After climbing the zoo’s iron fence, Cici Tattel followed hoof prints painted on the asphalt road to Grassland Grotto. She had read that the giraffe, Marana, a longtime resident, had given birth to a calf, named, after a contest sponsored by the Star newspaper, Chad.

The rain quit and the clouds cleared to reveal a hump-shaped gibbous moon illuminating the mother and son who stood in a corral attached to their shed. A metal sculpture shaped like a tree provided the only adornment. Chad stood under his mother. Occasionally, she reached her neck around to nuzzle him. Cici could understand their language now, not only the gestures, which resembled those horses use, but giraffe-language, translated into English. To speak, one merely imagined a thought and the other, if willing, receives it. Marana did most of the talking. Cici listened, content on the railing’s edge where Marana told her to balance. She was born in the horn of Africa, Marana told Cici, on the edge of a forest. Once, she said, she stood with her body in the forest and her head on the plain to attempt to inhabit two worlds. She never thought she would have to adapt to such another as this one, where food was brought to her on the end of a fork and she could never gallop again. As she spoke, the spots on her body swirled into paisley patterns. Chad smelled like honey, reminding Cici of peanut butter sandwiches she made when she and her brother Adam played in the woods on late fall days when they were small.

Cici studied the shape of their pen. In eighth-grade, she took Latin until the teacher, Mr. Roman, worn out by the Fester brother’ spit wads,which stuck to his posters of curly-haired men in togas, and their tipping chairs that made him jump when they clattered to the linoleum floor, quit halfway through the school year. Mr. Roman, in spite of or because of his surname, was well-suited to teaching Latin.

One day, he drew on the chalkboard a circle. This is a corral, he told the students. Cici sat up and watched his hand which was covered with brown hair like a bear paw. She had written long sentences about her horses in elemental Latin and illustrated them. She was earning an ‘A.’ Define means to fix boundaries, to draw a circle of meaning, Mr. Roman said standing back to admire the empty “O.” This is how labels come to be. Cici had thought of Jay who was “black,” and she “white” thought neither was a color found in a box. She thought of her mother, labeled “mom,” and her friend’s mother, also “mom,” and how the one seemed never satisfied with her daughter and the other perhaps too much so. She thought of John West who was “employee” but also “friend” and, sometimes “father,” and how that label was officially reserved for Ben, who owned the stable. She thought of Adam, whose name came from Hebrew for “first human,” and Michelangelo’s depiction of the first Adam showing a reclining lazy-looking blonde, man reclining with an indifferent look on his face, receiving, in spite of his bland expression, the full attention of God. She thought the painting defined her “brother,” bound to her by blood and name.

As dawn opened the clam shell of day the mother giraffe told Cici that her species name was Camelopardalis, from Latin, meaning “camel-leopard.” Humans, she said, noticed a long neck and thought “camel,” and spots and thought “leopard.” Really, she was neither and both. Everything is defined against something else. Did Cici know that patterns on giraffes’ fur are unique to the regions they come from? She did not.

The other animals stirred, spurred by a common light no matter their originations, other continents, other countries. Cici heard the gibbons’ ghost-like whoop, the sparrows, who were free animals, sounding exactly like her resin and wood bird call as they sang to the morning, and a bird she didn’t know that cackled from the aviary up the hill.

Before she left, Cici told Marana that her name was Latin, too, for “way for the blind,” and that she was named for her grandmother whom she never knew, and for a saint which was a heavy load to carry. Marana looked at her and lowered her long-lashed lids in a slow-blink. Cici went home to the stable in the park. Her own house and Jay’s were dark when she arrived in the clearing.

She swapped Sebastian’s jacket for a canvas and wool one that hung on a peg, threw a blanket over Moss’ back, and led the old mare out of the barn to let her amble where she may. Cici would delay as long as possible leaving the whispering woods, the birds streaking like shooting stars, and the squirrels chattering their gossip. She could laze on Moss’ wide back, hugging her roundness with her thighs and shins as she gradually reentered this world.

When Mona pushes open the door to the dance studio she is surprised to see the phonograph and chairs in place. She bends to remove her shoes. The tornado that swept through her life missed touching down in this spot. As she walks, her socked feet shine dust from the honey-colored hardwood. She sees herself reflected in the mirror along the far wall, a small woman dressed in black, closer to old-age than middle, framed by an open door and blue sky. She walks backward, receding from her own image, to close the door that leads to the outside steps.

The dance studio had been her idea but Jack picked up on it. In the twenty-seventh year of their marriage he built the studio above the barn that served as his workshop. The plan hatched on a summer Sunday when Mona read in the newspaper of the closure of Frangipani Hall. “Wouldn’t it be fun,” she said, “to have a dance studio?”

Jack negotiated a deal to rescue the floors from the original hall, driving over after hammering all day on other people’s renovation dreams. He hung a yellow work light from a beam and pried up boards into the night. Mona stayed late in her classroom preparing lessons for third graders, then picked up a pepperoni and olive pizza for them to split. They sat on the tailgate of the green truck eating slices from the box. Tired and full, Mona sneaked into the dark orchard nearby to swing and sway under the branches of the almond trees. Music from the truck’s radio muted the clank of wood piling up piece by piece. Jack numbered each board so they could be fitted together again. Home in bed later, they planned details of the space, propping a clipboard on their knees.

The night before she opened the door to students, Mona called Jack to the upstairs space, knocking on the floor with a broom handle in the code they had devised. He heard the pounding, left his workshop and climbed the stairs, painted white as she asked. The lights were off. Twenty-seven candles glowed in the darkened room. Mona danced for him in the half-light, gauzy in a translucent shift.

Mona crosses to the vacant table. Light seeps through the paned window. A cluster of browned roses leans in a vase, petals fall when she lifts it. Water has dried in the bottom of the container leaving a layer of black. She opens a window and drops the stems to the ground below where they catch in a hydrangea bush. A house finch lights from the plane tree in a flash of pink to investigate. Mona turns back to the empty room.

She stretches her arms above and behind her to touch her fingers to the window frame. She closes her eyes to feel her muscles straining up. She fills her lungs, leaning back, letting the air in her chest soften the knot in her heart.

“I loved you,” she says to the woman in the mirror.

With five quick steps Mona crosses the room’s long diagonal. Running and sliding she polishes an X in the floor.