"People pass me in the street, they see me, but they try to ignore me. They'd prefer I wasn't part of their city."
Bird Lady, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
It had taken some doing to find a flat-topped building in Tundra Town. With the endless presence of snow, ensured by the climate wall for the sake of its denizens, most structures were topped with sharp peaks or domes like inverted onions to save the cost of perpetual snow removal. Yet conveniently for the mammal making his way up the bleak and dun-gray stairwell inside of it, this building was flat-roofed. It was almost as if whatever god or gods there might be had, after heaping stone after stone upon his back, seen fit to grant him this kindness – or else, having driven him to his fate, had chosen now to expedite it. He might have gone to some other part of the city, but this one had… conveniences.
Reaching the door to the roof, he slipped a key from his pocket. If there was one advantage to being a small mammal in a city so full of large ones, it was the ability to go unnoticed. The musk ox assigned to clear the snow from the roof had never realized that one of his keys had disappeared and returned again, leaving a gleaming new copy in the borrower's possession. If it was a sin, the borrower was not concerned in answering for it. The key would be gone soon enough.
It took some doing to reach the lock and push the door ajar. His leg, damaged beyond repair when he was still young and lively, made for slow going, and with the rest of his body weak he had to stop and rest several times from jumping. Moreover, there was a bad wind blowing outside which pushed against the door as though some angel, trying to turn him from his course, meant to thwart the one wish left to him. Yet his old skills had not forsaken him yet, and if he had but one wish he would grapple for it with all his might, be it against flesh or phantom. Driving his toe-claws into the old sheet rock wall, he managed at last to wedge his way into the doorway. With a final effort, he was through and the door shut with a bang behind him.
Now he was out in the wind and the snow, and though he tried to shield his face the flakes stung him like a thousand tiny needles. There was a half-foot of snow on the roof, coming up to his knees and soaking the fur of his feet. It mattered nothing, and he forged his way through it toward a low wall surrounding the rooftop.
Weary from his battle with the door, and with the wind fighting to throw him down as if that bothersome cherub meant to wrestle him flat, he could not jump up onto the wall. Instead he struggled up, standing sideways to the wind as it chilled his face and numbed his paws. His ears were hidden under a ski mask, though it had openings for them. Gazing down at the stretch of city below him, he eyed his mark.
Running past the building on which he stood was one of the district's ice flows; channels of running salt water with pieces of ice floating therein. They served as a kind of moving sidewalk for mammals who favored saved energy over the warmth that came by walking. For him, however, they served another purpose, such that it was for them that he had chosen this district… in which to end his life.
He had calculated it well enough. Math and physics had always come easily to him. The wind would not carry him so far as to miss the water, though it was harder to say whether he would hit floating ice or flowing liquid. It made little difference. At this height the water might as well be the street beyond it. Its' sole advantage was that he might sink in it, and lie there until the trumpet sounded for all he or any other mammal cared.
Sighing out a puff of fog, he thrust a paw into his pocket and drew out a folded stack of papers. In a quiet whisper he uttered what were to be his final wishes.
"I, Shamus Stampett, being of sound mind if not sound body, do hereby present my last will and testament."
Out came a paper from the stack.
"The final notice on my rent, I leave to the winds." The paper was almost snatched from his paw before he could let it go, and shot away into the darkening twilight spinning and twisting like some battered pinwheel.
"My medical results, I also leave to the wind." Another paper joined its adopted brother, carrying with it news that the illness had grown worse.
"My balance with the hospital, also to the winds."
"My identity, to the water."
He watched numbly as a little plastic card, tied to a piece of broken brick, plunged down toward the ice flow. It was too far down to see or hear the splash, but he knew it had reached the water.
He took out the key and threw that as well, but a sudden shift in the wind flung it behind him to vanish untraceable in the snow on the rooftop. He shrugged in indifference. Perhaps the caretaker would find it. It was his by rights anyway, unless one wished to make an argument of his carelessness in letting the original disappear.
At last the figure started to lean forward, waiting for the moment when he would plunge into the abyss. Yet before he overbalanced, a sudden twitch ran through his body like one who has been shocked or who suddenly jolts on the verge of sleep. He wavered and toppled back into the snow on the roof.
