Zootopia: Tragic Miracle

The Hospital

My head aches and my leg is screaming as I open my eyes. My vision is blurry at first, but when I blink it gradually clears.

    An IV drip bag is suspended above me, and I can make out the smell of a doctor’s office. My arms and head are bandaged, and my leg is bound by a thick cast. Looking around, I can tell that I’m definitely in a hospital, but how I got here I can’t remember. The last thing I can think of is a rainforest, and collapsing on the side of a road.

I look towards the window, and the sight outside confuses me. I’m suddenly in a big city, somehow. I can see buildings in the distance, and snow is falling outside. It’s completely foreign to me, yet somehow familiar…

I shift my gaze over to the whiteboard and see my name written in dry-erase marker. They must have found my driver’s permit in my wallet. That’s how they’ve got my name.

Laying my head back into the pillow, I look blankly up towards the ceiling, wondering where the hell I am. It’s weird, the city outside seems so familiar, yet I know that I have not been here before. It’s not Minneapolis, and I know it isn’t Saint Paul… So where am I?

Suddenly I realize that I can feel something strange with my hospital gown. Where a normal hospital gown doesn’t have any sort of opening in the back, I can feel a hole on my lower back, where the bed sheets are brushing against my skin.

Weird…

I hear footsteps coming into the room and I look towards the source of the noise. Expecting to see a human, I’m taken aback when a slim cheetah walks in on two legs, wearing scrubs just like what you’d expect from a nurse. I feel bad for looking so startled, but I can’t help it.

She takes note of my awakening almost immediately.  "Oh-! You’re awake. Can you hear me? My name is Ilya and I'm a nurse. What's your name? How are you feeling? Do you know what happened?"

I swallow my surprise, knowing that it’s rude. I’m not too disoriented (Which is strange, I should be delirious, but I’m not), so I try to answer her questions the best I can, despite feeling my cheeks heat up out of shyness (I’m really shy towards new people).

“My name is Cody,” I manage to croak out- my throat is dry “I hurt all over and my leg is screaming, I think I was in a car crash, but when I woke up in the rainforest everything was unfamiliar. Can I ask where we are?”

She nods- she is as surprised as I am that I’m not answering with confusion. “This is the Hospital of Zootopia, in Tundra Town. You were found in the rainforest district about a day ago with a broken leg and a lot of bruising and scrapes, but you should be fine as long as you don’t walk on that leg and you be careful.”

She checks my vitals and helps me adjust the bed to allow me to sit up. As she leaves she tells me, “Oh, I’m supposed to tell you that you will have a visitor in about thirty minutes. He’s just going to ask a few questions, but if you don’t feel up to it, just say something.”

I say ok, and then she leaves.

I feel terrible, and I really don’t want to have to answer any personal questions, but if I say no it would be giving up a valuable opportunity to learn more about my situation. That nurse didn’t seem too put off by my appearance as a human, but Zootopia’s not supposed to have humans. I bet something strange is going on- something to make humans such as myself not seem as an oddity as they should… Whoever this visitor is, I should learn as much as I can… and that means being able to be social.

I sigh nervously, trying to avert my feeling of fear at the prospect of meeting another person from this unfamiliar world- being introvert is not an option right now. Not when I- when I know I probably won't see my friends or family again.

I try to avoid letting out tears as I stare up at the ceiling again, but it doesn’t do any good. If I’m here, it means that I probably have no means to get back home, and it’s more than likely that my friends and family believe me to be dead. And I know it, too. Tears flow down my cheeks as I try not to think about what that means, but fail miserably. This keeps going for about fifteen minutes until I finally get ahold of myself.

I grab the remote and turn on the hospital room’s TV, flicking through the channels just to see what they have on for about ten minutes. I stop for a second on ZNN, but it’s just a weather report about any natural weather events that are likely approaching. It's not extremely different from back home, so I can’t help thinking about some of the people I left behind. Including one of the local meteorologists back home, who married a relative of mine a while back. Great people, and even though we were never extremely close, they’re still likely affected by my loss.

I wonder if the crash was reported in the news back home- It was just me in the car at the time, so I know that no one from my family got hurt, but still, there’s usually at least a blip in the news about something like what happened to me… The school won’t likely say anything, aside from notifying the teachers. The usual. No official statement to the students, just an email to the parents accompanied by a general apathetic silence.  

I’m thinking about my life again, and it’s going to make me cry, so I just start to ignore it and look out the window. Snow’s drifting across the window, across the winter wonderland that is Tundra Town. It’s funny, back home people are denying the existence of global warming, whilst Minnesota gradually gets browner and browner every year during the winter (Christmas used to be pretty. Now it looks gross). Here, though, in a city that I can only guess is located in a semi-tropical location? I’ve never seen this much snow in my life. And, again I lived in Minnesota.

As I ramble on inside my head, I hear a knock on the door which abruptly stops my teenage mind’s rambling. Looking towards the door, I feel my heart drop into my stomach and a huge wave of overwhelming shyness warm my cheeks.

Standing in the doorway is Chief Bogo.