The Zoo
Doctor Joseph Gardner walks the linoleum halls with a smile on his face most days. He likes to remember how he used to play with animals on the street as a kid in his Virginian suburban neighborhood. He likes to remember how they comforted him when the children at school would turn away, when his parents would get loud, his toddler sister would cry, and the whole house seemed like it was screeching. He remembers fondly his interest in science during his middle school years, when he discovered he's a genius, when he discovered the frogs, the smell of formaldehyde that lingered in the classroom and on the students’ clothes (and how in high school it was a small pig). It was in high school that he decided to go into animal medicine and graduated two years early, and it was in college that his sister Abigail was paralyzed in a car accident that was caused by another one of his parents’ ugly fights.