“I always give a perfect little shell like this to my lovers.”

Sophie had said this as seriously as she could with her crooked smile, her lazy eye, when she handed him the tiny shell while walking on the beach. And now, a week later, she keeps repeating these same words to herself in a low voice, over and over, as she slowly walks alone through the Leipzig Zoo. Why did she always have to be so dramatic, so theatrical, so tedious?

“Lovers,” she repeats. “Lovers.” The words themselves sound more and more odd, like something she never said or ever would say.

She stops at an exhibit and leans against the rail. She has another two hours to waste before she can reunite with her friends, if she wants to, before their classes would be over and she could get back into the dorm and the couch that was serving as her temporary bed. If I want to, she reminds herself. Two hours would be fine, time enough to decide what to do.

She turns her attention to the exhibit. Three bears are out, two brown and one polar, each separated by bricks and moats, but all in view from where she stands on the platform.

They could rip my arms off, she thinks. They are huge. I just don’t know how quick it would be. If it swiped at my throat, took a big chunk out, that would be okay. But if it just knocked me down, pinned me and then started biting me and eating me ...

She has an image of her soft stomach getting squished like a pastry bag.

She thinks of the line again. “I always give. Always.”

The bear enclosure is triangular with three dens, the polar bear in the center. It looks like a pyramid or ziggurat with long steps leading up to the viewing deck. The dens have large square stones for the bears to climb on, also in the shapes of pyramids. It doesn’t look in any way natural. It looks like a stage. All the enclosures at the zoo are outmoded. The zoo is old, well over a hundred years, and all the housings for the animals are ornate and decorative, built more for the pleasure of the visitors than the comfort of the animals. The wrought iron cages are too small, even if they do have a certain beauty to them. They’re still bolted into the original Victorian bricks, a warm textured brown. Sophie likes that. The metal has scrolling details, swirls or flowers pressed or pounded from molds. She finds these charming. And all the floors she has seen are filthy with food and urine and feces but also beautifully inlaid with intricate designs. Just wonderful.

She takes a deep breath and looks at her knuckles turning white on the railing. The polar bear grunts as it paces back and forth. She lets go and moves away from the bears.

On the beach, after Sophie had said the line to him, Benny had taken the shell from her and felt with his fingers the perfect little ridges. He looked at its perfect symmetrical shape. Then he put the shell in his pocket when they started to walk again and listened for the small gritty chinking of it rubbing against his loose change.

Their day so far had been windy and cold. On the coast, east of Calais, the winter acted as if it would never crack, never let even the smallest drops of spring arrive. He pulled his hat down, dug his pocketed hands a bit deeper, and concluded once and for all that everything this girl said and did had the unmistakable sense of “French” about it.

He did find it cute that her accent, completely unnoticeable stateside, had resurfaced after only a few months of staying with her father in the French countryside. Come visit me, she had said on the phone. It’ll be a vacation for you. Let me show you my home, she had said to him. Home. She only lived there for seven years before her mother took her away.

Benny still wore his heavy winter coat, buttoned all the way to the top, and the farther the two of them walked on this cold, mid-March day, more often than not at an arms length apart, the more he receded into its thick collar. He seemed to be getting smaller and smaller. The air felt remarkably still when it changed direction, although this would only last a second or two. The wind always picked up again.

“Wow. It is cold out,” he said.

“It’s not so bad. You have to embrace it.” Her red coat was open and flapping in the wind.

“I mean, just unbelievable. Who can I write about this? Who do you know?”

“I don’t know anybody.”

“You lie.”

“Why don’t I fill the silence?”

He looked at her. “I thought we were talking. But feel free.”

She started to talk, one of her many rambling recitals of some childhood memory. They could go on and on. He liked her voice though, always had, and now with the newly unearthed accent it was like being with someone new, some twin version of her. He couldn’t get enough of it since he arrived, made her talk in bed, say his name. As she talked he watched her mouth. The lopsided way she favored one side, the side with her lazy eye. Somehow it only made her more endearing, like she had survived something and still come out beautiful. And she was beautiful. Her dimple flashed as she continued. A little spec of spittle appeared at the corner of her mouth. She had a slight lisp. All these things helped her, like her small size, not so noticeable in her zip-up boots, but he could remember the first time he got her out of them and it seemed like she had stepped down from something. When he looked at her then standing naked in front of him he noticed one whole side of her body seemed off. One leg was bent, and he realized that she held it like that because it was longer than the other. He loved her from that point on.

