At first it did not seem real, to be awakened in the night by a cross-dressing giraffe who claimed to have the keys to the kingdom of happiness. I was alone. There was no one to confirm the reality of what I was seeing. So I followed. What else could I do?

He led me out of the house and through the darkened streets. He said nothing more. I asked questions, but he did not answer them. He only walked slowly, prissily, in his high heels and stopped periodically to munch leaves from the trees. We arrived in a section of town I did not recognize, an area full of junkyards and warehouses and train tracks. We stopped at a building. It did not look like a kingdom. It looked like an abandoned cigarette factory, which in fact it was. We stood at a door as if waiting, though I did not know for what, or whom. The giraffe had keys attached to the pearls around his neck, I noticed, but he made no motion to use them.

Suddenly, without saying a word, he left me, his high heels clicking quickly across the parking lot. "Where are you going?" I shouted. "You cannot leave me!" But he did. He didn't even turn his head. Had I been deceived?

When a band of masked men burst from the shadows armed with sticks and knives and broken bottles I knew I had. I tried to run but it was too late. They grabbed me and dragged me, screaming, into the kingdom. I did not know what I would find there, but I suspected it would not be happiness.

This once I was right.

Emily Darrell has no mailing address.


To link to this story directly: http://wigleaf.com/200811giraffe.htm

Photo detail on main page courtesy of Aftab.

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