Zola the Aardvark from the San Diego Zoo romanticized her similarities to the .22 Caliber Killer. Because they shared a birthday and he lived in Buffalo, NY. In a cabin Zola imagined would be perfect for retiring. Then she found out he only killed people of color. Most of them by strangulation. They should have called him the Racist Strangulation Killer, Zola the Aardvark thought cutely. It’s almost like they didn’t want anyone to know he was a piece of shit right away. Zola the Aardvark didn’t want to analyze why she felt weird even thinking the word racist. Or why she wanted to say, Isn’t murder worse? Or why she felt a pang of relief learning the .22 Caliber Killer was schizophrenic.
So maybe he wasn’t like racist racist, Zola said to Amahle the Hippo who wasn’t touching the topic except with, Why do you need to relate to him at all?
The birthday thing, I guess. And the cabin thing. And I’ve been getting into true crime podcasts lately. Just tired of doing the same stuff all day at the San Diego Zoo. Anyway, I don’t relate to him anymore, it’s just funny.
What are your thoughts on Jeffrey Dahmer? Lucas the Red Panda asked Zola the Aardvark. He’s kinda like your friend the .22 Caliber Killer. He killed and ate a bunch of guys, who happened to be people of color. Does that change how we talk about him? Like, is he a serial killer first or a cannibal first or a racist?
Or a pedophile? Said Shasta the Timber Wolf. One of his victims was a 14 year old boy.
Zola the Aardvark said, I don’t want to think about that.
How much you love Jeffrey Dahmer, said Shasta, or the nature of his crimes in a contemporary context?
I’m glad he’s dead, said Maggie the Cheetah.
Really the Milwaukee police department and the early 90s news cycle are to blame, said Charlie Chaplin the Fennec Fox, one of the only animals with a last name. Given to him because there was a strip of black fur below his nose. I think Jeffrey Dahmer would have killed anyone. It’s just that people of color in the late 80s and early 90s didn’t receive the same investigative attention as white people.
Not to mention, said Richard the Opossum, gay men of color when the world cared so little about HIV and AIDS.
Dahmer’s boring now, said Zola the Aardvark, that’s why the .22 Caliber Killer interested me in the first place. Because how can someone kill 12 people and basically be unknown?
It’s beside the point whether you think they’re boring. Isn’t it at least a little weird that you want to learn about serial killers at all? Amahle the Hippo elaborated on her earlier question. These men caused immeasurable pain to dozens of victims and their families. Maybe you should find something better to do with your time. Like researching the history of discriminatory city zoning practices. Or how the modern prison sentence is more or less slavery.
Which was a point Zola hadn’t thought of before. Clearly there were infinite ways to enrich herself while in the San Diego Zoo aardvark enclosure. She’d given birth to a baby cub a few months before and, though she was excited during the first week, her boredom had magnified tenfold. Recuperating on top of nursing on top of extra guest attention made Zola check out of most cultural responsibilities. It was easy to waste her rare extraneous attention on podcasts. Soap operas disguised as groundbreaking journalism.
Her handlers had yet to give her daughter a name, though a specific sound and smell she associated with the newborn had taken shape in her mind and begun to blot out everything she knew before. San Diego factoids, zoo enclosure layouts, even the word aardvark had lost meaning. She felt a deep primal attachment to the new tiny thing that came from her. She knew whatever the handlers called the cub would never be enough. The new name would erase that first sound and smell and attachment. The cub would no longer be hers. It would belong to the zoo in the same way Zola did. In the same way all animals belonged to the San Diego Zoo when they were named by and fed by humans. Because humans traveled to watch the animals live in boxes built to translate something inhuman into a digestible human idea. Because humans needed to name everything. So they could lie about understanding it. Because if they understood it they could own it.
The medium sized grey furred animal curled around its very tiny hairless offspring to sleep for a few more hours before a human brought their afternoon meal. The animal dreamed about life outside of a box. In an outside it would never understand.