“... and so there were about a dozen of us, you know, with our bikes. Mine was blue, I think ...”

She had wandered closer to him and slipped her arm through his. She put her head on his shoulder as they walked. She didn’t let it move at all from its spot, even if he shrugged a shoulder or brought a hand up to cough. She was cute, sure, but she could be so goddamn clingy too.

Sophie has moved to the lions. The moat is only five feet across. It is down a little, lower than her, but, still, no more than five feet cross-wise. She can certainly jump five feet.

Sophie turns on the sidewalk and sets her legs together. She does a standing broad jump, and looks back to her original spot. She does it again, but this time marks the start with a black swipe from the heel of her boot.

She asks a little kid next to her if he speaks English or maybe French. Nothing. A blank stare. “Measure? Tape Measure?” she says holding her hands apart. The kid nods and jumps too.

“You’re a goofball, aren’t ya?” she says.

They jump a few times together. The kid can go farther.

“Okay, you win. I quit. See you around, little Olympian.”

She starts to walk again.

After a few paces, she turns around and sees the kid unwrap an ice cream sandwich. He tosses the wrapper on the ground in front of him.

Sophie goes back to him and picks up the trash. “Don’t you know you can’t do this? It’s not the right thing to do.” She bends down to the kid. “Please, little goofball, we go way back, right? I’ve never led you astray. So please, just promise that you’ll always put your trash in the garbage. Okay?”

She has a pleading sort of look on her face. The kid has a blank sort of look on his. She brings the wrapper to a garbage can and turns to him with a “this is what I’m saying” gesture and puts it in. There’s other trash around the can, near misses, and Sophie picks up each piece and throws all of it away. With each piece she makes a funny grimace face and waves her hand at her nose like it’s too stinky to handle.

The kid laughs and smiles. Sophie bows for him.

She feels immediately exhausted when she leaves the kid again. She goes for a few more steps, swaying between strides, and then sits down on a bench by herself. She feels heavy, part of the seat. She doesn’t feel like standing again but then she is scared that maybe she won’t be able to stand when she wants. She has the thought that it might be days before she can get going again. There must be some way she can get back up. It seems an impossible thing to do.

Right next to the bench is a sculpture. There are many throughout the old zoo tucked in niches, on pedestaled corners, of animals, some in marble, in bronze, many different styles. The one next to Sophie is a lion made of white stone. She looks at this, at how it is stained with pigeon shit, its edges worn round and soft looking. It is immovable and cold, its eyes fixed on something far away. She remembers Benny’s face on the beach and the way he had stared off to the distance in the same way. So callous. It was like he hadn’t listened at all to her story. Not one beautiful word.

She stands. “Shut up, shut up, shut up. Just shut up you tedious, tedious bitch.” She takes a moment, smoothes her jacket and then continues on her way.

The monkey house is useless, as are the giraffes and zebras. The birds in the aviary offer no help. They are too tiny. Even if a whole flock were to come down and grab her sleeves, they couldn’t do anything significant with her. But the aviary itself is massive. It is a huge open cage. It looks gilded and is shaped almost like a mansion. The top is very high.

“That is very high up there,” she says.

She looks at the bars of the cage. She thinks she can do it. There are cross bars on the bottom and together they form a lattice, almost like a ladder. She follows the bars higher but sees her ladder stop about a third of the way where the cross bars end and only the long vertical bars continue. She could never manage up those. She is such a lousy specimen.

A door opens on the attached bird house and a zoo worker steps out. He wears brown and carries a radio along with a clipboard.

She asks if he speaks French. No. “English?” He nods.

“Where are the big birds?”

He looks at her.

“The big ones. What are the biggest birds you have?”

“We have swans. Those are probably the largest. On the other side, there is a pond,” he says pointing.

“Oh, thanks. That won’t work, but thanks.” She thinks for a moment. “Aren’t there any big predator-type birds?”

He shakes his head and leaves her.

It’s getting warmer out. She’s thirsty. At the snack shop she gets a can of soda and stops at some tables to drink it.

