response to epistolary project

Dear Lycaon pictus,
Today, as I stared at you, standing so stiffly alone with your partner (did you know your twin previously, or did you become brothers by womblike shipping crates or thousands of miles traveled to reach this final resting place?) I stare at you, moving toward a painted backdrop, head turned to gaze behind. I read on the informational sign that your packs used to run in the hundreds, but are now reduced to mere thirties or twenties. I started to wonder of your ancestors, thriving in their community of a hundred yapping brothers and sisters. Then I started to wonder of your own pack. Do you miss them? Do you miss their soft breathe blowing warmly from their snouts, exchanging with your own, or their flanks dancing in and out as you lay in the African sunlight, or their soft fur, whose touch you know by heart, as it softly brushes against your own? Are you lonesome without your tribe?

Did you ever live in Africa, or were you born in captivity, a child of cement walls? And do you wish your body had decomposed in the dusty savannah, feeling the wind and earth hugging your bones in mourning, after vultures ceremoniously tore you to shreds?

Are you sad the last warmth of another being you felt, was a gloved hand, pressing you down as a cold scalpel was brought to your belly?

And now, you are put to rest in an air-controlled room, where you may occasionally be dusted from time to time, and are stared at by thousand of onlookers not much different from myself. There we stand, momentarily still gaping at you, frozen in that position, forever looking back at something the rest of us can’t see?
-P