The Day the King of the Jungle Died

Bzzzzzz…Bzzzzzz…Bzzzzzz…

Joe woke up to the humming of AC.

Maria left a few wrinkles on the bedsheet on her side of the bed. She’s making breakfast now, judging by the scent of batter and syrup. Sleep had not yet left Joe’s eyelids, but he managed to find his way to the bathroom, listlessly squeezing toothpaste onto his toothbrush. Another day.

He sat down for breakfast, turning on the erected screen on the table. Maria was frying pancakes in the kitchen, batter splashing onto her black hair and painting it with droplets of yellow. 

“Honey, you should probably wake up Christina. She needs extra time today to dress up for the school play,” Maria shouted from the kitchen while grease smeared onto her apron.

With a grunt, Joe rose from his seat and pounded on Christina’s door. In a few minutes, the entire family was seated at the breakfast table, silent without a word and mouthing their food. Joe fidgeted with the screen; at last, he opened the NYTimes app.

As colors and sounds flashed through the screen, the voice of a narrator caught the family’s attention. Last night, the last big cat on this planet died. Joe scrolled down, letting out a sigh as another voice popped up with flashing colors and background music you would hear at Walmart’s on a Monday. Max, the last lion on Earth, just passed away. As Joe frantically scrolled down, all the news today seemed to be about the same thing. That’s strange. 

Joe was about to turn off the screen when Maria told him to leave it on. The lone voice of an old man now filled the room, hoarse and teary and silent without music. 

My name is Nedelko Berge. I am an ecology professor at the University of Oslo. Yesterday, the last lion, Max, just died. [cough] 

His voice almost cracked under the weight of his words. 

Years of sea level rising and wildfires, induced by climate change, have diminished their habitats. Only a small group of lions and other large cats survived this catastrophe. However, their small population had limited genetic diversity.

He choked on the word “diversity”.

As we predicted, all large cats became extinct within a few decades. 

Deep breath.

We, as humans, have perpetrated this genocide…

Tears, stemming from the anguish of the professor, burst from Christina’s deep brown eyes like the gushes of ocean waves that had flooded Manhattan. Her face, now red, spoke of a desperate sadness, the kind when a child lost her favorite toy. Fists clenching the arms of her chair, fighting to grab on before falling into vertigo. For she had always dreamed of being a zoologist. For she read countless books about lions and giraffes and chimpanzees in her spare time. For she will never have the chance to see the savannah in person. For when her teacher asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said zebra.

So she couldn’t let them take away lions from her. Not without a fight.

Maria and Joe couldn't comfort her.

— — — 

Joe sighed. I should take her to the zoo over the weekend. 

Flooding destroyed coastal areas of Manhattan, and now the rest of Manhattan was also under risk of being submerged. Billionaires spent hundreds of billions to build skyscrapers in the Bronx and tore down the ones in Manhattan, so poverty was exterminated from the face of the Bronx. The Bronx was now the center of commerce, the center of prosperity, and the center of lavishness. Joe worked in one of the black pane buildings in the new Bronx, working software maintenance for a company managing AI models

The bus to work screeched to a stop. But it wasn't a bus stop. A crowd of protestors had blocked the road. From the windshield, Joe saw the sunlight reflected from the crowd’s sunglasses, and they appeared to be chanting some unintelligible message. The signs they held formed a field of anger, and Joe was able to catch a glimpse of the few closest ones. Down with fossil fuel! Bring back lions! Stop Destroying. 

With the thud of distant footsteps getting louder, the driver hesitantly took a U-turn to flee the crowd. I am going to be late for work now, Joe thought.

His boss had yelled at him for being late, and Joe knew better than to talk back. His boss had always been tough on him, but it’s hard to find another job that could pay for the family, so Joe swallows the insults when necessary. Today, however, she didn’t seem all that interested in giving him a litany of complaints. After a few words, his boss brought him to her office. On her desk, there was a thick file of paper with yellow covers. 

“Come on,” she said, “you have some work to do today.

“Change the entries for lions. Apparently they’re all extinct.” She sighed and handed Joe the file. 

“I thought that was the system’s job.”

“Not today. System’s down today. There was a fire near our database, so we had to shut down the system,” she turned her attention away from Joe, “try to finish this before leaving today.”

What could he do? Joe sat at his desk and began typing “extinct” into the entries one by one. Seven thousand entries forced his sombre hands onto the keyboard. Joe’s hand became mechanical as he moved through each entry. 

— — — 

A phone call woke Joe up from typing. He picked up. 

“Honey, could you pick up Christina from school?” Maria sounded urgent on the phone.

“Why? It’s still early. I thought you were gonna pick her up.”

“I can’t explain right now. I have an emergency meeting. If I don’t show up, I’ll be fired!” She hung up.

Joe was prepared for the worst when his boss reluctantly agreed to his unplanned leave. He promised to finish the entries after picking up Christina to finish his work, and he hurried out of the office, catching a sigh of relief.

Christina and her teacher were waiting for him at the school gate. They exchanged a few greetings, and her teacher explained that Christina had punched another kid in school. Joe listened half-heartedly as he watched tears meander down her sun-kissed cheeks. The tears joined up to form a river, and when one part dried up, fresh tears flooded in. 

Her hand was cold and shivering in fear when he caressed it. Gently, as a father always does, he warmed her hand with his and moved her chestnut-colored hair away from her damp face. Soon, they were on their way back home.

“So why did you punch a kid? We’ve always taught you to be nice to others,” Joe asked as they walked, her hands in his. The crying had now almost ceased entirely. Christina was still choking on her last tears.

She cried, “He told me that lions are not real. He lied!”

She gripped her father’s hands tighter and moved closer to him. Joe didn’t know how to respond.

— — —

Back at work, Joe was struggling to stay awake. Every once in a while his brain snapped at him, forcing him to stay awake amidst the most mundane of work. He had become a thing of diesel and gear, cranking out entries with numbness. “Extinct” was now a fragment of jumbled letters, and he had to punch this meaningless cacophony into every undeserving slot. 

It was night already when he was done. He felt dizzy from the whole day of scorching heat when he walked into their apartment. Christina was crying in her room. Maria’s head was in her hands. 

“People are stupid! People are stupid!” Christina sobbed relentlessly. “Why would they kill lions!”

Joe washed his face, covered in soot that drifted from the power plants miles away from the city. He took a deep breath. Outside, rain poured down from the clouds much like Christina’s tears. A taint of rusty red gouged the sky as ominous grey swirled about and pounded the city with billions of powerful fists. New York’s climate has been altered as rain was driven into the city from the south. Rainstorms during summertime were no longer a surprise.

Joe sat down next to Christina, bringing her into his arms. Holding her hands in his again, but this time the downpour would not stop. Maria was in the doorway, and their eyes met with a bewildered helplessness. But Maria had an idea. 

She came back into the room with a carton of vanilla ice cream. 

She handed Christina the ice cream. Gradually, the tears retreated. Spoonfuls of ice cream were gone from the carton. Soon enough, she was tucked in bed, a tinge of smile emerged behind the remnants of the storm. She hugged and kissed her father goodnight, and slowly faded away into the realm of imagination under the humming of the AC. 

In the master bedroom, Joe was in the blankets, too. Maria was already soundly asleep. He was not. Right before he drifted off, he was thinking about the weekend.

I should probably take her to the zoo. There’s no more lions though. But I bet zebras, flamingos, and hippos will do.