This is my first short story. Its about a panda who lives at a zoo and watches basketball. Hilarity ensues. Please comment and tell me how much you hate it.
Just south of the mock-bamboo signpost marking the corner of Oriental Way and Arctic Avenue was a smattering of poles, bars, and sub par stucco that one might call a cage. This metal pen was the home to a panda named Barrack, but he preferred to be called Barry, due to his view on abortion.
Barry awoke this particular morning, rolled out of his hammock, and greeted the faded sky mural on his ceiling with an overdramatic yawn. As the waterfall of asbestos flakes floated down from the ceiling, Barry ventured to the far side of his home to visit his pal Lebron.
The relationship of Lebron and Barry was an odd one that formed out of sheer convenience. Lebron lived in the penguin exhibit on Arctic Avenue. Barry found the habitat to be tacky, depressing, and the pile of cod skeletons near the paper mache glacier didn't help much in the atmosphere department. He tried not to judge. Too hard. Even if Barry wanted to be "that panda" and comment on the living conditions of his slick feathered compadre, it would be nearly impossible. Barry didn't know any language except panda. And some Spanish. Lebron and Barry relied on a primitive system of sign language, but alas, the limited motor skills of the two resulted in limited conversation. Barry didn't even know what Lebron's real name was.
The zoo's break room was adjacent to Barry's home and had a television which never broke its allegiance to the NBA Network, thus inspiring the moniker for his penguin friend...and every other animal in the zoo.
Lebron started to wave his wings like a Bucks' era Ray Allen guarding a shot from downtown (when a panda's only frame of reference to the world is the NBA, his similes are very limited). He gestured towards the three main gates of the zoo, the six main security cameras, the five Latino security guards, and the one hole in the zoo's barrier wall over by the touch tank. Barry slapped his forehead with the palm of his paw and shook his head with a breathy sigh.
The penguins were at it again.
Barry expected this kind of lunacy from Lebron and Rajon, but Barkley? It consoled him slightly that Kobe didn't seem to want a part in this...but he still hated Kobe. As Barry was trying to figure out what the sign language would be for, "Didn't you learn your lesson about breaking out after the first nine attempts ended with gun shots?", Dirk, the alpha penguin, called all the penguins back into the glacier's cave to hammer out the rest of the plan's details.
The panda gave a dismissive gesture and sat down to his dinner of panda chow. Barry promptly threw his chow into a Tupperware container that the cage cleaner had forgotten. He planned on gathering enough panda chow so he could roll it into a basketball of his own one day. Panda chow is 65% rubber after all. But considering that Barry was lucky if the absent minded zoo keeper remembered to feed him once a month, this would take a very long time.
After pulling off a dried stick of bamboo from the plant outside his flat, Barry began chomping and positioned himself in his recliner to watch the New York Knickerbockers play the Los Angeles Kings (Barry didn't have very good taste). This was heaven. The top lids of Barry's eyes slid down to meet their partner on the bottom, and just as the Kings missed another lay up, he fell asleep.
Bars rattled. Barry's eyes opened to the sight of Dirk ushering the penguins out the back door of the glacier. The entire zoo smelled like....date rape drugs and purple flavored energy drink. He thought it would be better if he didn't know.
As he saw the penguins shimmy through the hole and into "freedom," Barry reflected.
He didn't talk to any of the other animals at the zoo, but he knew they were all obsessed with one thing: escape. Thoughts of escape consumed them. It was like a brain tumor that spread and spread and spread, but wouldn't kill you. Or like Kobe hunting his fifth championship. Escape was everything. The only thing.
The penguins alone had tried and failed nine times. It was amusing for Barry at first, but it slowly became haunting. Sometimes penguins wouldn't make it back with all the flippers they left with. Sometimes they just died. But they just kept trying. The cold, soulless eyes of the penguins embodied this hellbent obsession.
The animals had no clue what "freedom" even looked like (they were all born in captivity), but that didn't keep them for devoting and risking their lives to finding it.
This is why Barry pitied the animals. They couldn't make happiness out of what they had been given, but had transformed happiness into some uncertain, unattainable creature.
Barry's philosophy on escape was much more wise than the philosophy of a panda should have been. He compared himself to a child who was given up for adoption. Most of the other adopted kids grew up wondering who their real parents were, then once they had the resources, they hunted them down to discover the truth. But this child had accepted that this "truth" was something he didn't want to see. He figured his parents were just a pair of naive teenagers who had grown up, and only saw each other at the check out line in 7/11. He was okay with that. Life had many ugly faces, and he had come to accept that this was one of them.
That's what Barry thought of the other animals' precious "freedom." If he ever did decide to walk out the lockless door of his home and go under the wall, Barry knew exactly what he would find.
Barry went to his secret stash of bamboo and nibbled half a stalk to clear his mind. He finished. He plodded back to his hammock at an unrushed pace. He got in a comfortable position. He watched.
Barkley was the last penguin to go. He swiveled his head from left to right then crawled into the unknown. Just as the penguin's right foot was devoured by the blackness, the guards woke up.
Barry was no horoscope, but he had an idea how this would end. He just hoped the penguins remembered to take the bullets out of the guards' .38s. A gun went off. Barry didn't feel guilty. The penguins made their own choice, and Barry had made his. Even if Barry was wrong and the outside world was everything the other animals thought it would be, how could he know whether it had things like bamboo, hammocks, and the NBA Network?
He planned on staying where he was for a very, very long time. On this note, sleep defeated him.
