menagerie

People weren't just angry about it. They were still afraid. Fear is a powerful, often irrational emotion, and mass fear... has the power to shake any society to its core. As long as the world remembered, they would live in fear of all cryptids-- regardless of whether or not any individual among us was truly dangerous.Of course, not everyone supported stripping cryptids of all right. But dissenters were few among a dangerous and violent many, and most ignored the problem. Submission was the only solution they could conceive of to fix my problem. But with the imprint of Clyde's fist still throbbing in my stomach I was less interested in fixing a problem than in becoming one.

I don't believe every cryptid should be allowed to roam free, just like I don't believe every human should be allowed to roam free. We have psychos, too. People kill their coworkers. Kids kill their classmates. Parents kill their own children. Those people are every bit as monstrous as the worst cryptid predator you can ever point to, yet they're human, just like we are.

Mr. Jamrach led me through the lobby and into the menagerie. The first was a parrot room, a fearsome screaming place of mad round eyes, crimson breasts that beat against bars, wings that flapped against their neighbours, blood red, royal blue, gypsy yellow, grass green. The birds were crammed along perches. Macaws hung upside down here and there, batting their white eyes, and small green parrots flittered above our heads in drifts. A hot of cockatoos looked down from on high over the shrill madness, high crested, creamy breasted. The screeching was like laughter in hell.

It was the first smile of my life. Of course, that is a ridiculous thing to say; I had been smiled at often, the big man had smiled at me not a minute since. And yet I say: it was the first smile, because it was the first that ever went straight into me like a needle too thin to be seen.