Three Messages and a Warning by Eduardo Jimenez Mayo & Chris N. Brown & Bruce Sterling

Author:Eduardo Jimenez Mayo & Chris N. Brown & Bruce Sterling
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781931520317
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Published: 2012-02-14T08:00:00+00:00

Lions

Bernardo Fernández

Translated by Chris N. Brown

Now we flee, hiding in the dark, moving away from the light of day. But it wasn’t always so. There was a time when they were our plague.

The first lions appeared in the public parks. They always took refuge under the cover of darkness, hiding where the trees were thick enough and the grass grew tall enough to hide them.

Fleeing from us, they sensed that we were the ones responsible for the disappearance of their habitat, who took them into a captivity that quickly exceeded its capacity to house them.

At first we noticed the sudden decrease in stray dogs in the city. After a while, we started to see their gnawed bones scattered near the public gardens. As always, we didn’t pay attention until it was too late.

If they had been an endangered species like gorillas, the panda bear or manatees, surely our zoos would have fought to have examples in their cages. But they had an overpopulation of lions.

And so they started throwing them out in the street.

The process went like this: in all the city zoos they gave the order to eliminate the excess lions, arguing that it’s better to maintain fewer examples of a species so well-known and of such little interest to visitors.

There were dozens of cats sacrificed in order to keep budgets within reasonable limits.

That measure was quickly abandoned given the difficulty of eliminating a predator of such dimensions; the costs were almost the same as the original plan to save them, not taking into account the protests of the Sanitation Department, whose workers refused to dispose of cat corpses, nor the dumpster divers’ rejection of the foul taste of lion meat.

But the orders were ignored, without discussion.

So that was how the first lions ended up with their claws in the streets, clandestinely removed in the middle of the night, near the public parks where at least they could leave their feces without being too obvious.

It’s impossible to know precisely how many were left to their fate in this manner. The archives that contained the official numbers were destroyed when the political scandal broke. But the most conservative numbers estimate that there couldn’t have been as many as the sensationalist media wanted us to

believe.

The real problem is the high fertility rate of lions. A macho adult male has the ability to copulate up to five times in a single day.

Five copulations with five ejaculations included.

More than one was likely to be a success. This, without considering the absence of natural predators.

Although we ignored the parks where the early ones were released, now we know that at night they were emigrating to every green zone they could find, occupying all the available space bit by bit.

We didn’t discover our new neighbors until much later. The morning joggers, unemployed old people, children, young couples, and drug dealers who populated the public gardens at all hours were observed by attentive amber eyes, whose owners hid under the shade of the trees.

The cats changed their habits, turning themselves into nocturnal beings.

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