It's my fourth time this week at the clinic waiting for my rewilding. The pamphlet says I could come back a penguin. Or an elephant. Or a frog. I'm not picky. But it would be nice to wake up one those King Kong monkeys that roamed the steppe during the last Ice Age. Of course, everyone wants to rewild into megafauna. Who wouldn't ditch this human thing for life as a rhino? Six months ago they tried to put cousin Margaret on chemo for the third time but she ripped out the tubes and marched herself to the clinic. Now she's a panda. All the bamboo she can eat and nobody wiping her ass. The preserve sends a picture every month.

The nurse hands me a stack of forms to complete. Answering honestly will expedite my chances of a suitable conversion, she smiles. For the next hour, I pretend to look busy and deep in thought, already knowing all the answers.


Is it ever safe for the chicken to cross the road?

When you walk into a spherical room, which corner do you go to?

If a male barber shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves, does he shave himself?

Why do dogs understand human words, but we can't understand barking?

Are plants farming us, supplying oxygen until we die to become compost they can digest? Show your math.

Which animal should be dismissed from Noah's ark?

Is cereal soup?


Under ALLERGENS I put cartwheels, having never actually done one in all my life.

The clinic is beneath an abandoned factory. Just to get to the door you have to walk down several flights of stairs and show everyone your teeth. It's all very hush-hush. Which is understandable. Rewilding is still a novelty and the conversion rate is frighteningly low. But since the extinctions, living in the city is its own kind of Russian roulette. Better to take three pharmaceutical cocktails and wake up on a wildlife preserve without a care in the world. If you agree to the terms of service your name is inscribed on the wall and your family gets to choose between a snow cone machine and an electric toothbrush. I hope they choose the toothbrush.

Most of the volunteers with me in the waiting room have seen better days. Bluehairs and addicts and army vets missing limbs. With the surge in volunteers lately the clinic is becoming more selective. I'm young, I'm healthy, and I'm frequently horny. The pamphlet says I'm an ideal candidate.

The woman sitting next to me fills out her questionnaire. She fidgets in her chair, fussing with her hair which smells like ammonia, no doubt distressed at the thought of rewilding as a beetle, or a mouse, or an anchovy. Under ALLERGENS I can't help but notice she has an extensive history.


Plums: Moderate. Broken arm falling out of tree while trying to sneak out of foster home.

Dogs: Severe. Dentist extracted supernumerary canine tooth, aged nine. Only childhood friend a spider unable to spin webs that ate sugar granules from fingertips.

Wool: Mild. Tied up with scarf during clandestine drama club rehearsal of Antigone.

Eggs: Moderate. Anaphylaxis from gin fizz at anthropology soiree. Ovaries equally inhospitable.

Ragweed: Severe. Rash, asthma. Walked the 37th parallel in hopes of being abducted by extraterrestrials. It was a mistake, I believe, having been born human.


It's easy to fall in love with strangers. Just like it's easy to be jealous of melting snow. But she has the face of an ibex, pretty in an awkward way, and I have the hands of a lobster, so I know we'll never be goldfish in some pond doomed to fall in love over and over when our memories lapse every seven seconds.

Most days I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but today when the woman goes to submit her paperwork I pretend to be a bumbling oaf and stumble into her. I don't know why I act this way. I don't open my door to happiness. When happiness knocks it means her cousin catastrophe is creeping through your window. We exchange shy smiles and apologies as my fingertips glance hers.

They lead all the volunteers down another flight of stairs and through a maze of tunnels with flickering lights humming a fluorescent symphony. Doyennes in messy surgical scrubs flank us on either side. Janitors scrub greasy streaks off the floor.

I know I'm going to run before getting to the end of the hall, run up the stairs and back to my one-bedroom apartment full of empty beer cans and a stained copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook, run just like I have the last four times, but for a moment I imagine walking into the rewilding chamber. There will be soft music. It will be warm. We'll drink the cocktails, nervously at first, then with gusto, licking the glass rims. They'll bathe and perfume us. As they strap us into the gurneys the woman will tell me she has a tattoo nobody has ever seen. There's a faraway sadness to her face as she wonders if after she rewilds will it be a birthmark, a scar, or just disappear? She's trying hard to hold onto the memories of the nights she spent with the tattoo.

My head is getting cloudy. I can see the tattoo on her hip. Five little black geometries in a line. Play. Pause. Stop. Rewind. Fast-forward. Only I'm not sure which skin button to push.

Does she know I'm imagining us grazing the icy steppe, two little ibex kids bleating pleasantries, escaping snow leopards as we leap cliff to cliff, the caprine equivalent of cartwheels?

What do you think they made in this factory? she asks dreamily.

I open my hand into hers, already the fingers gnarling into something else.

Paperclips, maybe?


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