The Adventures of Shannon Pasha-Book 1-start

Chapter 1

“It’s the sun!” I yelled, hanging most-way out the open window of my all-but-parked on the freeway Plymouth Horizon. “It’s always there!” Exasperated, I shook my open hand, palm up, one more time at the long lazy line of cars stretched out ahead of me before letting it fall loudly against the side of the car. Heading East in the early morning, sun glare backups are common but to me, mind boggling. Hadn’t any of these people ever heard of sunglasses? I slurped coffee from my travel mug and, though a semi-karmic force, dribbled Columbian Roast down my front.

“I should just wear a bib.” I thought. I held the mug between my knees, since the 1989 Horizon is from a pre-cupholder era, and dabbed unhelpfully at the coffee stain with an errant napkin. “Actually, I just shouldn’t be drinking coffee at all. It’s and addiction and it shows weakness of the character and is bad for my breath and teeth and what else, heart? And it destroys the rain forest and fuels the conglomony of Maxwell House. From now on, I am just going to buy fair trade, organic, locally roasted, bird friendly peace-coffee.” Giving up on the brown stain drying neatly in the center of my light-blue polo shirt, I inched the car, Christened “Dante,” forward.

I tried not to look at the clock. I rarely wore a watch but had placed a sticky-backed travel clock on the dash in such a way that it was obscured by the steering wheel. Of course everything in the Horizon was obscured by the steering wheel unless you were a seven foot tall hunchback. But my wavering eye strayed and I saw it was nineteen minutes after.

God, I was going to be late again. Working at a Zoo was not all it was cracked up to be.


Chip was going to be furious, and I still had to stop for the damn donuts. I cranked up the volume on my radio, blasting Kiante’s “Morning Cutlery” college radio show so loud the mesh covered speakers rattled irritably. Loud music was like Prozac. When one didn’t have money, clean clothes, air conditioning or donuts, one still had the ability to blast loud punk music to rattle the hatchback windows.

The music mellowed my mood and I slipped into the Zen of stop and go traffic: clutch, break, first gear, release break, clutch, gas, OM. What a modern mantra. Sighing, I slipped from fury into “the Zone,” driving like automatic writing the path I take to work each day, drifting towards the exit lane as my turn off approached.

I let my mind wander and started brainstorming what b-roll Chip and his Channel 6 production crew might shoot for the weekly kids television show, “You Belong At the Zoo” (dissatisfactorily abbreviated YBATZ) Granted, I should have had the schedule all written out, typed in Courier 14 point double-spaced, double-sided, but YBATZ was no Sesame Street. Hell, it wasn’t even as well produced as “Cooking with Mr. Food”. It usually consisted of Shannon pitching interesting and educational stories to Chip, and Chip replying “what else do you got?”

When I finally pulled into the employee parking lot and spied Chip’s Channel 6 van, I realized I’d forgotten the donuts. “Shit.”

But then she saw something odd. Not only was Chip’s big white van in the lot, but Channel 10 and 12 were there as well. The only time more than one news crew made it out to the Onami Zoo was when there was a birth or severe weather (one of those “what do you do with the animals on a hot day” fluff pieces).