Animal Crackers

A zoo worker, cautiously washing down Marysue the elephant, considers the strange, grim fragments he's heard of his co-workers' lives. Giraffes demand better living conditions and stage a mock group suicide. A girl escapes her repressive finishing school to find freedom with the monkeys in the African jungle. Snake or dog, buffalo, cat or turkey, each animal in Hannah Tinti's brilliant, darkly comic collection holds up a disturbing mirror to the human beings around it.

From Publishers Weekly

Animals play the starring roles in Tinti's striking debut collection. In 11 highly original, sometimes gorgeous stories, they are freighted with the symbolic significance of all that is peculiar, cruel and loving in their human counterparts. "Big animals are like big problems," says the title story's zookeeper, but more often, it's people and their complex relationships to themselves and one another that cause the problems. In "Preservation," a young painter charged with restoring murals in a natural history museum's dioramas is haunted by the impending death of her artist father in the form of a stuffed black bear come to life. A woman mourns the loss of her lover while caring for his pet boa constrictor in "How to Revitalize the Snake in Your Life." Tinti's weaker stories"-Gallus, Gallus" and "Hit Man of the Year"-read more like parables and lack the psychological realism that makes her wildest notions work so brilliantly. At its best, Tinti's suburban gothic recalls Joy Williams, where violence is domesticated though no less horrifying: a mother commits murder and covers the body with breakfast cereal in "Home Sweet Home," while in "Bloodworks," a father with his own history of cruelty to animals discovers a dead kitten in his son's closet and worries that there is "something in the family blood." A redeeming generosity underlies the harsher realities in these stories, and it is to Tinti's credit that her zookeepers and pet owners, as flawed as they are, are as sympathetic as her wise giraffes and gentle bunnies. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Tinti boldly parses primal emotions in her stealthy short stories, which, like cats' paws, conceal weapons of great precision. Each tale posits interaction between animals and humans, which, rather than offering cuddly moments, lead to vicious or spooky confrontations. Zoos make perfect theaters for Tinti's creepy and caustic satires. In the title story, an unhappy zoo worker assigned the task of washing an elephant has a dire plan in mind, and in the Animal Farm-like "Reasonable Terms," giraffes enact a dramatic protest. A museum of natural history is the setting for "Preservation," Tinti's finest, most compassionate, and most richly metaphorical story. A rabbit, rooster, and boa constrictor play pivotal roles in alarming tales on the domestic front, in which ironically prosaic backdrops contrast with shocking acts of cold-blooded revenge and bloodshed. Tinti's fables are dark and wily, grim yet morbidly fascinating exposures of both our animal selves and our uniquely human psychoses. Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Inside Flap

With bravura storytelling, daring imagination, and fierce narrative control, this dazzling debut introduces that rare writer who finds humanity in our most unconventional behavior, and the humor beneath our darkest impulses.In these ten strange, funny, and unnerving stories, animals become the litmus test of our deepest fears and longings. In the title story, an elephant keeper courts danger from his gentle charge; in Miss Waldron s Red Colobus, a headstrong young woman in Africa is lured by the freedom of the monkeys in the trees; in Talk Turkey, a boy has secret conversations with the turkeys on his friend s family s farm; in Slim s Last Ride, a child plays chilling games with his pet rabbit; in Gallus Gallus, a pompous husband projects his anger at his wife onto her prized rooster.This fresh, inventive debut will introduce Hannah Tinti as one of the most gifted writers of her generation. Enter her world at your own risk, and you will come away bewitched.

From the Back Cover

"Hannah Tinti is who you want around a campfire or on a long road trip. The stories in ANIMAL CRACKERS willmake your head spin, your skin crawl, your heart jump."-Helen Ellis, author of Eating the Cheshire Cat"A whimsical cross between the Dr. Doolittle books and The Life of Pi. Original and funny, but also tough, touching, shocking, and enthralling."--Stephen Dixon, author of Frog, Interstate, and I

