Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Zoo and Crowbar
    Zoo and Crowbar
    Zoo and Crowbar
    Ebook81 pages1 hour

    Zoo and Crowbar

    By Paul F. Clark

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The Wind has mysteriously caused the death of all people on earth -- except for Zoo. As the last remaining person on earth, he must deal with this extraordinary situation, and the result is a series of dreams, shocks, hallucinations, events, explorations and the final outcome in the light of his changing understanding.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGuernica
    Release dateMay 15, 2015
    ISBN9781550719376
    Zoo and Crowbar
    Author

    Paul F. Clark

    David Zieroth’s The Fly in Autumn (Harbour, 2009) won the Governor General’s Literary Award and was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry in 2010. Zieroth also won The Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award for How I Joined Humanity at Last (Harbour, 1998). Other publications include the trick of staying and leaving (Harbour, 2023), watching for life (McGill-Queen’s, 2022), the bridge from day to night (Harbour, 2018), Zoo and Crowbar (Guernica Editions, 2015), Albrecht Dürer and me (Harbour, 2014), The November Optimist (Gaspereau, 2013), The Village of Sliding Time (Harbour, 2006), The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill: A Country Boyhood (Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002) and Crows Do Not Have Retirement (Harbour, 2001). His poems have been included in the Best Canadian Poetry series, shortlisted for National Magazine and Relit Awards and featured on Vancouver buses three times as part of Poetry in Transit. He watches urban life from his third-floor balcony in North Vancouver, BC, where he runs The Alfred Gustav Press and produces handmade poetry chapbooks twice per year.

    Read more from Paul F. Clark

    Related to Zoo and Crowbar

    Related ebooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Nine Haunting Postapocalyptic Novels

      Feb 3, 2022

      The paradox of imagined apocalypses is that they’re always more about the present than the future. Here's a list of a few haunting and evocative titles. The post Nine Haunting Postapocalyptic Novels appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Nov 5, 2020

      Sadly, the wonderfully prescient quotation from Samuel Pepys [FT397:70], “A dram in exchange for the pox is an ill bargain indeed,” is not by the great diarist, but from a spoof Twitter account. (https://londonist.com/london/books-and-poetry/samuel-p

      13 min read

    • Article

      Stranger Places

      Aug 9, 2018

      It began like any normal pregame in the woods. Naked, alone, hungover, a sweaty sleeping bag in the back of a dusty pickup truck, miles from civilization. Predawn in a narrow Utah river bottom, canyon country, early July. A Thermos of lukewarm coffee

      18 min read

    • Article

      The Trouble Gene

      Jul 1, 2020

      One clear thing about trouble—it can set you back to zero, a personal cone of silence. And reading, writing, listening allow entry into that troubled solitude; you disappear into it regardless t of the time or place you really are in, be it bed, kitc

      12 min read

    • Article

      When World Stops Spinning

      Mar 29, 2020

      When World Stops Spinning
      3 min read

    • Article

      “Properties of Thirst”

      Jul 5, 2022

      “Properties of Thirst”
      11 min read

    • Article

      No Exit

      Apr 21, 2020

      No Exit
      6 min read

    • Article

      ‘They Put Me On A Ship And Took Me Into The Sun’: The Wild UFO Podcasts Taking Over Our Earphones

      Apr 7, 2023

      In the depths of winter last year, I was running through a cold and unlit field near my house when I saw a trail of lights moving through the sky. I stopped. The air caught in my throat. “Bloody hell,” I thought, “were the UFO people right all along?

      6 min read

    • Article

      Come the Renaissance

      May 20, 2020

      I’VE escaped from the Abbey. Am I skipping up the drive back to the house, swinging my guitar case and trilling I Have Confidence in Me? Not so much. Bit more Fidelio, if I’m honest: creeping, wan, unshaven, shielding my eyes from the unfamiliar sun.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Nov 3, 2022

      When I read David Hambling’s article ‘Listening to the voice within’ [FT423:16], I became conscious that my ‘inner voice’ was reading the piece aloud in my mind. Obviously I’ve had this realisation before; I decided to ask my wife if she also had an

      10 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      Are you ready? I nodded. She slid the needle inand the sick cat, who only a moment before had tried toleap to the floor closed his eyes and exhaled. Andthat’s it, she said a little too brightly, pulling the needle out.That’s it? I asked. That’s all t

      3 min read

    • Article

      Sweet Fantasy

      Nov 20, 2021

      Sweet Fantasy
      8 min read

    • Article

      Sci-Fi Has Changed A Lot In The Past Decade — These 7 Reads Will Show You How

      Aug 16, 2021

      This year's Summer Poll is all about the past decade in science fiction and fantasy, so we asked critic Jason Sheehan to come up with his own list of the new sci-fi that's blowing his mind.