"Agh!" he cried as the fall jostled his leg the wrong way. He hissed through his teeth and struggled up, climbing again to the edge. Yet he was not so resolved this time, and a fearful coldness entered into his inner parts as he looked down towards his intended sepulcher.
No, a part of his mind uttered in cold horror. He had a flash of himself lying frozen at the bottom of the waterway, and shuddered at the picture of it; a lifeless thing wearing his face.
Yet, was he not already dead to all purpose? What was life if not more pain, more sorrow, more isolation? Had a wise mammal not once said, "If I die, I am promoted"? Again he leaned forward, and again he drew back, though this time was less a spasm and more of a flinch.
So he tottered for an interminable period, faced with but one choice and yet afraid to seize it. He had nothing to go back to, no one to miss him… and that was even if he could get the door open, which was now impossible. Even if he didn't jump, he would freeze to death in a couple of hours. That might be more peaceful, but… no. To stay up there was to ensure discovery, and with it pity. He would not be pitied; he couldn't bear that emasculating indignity, even in death. If he would die he would have one last rush and then obscurity. The only way off the roof was forward to a swift end, and then to sleep.
A thought struck him, and jumping back onto the rooftop he pulled out his phone; the one thing he hadn't tossed over the edge. This struck him as strange, but now it proved convenient. Music, he thought, unlocking the device with numb, shivering fingers. One last song to ease my nerves for the dive.
He chuckled then. The typical last bit of pleasure, at least in all the old movies, was a cigar. Perhaps he should have brought one; he'd always wondered what the attraction was, and what had he to worry about? He was already doomed. The sentence of death was in his very flesh and bones. Music would do, though. He opened the apps menu and reached for the Music icon.
A sudden shiver made his paws shake, and instead of Music he hit the News app by accident. "Blast it," he hissed under his breath as the window opened. He tried to close it and get to his intended destination as soon as possible, but just as he closed it the page loaded and he got a flash of a face… and a name.
What?! he thought as the app closed. His heart, though already beginning to feel cold and sluggish, gave a painful twist. No! Come back! With all his might, he willed his paws to open the app again and prayed – if such it might be called with so little hope of being heeded – that the selection system would not take him to some other story in the endless shuffling mass of news.
Then there she was… a small figure seated on a stretcher, with the shot so zoomed in that clues to her whereabouts were virtually non-existent. He could not have cared less about that, though. All that mattered was the face… and the headline.
Judy Hopps Back. Rabbit Officer Exposes Plot.
The headline – apart from the atrocious pun – was scarcely informative, but the first three words seized his attention as swiftly and held it as firmly as a starving alligator. For a long moment all he could do was stare at the picture as though he were seeing a ghost. Yes, a ghost, but the ghost of an old and dearly cherished friend.
Judy?
He had known her once, long ago when they were young. Their friendship had been brief due to the hands of fate and family, but there had been a camaraderie close enough to set a few tongues wagging. It was all empty talk. A rock sitting alone in the woods had, he surmised, more romance than the both of them put together. Yet she had shared his peculiarity, and when he learned that she was in the city – and moreover that she had achieved her dream where his had died beyond any hope – he had watched for her in the headlines every day. He was no stalker; the thought of contacting her barely even tickled at the edges of his mind, busy as he was with his treatments. Yet despite having no idea he was in the city, she had impacted him… for better and for worse. When the headlines exploded with news of her resignation, his heart broke within him and the brief improvement in his health crashed into the dust.
Now, so much later, he fervently read the rest of the article, taking it in like a starving mammal who eats so fast as to taste nothing. Two things did catch his attention: that she had been hospitalized for minor injuries, and that – according to the closing line – it was unclear whether she would resume her career with the police.
Ha! he thought, the reporter's ignorance making him smile for the first time in… how long had it been? More than three months, for certain. Yet now he nearly laughed. If Judy was anything like she had been in her younger days, her future was sure as summer, as his old uncle Ben used to say. Yes, she was the same; at any rate she wore the same old 'I don't know when to quit' smile. She'd be back alright. Within a week most likely, she'd be back on patrol if she had to do it in a wheelchair.
