Glimpses

When Eli removes his hand, the bird blinks and flutters its winds, then rises, dazedly, to its feel.
"Remarkable!" Mr.Marshall stands abruptly, making the table woddble and upsetting the pot of flowers, not that he notices. "I've never seen anything like it. Truly, never."

She has ever been given an animal so decomposed, nor so messily killed. Its body is a mangled affair of blood and fur, sinew and splinter-small bones.
"Its body can't be salvaged," she says to her instructor, feeling nervous and annoyed under his scrutiny.
"But you must bring it back," he says.
"Bring it back to what?"
"To a body," he answers. His patience is wearing thing.
"I would need to construct an entirely new body to do that," she says.
"In the silence that follows, she understands what her instructor intends for her to do.
"No," she says.
"If you want to win, you must get your hands dirty."

"What is your name?" Mr.Marshall asks.
The boy does not answer immediately. He still has no name, no form of identification. No occasion has ever called for one. He has prepared an alias but he has never said it before. It takes strange on his tongue.
"Elidor Kells."

When the girl turns seventeen, she is given, as a gift, a kitten.
The kitten, a black ball of fluff streaked with silver, which she dubs Mittens, prances in circles and attacks the lace hem of her dress. It is vicious in the way of creatures too young to be obedient or properly malicious, and the girl adores it.
Until her instructor visits her for her daily hour-long lecture and takes the kitten from her hands before neatly and carefully slittings its throat.
It takes some time for the girl to finish crying, and them some more time to calm herself enough to listen to her instructor.
"What is the first step?" he asks, stepping back.
"To close the cut. Or she'll bleed again when she comes back," the girl answers, biting back more tears.
"That is the easiest part. Begin." Her instructor stands perfectly still, with his hands clasped behind his back, waiting for her to focus.
"For Christ's sake, stop crying," he says, when she still does not move, and he pushes the dead kitten toward her.
The girls looks away from the vivid red line at its neck, takes a deep breath, and turns back. She stares at the blood drying in its fur, and for the next half hour she looks at at nothing else.

The boy is intriguing, she thinks. And striking.
As he spins her on the sand, she finds herself laughing, loudly and freely.
When he pulls her into a kiss, she is still laughing against his lips.

In the South African exhibit of the Central Park Zoo of Madagascar, the cage of the Python regius is spacious and warm, and kept closed with a complicated series of iron locks. 
Which makes it all the more baffling when the python escapes.
The caretakes that arrives that morning finds the cage empty, the door closed, the locks still locked. Yet the python is gone.
"It couldn't have escaped," the proprietor says. "It must be elsewhere on the grounds."
But even as he speaks the staff searching the property are finding no trace of it, nor is anything else amiss.
"Could it have been stolen?" someone asks.
Though the police spend the day investigating and questioning, the culprit is not found.

Text by Lucie MacAulay