      9 min read

    • Article

      International Books

      Oct 13, 2019

      Ever heard of the US Camel Corps? Me neither. The short-lived experiment (1855-1864) saw camels introduced into the US Army because they could bear enormous weights. (Turns out they had downsides, too.) Lurie, a young outlaw, falls in with the Turks

      4 min read

    • Article

      The 10 Strangest Dystopias

      Oct 7, 2021

      With the daily news seeming apocalyptic and standard dystopias feeling a little tame, Lincoln Michel breaks down some of the strangest dystopian novels. The post The 10 Strangest Dystopias appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Book Club

      Apr 26, 2023

      Book Club
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Zoo and Crowbar

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Zoo and Crowbar - Paul F. Clark

      David Zieroth

      Zoo

      and Crowbar:

      A Fable

      GUERNICA ESSENTIAL PROSE SERIES 109

      TORONTO – BUFFALO – LANCASTER (U.K.) 2015

      After so much disbelief,

      will something be beyond us to receive us?

      – C.K. Williams, Le Petit Salvié

      Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different – unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

      – Karen Thompson Walker,

      The Age of Miracles

      Table of Contents

      1

      2

      3

      4

      5

      6

      7

      8

      9

      10

      11

      12

      13

      14

      15

      16

      17

      18

      19

      20

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      Copyright

      ☐

      DRIVING ON THIRD, HIS CAR FILLED WITH THE smell of orange peels he chucked on the empty passenger seat, the radio on, Zoo was half- listening. And when the reporter in Africa stopped talking and fell with a thud to his studio floor, this was the beginning of Zoo’s separating from himself, which soon started to feel like a cut, like wretchedness coming after actual hurt, but instead of building immediately into pain, the leave-taking turned into soft dulling. He slowed the car to stop, suddenly faint, thinking he might be sick to his stomach, confused by his own reaction, sweat now on his forehead and hands. He decided to drive on; he was nearly home after all, asking himself what could happen here? He kept up the question. It helped him drive. His arms felt prickly, as if touched by thin needles, and then came a passivity he was grateful for. He switched off the radio and thought, I’m having an allergic reaction.

      What could happen here? The answer came at home when he pulled out an old portable TV from where it sat in the corner of the second bedroom, plunked it down on the coffee table in his living room, plugged it in and began surfing through the half dozen channels he could still pick up without Netplug. The French network had sent in an air device to record what was happening to people in Africa. Blown off course, it had missed the major population centres and drifted over the countryside where the commentators were shocked to see dead animals, the elephants that didn’t make it back to their famous burial ground the most obvious from that height.

      One pundit from Disease Control speculated that a new phenomenon, a fatal wind-blown virus like a malaria that mutates rapidly, was sweeping the continent. His idea was picked up and, before midnight, the announcers were speaking of ’The Wind.’ Banners ran across the bottom of the screen: Toxic Wind out of Africa Blows toward Israel. As it turned out, the banner was right: a rabbinical student in Haifa fell over, dead, and then within minutes, if the reports were right, a busload of Palestinians also died, most of them leaning, apparently, against one another, none of them panicked, although there were no pictures to confirm this. Zoo could no longer tell if these events were really happening or if he was witnessing an elaborate deception by the media, intended perhaps to produce mass hysteria – for reasons he couldn’t imagine.

      For a moment he thought he was watching an updated version of The War of the Worlds, and then he turned back to the screen, waiting for the event that would bring something home here in the West. He flipped channels, saw one announcer begin to stutter, the camera cutting away from her awkwardly. The webcam in Cairo showed a strangely calm city before the continent went dark once again. Seven hours had passed since he’d first heard of the Wind, and his phone hadn’t rung once. Neither had he thought of calling anyone.

      One plan he almost believed: the British government was prepared to bomb the first place affected in coastal Europe or anywhere close across the Channel. They argued that, if they blasted the Wind with nuclear force, it would be annihilated. When asked, a think-tank of European physicists said that the Wind was a force of non-dimensional anti-matter, emerging from behind the 90% of the universe we hadn’t yet been able to grasp, and that possibly a nuclear explosion could alter its makeup and send it back into a realm we knew nothing about.

      The spokesman said we were dealing with phenomena beyond our understanding, of an entirely unimagined nature. But perhaps a bomb would still work. Zoo sat on his couch and watched these men talking as if they were discussing the gravitational pull of the moon or some force that had been safely assigned its place. Their composure was broken at least once when the man with the large white moustache, his eyes wide with excitement and disbelief, wiped his brow with a crumpled blue handkerchief. One scene showed travellers in Heathrow shouting, and what looked like dancing, and then slumped along the walls. Shortly afterwards, Zoo fell into an abeyance of sensation almost like sleep.

      Later, he reached out and turned off the TV, not wanting new information about new death places, wanting instead to turn toward that non-dimensional anti-matter force that was now the only necessity. From the kitchen table he looked out on sunshine, and the city across the harbour was dreamy in its wintry light. He could see tiny corporate flags flapping at the tops of towers, and he wondered about the others who might be feeling this new way, for surely there were others ...

      He remembered scenes of panic, everyone wanting to be home, but finally any place sufficed because

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1