Penny Woods - Issue 36

PR Woods has been published by Adda, East of the Web, Ellipsis Zine, Fictionable, Globe Soup, Litro, the Manchester Review, Reflex Press and Westword. She won the Parracombe Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth and Mslexia short story competitions 2021. She lives in London. Find her on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/pudsk.bsky.social

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MENAGERIE ON MARS

First, they sent the cats.

And, for a while, people missed them. Old ladies were worst hit. No furry sleekness wrapped around their legs. No mewling that reminded them of babes that had long since fled the nest. The courtyards and gardens fell silent. We felt, in the absence of purring, the earth’s gentle vibrations once again. 

Gradually though, we decided we liked it. The windows let in more light with no somnambulant silhouettes on the sills. There were no litter trays to empty, no unwelcome deposits on the grass, no night-time screeching. Birds gradually re-emerged, cautiously at first, heads cocked, one eye on the cat flap, not believing it would now stay closed forever. Firecrests bathed in the dirt, shyly then luxuriously. Mistle thrushes began to own the lawns once more. 

The dogs missed the cats of course, so we distracted them with bright lights and squeaky toys. We taught them to chase their own tails again.

Then they sent the monkeys, from tiny, dopey-eyed tarsiers to the larger primates: the gorillas, the gibbons and the chimpanzees. There was an outcry when the orangutans went. The doors of the cages in the zoo were left open, swinging in the breeze. Signs went up around the enclosures: “Little Joe went on the 117th animal mission to Mars. We miss him lots but we just know he’s having a great time up there.” There was even a cartoon of a gorilla and an orangutan with their arms around each other, each holding a cocktail in their other hand.

Strangely, the animal rights brigade were the most enthusiastic. Like we were returning them to an Eden where predator and prey worked it out among themselves without human interference. Animals thrive when they’re left alone, don’t they? It was so natural. Rewilding, even if the astrophysicists could never decide how wild Mars really was, and if it was our kind of wild, or something redder. Angrier. 

All the animals wore monitors, so we could track their movements, and the world gazed at the gravelly satellite images, like we ogle at the funeral of a famous person, or a celebrity wedding. They swore one of the bonobos even waved at us. As one world, one humanity, we waved back, which made as much difference as recycling a crisp packet. 

When the tracking showed an animal hadn’t moved for days, we told ourselves it was injured or – exciting! – giving birth. We accepted some would die. Natural selection. Someone has to land on red. If the screen suddenly went blank, we assumed an animal had knocked the receivers over, or rubbed up against a tree and broken its body cam.

Except there were no trees. But there would be something like a tree, we told ourselves. When we could not see the animals, or track them any more, that was the freedom we’d promised to them and to us. It didn’t mean a death, not always, not every time.

The cat-free honeymoon for the birds was short-lived, because we sent them up soon after. The skies fell silent, the dawn chorus became a song of alarms and Alexa and combustion engines. So not really silence at all. And we were relieved, you know? No shit on our shoulders or our windscreens. We could eat our chips in peace on the beach, and didn’t need to save our crumbs for the ducks, because the ponds were empty – no, not empty; spacious, free of interference, broad and wide. Living space – isn’t that what all creatures need, really? And isn’t that what we were trying to give them, and us?

It felt strange though, to walk through the squares and not have the paving stones cluttered with ashy pigeons squawking and pecking at our feet. Were pigeons grey? That’s how we remember them but then someone said, no, they had little splashes of white on their necks, like the grey paint had run out. And didn’t they, some of them, have a swirl of sunset pink on their breast? Perhaps that was wishful remembering, drawing a rainbow on to a memory when sepia would do just as well. The heavens were our own once more. 

When someone said, should we send the octogenarians, we laughed, a little uncertainly. Did they mean the oldest animals of all the creatures, or did they mean something else? Scientists pointed out that the octogenarians, of any species, aren’t known for prolific breeding so the idea was filed away, for reference.

We sent the foxes and the bats, the rats and the mice. We sent the Etruscan shrew and the small-clawed otters. The spiny squirrels and the bare-bellied hedgehogs – all the little mammals were caught and we finally had the world we’d been waiting for. Earth was declared free of rodents, and the street parties went on all night. 

Zoonoses disappeared, although we still had cancer, and heart attacks, and diabetes, so there wasn’t much of a rest for the nurses, not like they had promised. The vets started to help out.

The streets were so clean, for a while. Bulging rubbish bins lay dormant, as there were no fox cubs to scavenge and play. The grass grew over the mole hills. The holes in the river banks filled with water. We left cheese out in every room, and nothing even stirred. 

Yet, before long, the landfill sites and the drains overflowed. Some of us muttered that maybe the animals had been clearing up after us all this time. We built bigger bins and buried more rubbish and the air started to smell different. We stopped watching the live cams and we switched off the monitors. 

But one day, the rats came back. 

We don’t know how they did it; impossible, they said. Must have been a secret community of rodents that wasn’t discovered in the first purge. Or perhaps they had help; not all the scientists were on board with the project. We woke one morning to find paw prints in the butter. Whiskers peering round the edges of street corners. The sound of scampering through our pipes. They took over the underground when the weather turned hot, and nibbled their way through the oversized suitcases of indecisive tourists. They chewed on chubby toes squeezed into sandals. The rats grew and grew as they ate up the food we thought we’d buried then, for dessert, gorged themselves on the fruit bushes that the birds no longer stripped. 

We put bleach down the drains and closed all the windows. We shoved wire wool into every crevice and installed electric traps. We emitted high-pitched noises through the radio waves that, they claimed, only the rats could hear. 

And now we’re hunkered down, we’re hiding, we’re stocking up and waiting until it all passes. We’re not afraid! Us humans are all in it together.

Only, the thing is, I’ve been trapped in here for days now, and the scratching at my bedroom door is getting louder.