There are more sculptures by her, small ones scattered among the tables where she sits. They are fanciful, each depicting little men, like fairies or gnomes. They ride oversized mounts, snails or turtles. One rides some sort of caterpillar. The little men look happy, with big grins, waving their arms in the air, but she isn’t so sure about the animals. She can’t really tell by the faces, but their bodies seem weighed down by the small saddles they wear. She starts to feel very sad for them. She imagines them being corralled, broken, and forced to carry the men. She starts to cry a little, small tears, for the bronze animals.

She shakes her head and wipes her eyes. “Jeez. What the hell? No wonder he can’t stand you.” She wipes her eyes some more. “I can’t stand you.”

Benny and Sophie had taken the first train to the beach after he showed up at her father’s. They wanted to be alone.

It was overcast from the moment they stepped off the line and smelled the salt. After they checked in to their hotel, they went for the walk on the beach. The low clouds made a canyon for them. They hid the white cliffs of Dover over the channel, blending with the grey sea, and hung just behind the first row of high-rise apartments off the boardwalk. The beach was completely deserted except for Sophie and Benny. He hadn’t seen anyone else.

She was still going with her story. “... It was right before my mother took me to the States. I think I already knew we were leaving, maybe. I can’t remember ...”

He didn’t mind these drawn-out memories. Their details suited her. They flushed out and made real her quirks. When he heard them, she made sense to him. He understood why she dressed the way she did, those old burgundy boots, the same long scarf dramatically draped, and her long hair always wrapped up in some weird Gibson Girl tribute. He welcomed them.

Her voice itself was usually enough to send him into a trance. The lisp, the funny way she pronounced certain words because of her crooked smile, they combined with her stories and together they would wash over him until he could only take in the spirit of what she said, forgoing the specifics, but always feeling the quality of tone and uniqueness of rhythm that was completely her.

But this story affected him differently. He held onto the points, the details of what had happened. It wasn’t all that different from any of the other stories she’d told him over their time together, but something about being close to the place, in the country of her birth, gave this story a concreteness that the others had lacked. When she described that robust Bastille day and how she and her childhood friends had raced their bikes up and down the steep hills of her village, the village she would soon leave, he had no problem seeing her wind-blown face, giddy and flushed red with excitement. And when she described how they were singing together, those patriotic French songs of their independence day, as they rode, shouting as loud as they could, how she felt tied to her friends and her country, proud of being French, for the first time she had said, we are French, she had thought, yes we are, it is special and mine, Benny could see so well that moment in time. And he also saw what would come after. He saw how she would be plucked from this nest, only to spend the next fifteen years of her life trying to find her place again, wearing out-of-style clothes, and trying to change a way of life she had only just inherited.

Benny had thought these things while she talked freely to him, not looking at him. He saw an image of her again and again, of her seven-year-old face, free of worry and full of potential and so very, very happy in a time well before him. Well before he had anything to do with it. She was happy without him.

“Benny, Benny.” She had stopped talking and backed away from him so she could see his face.

He continued to look off at the sea. He was concentrating.

“Benny!”

He caught up to the moment and looked at her. Then he saw the smile on her face fade and a look emerge that was unmistakable. The disappointment was definable, like a physical thing, and if he would have had the right kind of instrument he could have measured it and powered the world by its volume.

“I was listening. I was.” He reached out a hand.

She turned from him.

“Shit,” he said. “Come on. Sophie. Please. I was listening. Really.”

He took a step towards her. She seemed to sense it and took another away. He sighed and put his hands back in his pockets. He jiggled the shell and loose change together.

“I was listening,” he said. “I swear.”

He was tired, still jet-lagged even, but mostly just tired and lost as to what to do. It didn’t come naturally. She was a lot of work, and fragile when like this, just as his friends had warned, but that didn’t matter. It was all worth it. When she’d smile and look at him in that sideways kind of look, he could take anything, do anything. He just wasn’t sure how to fix it when it went off course.

He thought maybe he should tell her what he had been thinking, how much her story had moved him. Part of him wanted to let her know that his staring at the sea, his concentrating was necessary. He hadn’t wanted to lose it. He was trying to be strong, like a line of stone soldiers standing in place, as he faced into the hard wind which stinged his eyes and threatened to set loose the tears her voice had swelled. He even decided to tell her, right there, but then he stopped. He realized that he didn’t have a good answer as to why he didn’t just let her know in the first place, why he couldn’t just let it show openly that her story affected him so. And then he thought, maybe I wasn’t listening. It all of a sudden became very blurry.