You always were a fighter, Judo Judy, he thought, recalling the old nickname. Some kid whose name he'd long since forgotten had stuck it on her in mockery, but she had worn it with pride – kind of like the song "Yankee Gnu-dle."
Yes, she had always been a fighter… and like a ray of sun slowly breaking through the clouds, it came on him that if she were there at that moment, he knew what she would say. She would tell him to keep fighting, and convince him too. Though he'd always had the advantages of size and strength, any sort of debate had always been over before it began. If there was a mammal who could win an argument with her, he'd want to shake their paw; the paw of the finest wordsmith in the state, if not the galaxy.
She would tell me to fight, he reflected. She'd tell me not to stop; to keep trying no matter what.
He looked up again; not at the street this time, but at the skyline and the sun still visible up here, though in many parts of the city below it was as good as night. The tapestry of reds, oranges, yellows, and purples decorating the skyline stood out brightly over a city whose lights were now beginning to blink on; the same city as so many other nights, and yet now different.
Wrong had been made right. The savage predator attacks were over now, and the villain behind them was now under lock and key. Mammals would go to sleep in peace that night who had, for so long it seemed like forever, lived every moment in fear that they or someone they knew would turn in an instant into a crazed killer. For the vast population of Zootopia, life could begin anew.
And somewhere out there – maybe in a hospital bed or a private one or even on a couch – lay one mammal who just might remember her old friend. One mammal whom, he was sure, he could tell anything in the world without fear of dismissal or doubt or the dozen other things that had held him silent for so very long.
The wind still blew, though, and the snow still jabbed. He sighed and turned to the door, still shut against him. It was just as cold, impassive, and impenetrable as before. Yet now that hope had come back to his heart, it brought with it its brother, inspiration.
An hour later, the door jostled as a large, heavy animal shoved at the other side. Through several grunts and a nasal bellow or two, a hairy head and shoulders came into view. The musk ox was so intent on his work that he never noticed the hollowed-out cave in the mound of snow by the door… or the tiny form slipping through the gap he had made in the door. Nor did either of them quite detect – though the latter had perhaps a small inkling of it – how the subsiding wind sounded strangely musical in that little form's wake.
Shivering and slapping his paws together to get the blood flowing, the small mammal was already thinking over his options. He'd find a place to spend the night, and then… oh, there was no knowing what he'd do next. He would think of something, though. He would find a way, and now he had at least one goal in life; one thing on his To Do list to keep him going.
I've got to see Judy again, he thought. Somehow, I have to find her… and tell her what she just did.
Every year, countless people all over the world end their own lives for one reason or another. Some do so because they feel they will never measure up, some because they want to escape regrets for the things they've done, some because they feel life has no meaning, and some because, like this unfortunate mammal, they just want to die on their own terms. The causes and means are many, but the reality is always terrible – and made worse because in most cases, the key common thread is a sense that no one is listening.
I don't really know why it first came upon me to write this story, but it happens that this is Suicide Awareness Month and the weight of it came so heavily on me that I had to put aside even working on my books to put this piece together. As I told a friend early in the process, I truly felt that God was compelling me to write it. I still feel that way. It seemed appropriate to do it this way and have Judy's actions in the movie unwittingly stop a suicide because something of the kind happened in real life. Some of you may know the band Third Day. I don't know if their song, I Need a Miracle had any role in inspiring this story or not, but it has much the same plot and was based on a story a fan told them about one of their other songs actually saving his life. The truth is that, like Judy and Third Day, sometimes we really don't know the impact of our actions. To condense Judy's words, though, "But we have to try. So I implore you, try."
The first part of this story was written to Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. The latter, starting about where the character smiles, was written to In Like a Lion (Always Winter) by Relient K, and toYou Know Better Than Ifrom the movie Joseph, Prince of Dreams. If any of those needs explanation, I suggest listening to them. I just don't have the words.
All I can say in closing is please, try. If you're thinking of suicide or know someone who is or even just have a concern about the issue, please. Don't. Give. Up.
Special thanks to Cimar of Turalis WildeHopps for proofreading.