sallie burst into tears and clung more tightly to her mother, because it wasn’t alright. She had finally found Zeb, and it wasn’t alright at all.
“Damn it, Rebekah, I told you it was a bad idea to take her there,” Daddy’s voice was furious, and Sallie could feel him shaking.
“It seemed so important to her,” Mommy said, tightening her hold on Sallie as she lowered herself to sit on the bed.
“We have to go back!” Sallie sobbed, pushing herself up so she could face both of them.
“…what?” her mother said, just as Daddy exploded,
“Absolutely not!”
“Zebbie’s there! We have to go back! We have to!”
Her parents grew very still.
“Salome,” her father’s voice was strained, and he crouched down so his eyes were on level with hers. “Did you see Zeb today?”
Sallie hesitated. She knew very well what her parents’ reaction would be if she told them what she’d seen. But she was a very truthful girl, and besides which, this might be her only chance, slim as it was. She nodded.
Mommy gasped, and Daddy swallowed and placed a hand on her shoulder. She could see the effort it cost him to keep his voice calm.
“Where, exactly, did you see him?”
“In the lemur cage,” she whispered.
“I don’t understand, sweetie,” Mommy said. “You saw Zebbie in the cage with the lemur?” Sallie shook her head, miserable.
“Zebbie was the lemur,” she said, pleading with her eyes for her parents to somehow know it was the truth, and not just her over-active imagination.
Her father closed his eyes, and for a split-second she thought he might believe her. But then he opened them, and they were full of tears.
“Oh Sallie,” he choked, “that- that was just a bad dream you had. It wasn’t real. You saw the lemur today, and you were thinking about Zeb, and your brain put them together while you slept. But it wasn’t real.”
“It was real,” she whimpered, hating herself for sounding like such a baby.
“Sweetie, I know it felt real,” Mommy said, stroking her head. “Sometimes dreams can feel even more real than memories. But people can’t change into animals.” She gave a shaky laugh and added, “Not that I think your brother wouldn’t have loved to be a lemur. It’s a very good match for his personality. But we would have noticed if he had a habit of changing into one, okay?” Mommy was crying now, but trying very hard to look like she wasn’t, giving Sallie a reassuring smile. Sallie felt like the worst scum on the face of the planet. She had made her parents cry- surely there was nothing more horrible than that.
“Okay,” she said, feeling defeated and scummy and worse than she had since Zeb originally disappeared. “You’re right. It was just a dream. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, Sallie-girl,” said Daddy, and wrapped his arms around both her and Mommy. “Never be sorry that you miss your little brother. We miss him, too.”
Wow, another great addition to the story.
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