He was facing her back, the both of them standing in the same direction, towards the dunes. He saw movement in the distance and over her shoulder a pack of horses and riders came out of the dunes. They were running at a full gallop, increasing their speed on the open stretch of flat sand. Her head perked up and followed the rider's path along with him. And he also saw, trailing close behind the riders, a black, shiny dog. It was running as well, going as fast as it could, doing his best to keep up with the fading troop of friends.

Sophie took a few steps and then started running, down the beach away from him. He called to her, started walking after her. But he let her go. He figured he’d find her at the hotel. He thought she’d be on the bed, her back towards the door. He thought he’d have a chance to talk her down, explain it all, that she’d be receptive.

But she wasn’t there, or in the lobby, or the hotel cafe. She wasn’t in the cafe next to the hotel. He walked all through the town, ducked into every restaurant and open store. He combed the village, searching for the flash of her red coat. It wasn’t until it grew dark that he decided to call her father, try and muddle through a conversation with no common language. He couldn’t get anything across, but her father sounded happy to hear from him. He hung up and went back to the hotel to wait. The last thing he did before he went up to the room is pantomime to the clerk that he needed a pad of paper and a pen. He worked very hard trying to communicate to the man that he needed to take them up to the room, that he wouldn’t be bringing them back down.

Sophie leans back at the table in the zoo and takes a sip of soda. “I always give a perfect little shell like this to my lovers.”

It shouldn’t be that hard to just walk into an enclosure with a wild animal. It’s all a matter of staying on course, not veering one way or the other and not stopping. You get up and go in a single direction. You don’t wander. That’s how she got here. Board the first train that’s leaving and see where it ends, board another and another until finally you’re in a place where you can think for awhile. She hadn’t planed on ending her course in Leipzig, at least that’s what she had told herself. When she stepped off the last train she figured the universe had directed them and her to where her friends were still in school. Of course they would let her stay, give her whatever time she needed. She takes another drink of soda and then lets it rest on her lap. She sighs.

Maybe she did direct it herself a little, make conscious decisions along the way, skip one train departure time for another, in the vague sense of finding a good friend’s couch while she “worked through it.” That romantic idea, of fleeing to the safety of a friend, even if it was buried under the surface and acted on indirectly, still seems okay.

I don’t know, she thinks, maybe I did steer myself here. Maybe I’m not so guided as I thought.

She finishes the soda and squeezes a dent in the can with her thumb. She looks up and sees all the people, families with strollers, school-age kids, old people, walking in front of her. They pass by her on their way to other places. Her mind wanders back to the bears she saw earlier, to the polar bear in particular. It was so restless. It was pacing back and forth while she watched it. There was a rhythm in the steps it took, the same repeating steps.

She thinks of this bear. She decides this bear is the one she wants to do it. It’s the white fur. There’s something in that image. The white muzzle stained red. But she doesn’t get up yet. For all her intentions she keeps thinking about the steps the bear repeated. They were the same. It was same motion, over and over. It was the same pattern. It didn’t change. When she had watched the bear, she felt overwhelmed. It seemed to carry so much weight in those steps. Such a burden. It was frightening to be so close to it, just that small moat between them. It was terrifying, but it was also thrilling. They were so close. She admits that she was excited. She admits that it felt good. She closes her eyes and imagines herself standing in front of the bear again.

Then she smiles, that sideways smile. It’s so clear. This is how I should be feeling, she thinks. There is no way she couldn’t feel it. It was all designed, the viewing platform, the huge rocks, the penned-in untamed bear. It had to pace. She had to swoon. Her experience was laid out well before she got there. Others must have felt the same thing in this controlled viewing, they must feel the same as her. Probably the same experience for a hundred years, given to whole crowds of people. So many people feeling exactly like her. She straightens herself on the seat. She drops her empty can to the ground. It was all very normal. Anyone would feel the same. She’s normal. Her thoughts turn to Benny and where he might be at the moment. She tries to remember if he likes swans, if they’ve ever seen one together.

Sophie leaves her finished drink where it landed. She stands up and puts her hands in her jacket pockets and finds them full of gum wrappers, receipts, and tram tickets. She empties her pockets. She lets the trash and little bits of paper litter the space around her. She doesn’t want to be bothered by their bulk when she starts to walk again.

She heads out and around the snack shop. It is a roundabout way to get where she’s going.