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

animal crackersIt's time to wash the elephant. Joseph has dragged out the hoses and I'm trying to prod Marysue out the door to the place we do it. Hup, I say, and poke her with a broom. I need to be careful--there is a part of me that steps into traffic--she eased her weight onto the last keeper's foot and the bones were crushed to pieces. I imagine my ex-wife lifting that giant ear and whispering, Step there.When I started, the staff treated me to a beer and showed me their scars. They said it would happen sooner or later. They said watch out. Everyone who works with animals has a mark somewhere.Joseph says big animals are like big problems. He should know, he's had his share--eighteen years old when the army shipped him to Cambodia. He came back okay, he says, only to get his arm chomped off by a Senegalese lion in a traveling circus. He's got a little stump coming from the end of his elbow that bends up and down. Like me, Joseph used to have a wife who isn't in the picture anymore. She left him for a soldier who'd also been in Cambodia. Joseph says it was his fault. He doesn't blame the lion.It's a warm day and I'm sweating in my coveralls. We scrub Marysue's legs and Joseph tells me another story, this one about his friend Al he met in the service (not the one who drove off into the sunset with his wife). I listen to him describe the jungle and turn my hose on the ground to make some mud. Marysue likes to roll in it. She scoops some up, throws it across her back, and I take a long-handled brush and rub it in. She looks at me with her mouth open and I think she is saying thanks.Joseph's friend Al was stationed near Phnom Penh and had a pet cockatoo he'd bought off the street for a buck. It would sit on his shoulder and squawk, feathers rippling, but mostly it just looked around and moved its feet back and forth. Al taught it to shit on command. He'd make it go on his friends as a joke, or on people he didn't like, for a different kind of joke.One day they were at a bar with the cockatoo flying around and it suddenly landed on Al's shoulder and let loose some of its sparkling white fruit. It had never done this before--Joseph laughed--but Al just sat and stared at it spackling down the camouflage green of his army jacket. He said, I'm going to die, and he did--somebody had booby-trapped his bike and it blew when he turned the ignition. Joseph said he saw the cockatoo flying around after that, looking for its master, and finally Joseph got so mad he knocked it out of a tree and broke its neck. He still had both his arms then.I watch Joseph to see how he's feeling, but he doesn't seem angry anymore. He slides a sponge across Marysue's feet and says that manatees have the same kind of rounded nails on their flippers. He says they're the closest thing elephants have to a relative. I try to imagine Marysue floating in the water, suddenly free of all that weight. Elephants can swim for miles, Joseph says. Somehow they know they're not going to sink.Sandy runs the monkey house. She is an attractive woman if you look at her from the left. When she turns, you can see the puckered skin and the crooked white line across her cheek into her chin where a gorilla took a bite out. The scar just touches the corner of her mouth, so when she smiles, the skin stretches and it looks like something's still holding on to her.She studied biology and zoology in college. After graduation she got hired by one of her professors as a research assistant and headed into the African jungle. She was thinking she had the touch, and it made her do things she shouldn't, like get too close to a newborn gorilla and have the mother come charging out of the bushes and bury her teeth in Sandy's face until the team they were traveling with shot her down. Sandy woke up in a hospital to doctors clicking their tongues as they sewed her skin back together over the bone.We went out on a date once. I took her to dinner and a movie and we got a drink afterward. She told me her old boyfriend used to make her keep her head turned when they made love, so he wouldn't have to look at it. Hearing all this made me uneasy, the way people can tell you secrets about themselves too soon and make you feel responsible. I took her home after that and left as soon as I could.Mike takes care of the sea lions, George and Martha. He has a master's degree in poetry and has worked here, scrubbing the tank, for seven years. Each day at noon he performs a show, throwing fish from a pail to George and Martha as they bob on the surface of the water. Afterward, if the boss isn't around, he tries to sell copies of his chapbook to the crowd.One evening after we split a bottle of schnapps, our pants rolled up and our feet in the sea lion pool, Mike told me about how he went diving at night off the coast of Mexico with a few of his buddies. He said jumping into the ocean after dark is like stepping down into a graveyard, falling through the earth, bumping into coffins and bodies, and feeling all of the lost bits and pieces of souls that have seeped into the soil come looking for you. He said he'd never do it again.The men brought underwater lights to look at things. They attached glow sticks to their tanks, each a different color--green, yellow, purple. They held on to their masks and regulators and fell in backward.The group went down about eighty feet and let the current take them. Bugs swarmed their flashlights, and Mike could feel little insects wiggling against him as they got caught in his wet suit. He saw giant lobsters, jellyfish, skates, sharks, and other strange things he didn't know the names for, creatures that only come