This is the memory palace, of Nate de Mayo.

The old woman kneeling at the altar in the flickering candlelight lost in prayer.

Didn't hear the bear had into the Church of St. Thomas, and so her death, which came as

the grizzly teeth sank into her throat, while horrible, was sudden and swift and therefore

relatively merciful, as these things go.

The young nanny holding close her young charges in the back of a horse-tron carriage couldn't

protect them from the lion when he pounced and took all four children away.

The young women, seamstresses who had put down their needles and thimbles and scissors,

to stroll for a spell in the sun, didn't expect to see a rhinoceros tear through the

park, nor its horn tear through their friend, Nate Thomas.

The New Yorkers who woke up on a November Monday in 1874, to a headline in the herald that

screamed of, a shocking Sabbath carnival of death, were stunned to learn what had taken

place in their city mere hours before, as they read about the rhino at the Central Park

Zoo.

In the zookeeper who poked it with a stick through the thin bars of its cage, taunting it

for no good reason, just as the last visitors were filing out through the gates at the end

of the day, until the rhino started ramming its body against the bending bars, until they

broke.

As did the bones of the zookeeper, as the beast barreled over him, and rampaged on, smashing

the cages of other animals until the panther, and the lions and the tiger and the bears,

grizzly and puller, in wolves there were wolves too, were all somehow let loose to run

a muck, cackling hyenas, shrieking monkeys and apes, swinging free, swinging for the trees

...