out at night.Then Mike swept the light below. Just beyond the beam was an enormous scaly movement that didn't seem to end--part of a manta wing, or the curve of a tail. The animal churned steadily beneath him and there were things hanging--spines or leeches--bits of detritus in its wake. Mike willed himself not to panic. He turned off his light, as if caught spying on his neighbors, and paused in the stillness of the water. Then he swam as fast as he could.He stopped at thirty feet for safety, to keep from getting the bends. He clicked on the flashlight and looked behind him. There was an eel. A school of fish. Mike watched the green glow of a light stick slowly moving toward him and felt a gathering of relief. Together he and his friend treaded water, back and forth, while they waited for their buddy to join them. They could see the purple color of him in the distance.When he didn't come any closer, they got nervous and went after him. He wasn't there. It was only his tanks settled on the ocean floor, the glow stick swaying like a weather vane in the direction of a bad wind. They went back to the boat, but he wasn't there either and by then they were out of reserve. They radioed for help. Mike used a snorkel and his flashlight to keep looking, but he stayed close to the boat. They never found the body.Mike threw the empty schnapps bottle into the pool. We were both quiet for a while. I had my fingers wrapped around the railing and I thought about all the little kids who would be pressing their faces against the glass tomorrow. We had some more quiet between us and then he waded in to fish it out.You hear animal stories every day. How a bee stung little Johnny and he went into cardiac arrest. How a snake bit Cousin Tom and it shriveled up his toe. How a pack of dogs chased Aunt Shirley down the street until she climbed through an open car window, rolled it shut behind her, and watched the animals circling, pawing the doors, their wet noses leaving streaks on the chrome. These stories are supposed to give warning.Joseph scrapes away at the bottom of Marysue's foot. He touches her below the knee and she lifts her leg automatically, as if his fingers are telling her something important. I know not to make any sudden movements now. She watches me as if I might attack, because this is when another animal would come, when she is not ready to protect herself. Her eyes seem too small for such a large body. She keeps her trunk on Joseph's back, feeling around, making sure of what is happening to her.Joseph says that in the wild when elephants feel threatened, they put the young and the weak in the middle and form a circle around them. I wonder if Marysue has family somewhere. If they tried to save her from being tagged and shipped. I picture her searching for a tail to hold on to while the others paw the ground and get ready to charge.Ann runs the ticket booth. Her cat, Stinky, comes to work with her every day. Ann keeps a small basket by her feet, where he sleeps. Stinky doesn't have any fur. His skin hangs down between his legs like an old man wearing a diaper. Ann says Stinky saved her life.She tells me about one night in September when she woke up to a blazing light in her room. Her bed was vibrating and she thought it was an earthquake until she felt her body rise and start to move toward the window. The sash flew up and the screen was ripped off. Ann says what came next was like the sting you get before frostbite, followed by a numbness that crept from her fingers and toes and moved through her thighs, her shoulders, and on toward her heart. She tried to scream, but her throat was swollen tight.Stinky jumped onto the windowsill and started hissing. He had fur then, Ann says, orange and yellow swirled together, and it stood on end, prickling against the beam like needle points. Stinky bared his teeth and Ann says his eyes reflected the light so intensely it looked like lasers shooting out of him, and suddenly everything went dark and Ann dropped to the ground, hitting the back of her head on the bedside table. She clutched the rag rug on the floor around her and crawled underneath the mattress, where she lay stunned until morning. When daylight came and she had enough courage to come out, she found the window still open, shreds of the screen in the bushes out...

From AudioFile

In this collection, animals play a central role in telling the stories of the human characters. Laural Merlington and Dan John Miller narrate, separately and together. Their narrations are as varied and versatile as the stories. They use pace, accents, and slight differences in tone to good advantage. The tightly constructed stories offer surprises, in many cases, as the mundane opens up to the unexpected. The humor is generally dark. Merlington and Miller's even and straightforward presentations enhance the contrasts and sometimes-disturbing effects. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

About the Author

Hannah Tinti’s work has been published in Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, Story Quarterly, Sonora Review and is forthcoming in Epoch. She earned her M.A. from New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program and has received residency fellowships from the Blue Mountain Center and Hedgebrook. Hannah Tinti’s first book, a story collection called ANIMAL CRACKERS, was published by Dial Press in March 2004 and quickly went into a second printing. It was a runner up for the 2005 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. One of the stories (‘Home Sweet Home’) appeared in BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2003.

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