It’s a game, Sage tells Brianna, the island with the animals. She is the third of Brianna’s clients to mention it, but the first to explain. You played as this cosmetic vivisectionist at an island resort. You assisted the resident plastic surgeon. “You get him whatever he needs, dyes and patterns and skin and stuff,” Sage says. “Then you do the surgeries.” It is the most she has spoken since she began telehealth sessions with Brianna ten weeks ago.
Sage sits in her bedroom. Midday sunlight bleaches her adolescent hunch. Her face is a blacked-out smear beneath the overhead light. Her audio outpaces her mouth. She is fifteen, but whispers like she’s five. Brianna accepts she will only ever catch the gist of anything Sage says.
Brianna types. She knows better than to fill out progress reports while on a call, but the session is running long and she is three clients behind in her documentation. The white space of the text box reflects off her glasses. “Uh-huh,” she says.
Sage’s face crumples. She readjusts her camera. The connection is poor. One moment she is reaching for the display. The next, Brianna is looking straight up her nose.
“Sorry.” Sage’s nostrils are twin black holes. “Sorry, you don’t care, I’ll stop.”
Goals, intervention, response, plan—Brianna scrolls to the bottom of the progress note. “It’s okay! It doesn’t matter if I care, what matters is that this game is important to you. It”—A patter echoes through the mic. Brianna pauses. She cannot pinpoint the noise. She types again—“it brings you peace in this unprecedented time, and that”—The patter continues, synchronized with her typing. Brianna freezes, embarrassed. If she can hear herself typing, then Sage can too.
Brianna sits back, hands knotted. She must salvage this. “It sounds like a creative game. Vivisection, huh? What’s that again?”
Sage says nothing. They listen to each other breathe.
Brianna is not a gamer. But she embraces every opportunity for connection. She wants to understand her clients’ obsessions, the hobbies that enrich their lives, the trends and cultural moments that give their days structure and meaning. She has baked the sourdough. She has watched Tiger King. She has assembled a singularity black puzzle, begged mercy from the Duolingo owl, cross-stitched a tea-sipping Kermit. She drops $59.99 on a digital version of the animal island game, to play on her girlfriend’s console. The purchase is penance, as much as curiosity. She cannot bring herself to apologize to Sage for her distraction. To admit that it happened.
She plays after work, Zoom sessions done, deep into the witching hour she has previously spent doomscrolling. The animal island game will probably not last very long. Since the world shut down, none of Brianna’s borrowed hobbies do.
The game opens on a seaplane. The human pilot and helmeted copilot, species unknown, crane their bobbleheads to where she sits behind them, invisible to herself. The pilot introduces himself as Montgomery. He smiles a red smile.
“It is such an honor,” he expounds, “to deliver our new head of acquisitions”—here the game prompts her to input a name; she chooses the default—“Eddie Prendick to”—island name; again, the default—“Isle Moreau!” The copilot claps tiny nub hands in verbal silence, lenses a glass shine where eyes should be. Horns lance up from his helmet.
They are moments from landing. The pilot prompts her to “freshen up.” A character customization screen appears. She cobbles together a big-headed, big-haired miniaturization of herself, dressed in the same shade of royal blue she wears to work. She does not know how games like this work, if you are meant to design a version of yourself that is accurate or aspirational. She would ask Heather, but Heather is asleep in the bedroom, exhausted from being essential. Hunched alone on the futon in the den, in sweats and smelling her own hair from months of lockdown, Brianna is embarrassed by her own ignorance and lack of imagination.
Doctor Moreau greets Eddie on the pier. He, too, is human. He bops to cheerful island music, dressed in a stethoscope and pineapple-spangled lab coat, shimmering with gleeful stars. “We are so excited and lucky to have you,” he says. “With your expertise, Isle Moreau will become the most renowned destination for cosmetic modification in the world!”
Doctor Moreau is a cosmetic vivisectionist, Isle Moreau an upcoming luxury resort for designer body modification. Eddie has been hired “all the way from the City” to “acquire specimens.” The resort is a work in progress. Blue tarp and caution tape mark the beachfront where the construction crew has broken ground for the clinic, a square of unambitious proportion. The area is small now, Doctor Moreau admits, but will expand with Eddie’s help. Already the resort has generated interest: a prospective client has scheduled a consultation for cosmetic work. Doctor Moreau will see them as soon as the clinic is ready.
The prospective client is a puma, the first animal Brianna has seen. Brianna sits in on the consultation. The room is strangely conservative for such a whimsical game: soft white chairs in a soft white consulting room, glass-topped coffee table set with teacups. No one drinks. The puma is yellow-brown, sleek in a purple sheath dress and cat-eye glasses. She has already had work done. Doctor Moreau thanks her for her continued patronage. She salutes him with her cup and saucer, clasped in slender hands that resemble a gibbon’s: the slate-gray, elongated palms, the hooked thumb, crooked fingers meant for canopies, not open, salty skies.
“I have always dreamed,” she says, “of wearing a zebra skin.”
The background wall is a screen, cycling through samples of Doctor Moreau’s chimeric work: an eagle’s torso on a lion’s hindlegs, wings flexed in a powerful curve behind the uplifted head; a leopard with a snake’s head and neck, draped across a sofa with sleepy, modelesque eyes; an antelope, winged and beaked, leaping to intercept a football; images kinetic with possibility. An image of the puma appears on the screen, arms raised liked the Vitruvian Man. One moment she is tawny, the next, striped. An exclamation marks pops over the puma’s head. She examines herself, projected large, paw to her chest.
“The process is very simple.” Doctor Moreau turns to Brianna’s character. “As our new head of acquisitions, you will harvest the desired specimen and I will perform the operation. It is a simple procedure: I remove two layers of the patient’s original tissue and graft the desired specimen in its place. With our modern improvements, the operation is quick and easy, and recovery takes no longer than a day. Patients have full access to all the amenities of Isle Moreau and recover in no time!” Eddie nods congenially, feet bopping, smile blank.
The puma turns from the screen. She raises the cup and saucer beneath lush lips. “The full body operation…is it painful?”
Three pairs of tiny feet bounce to a tropical ukulele and flugelhorn, one animal, two human. Doctor Moreau’s eyes shrink to two smiling curves.
“Not one bit!” he says.
The game does not respect Brianna’s time. No matter how hard she mashes buttons, Doctor Moreau’s instructions drag on, unskippable. “Please procure a zebra skin for our first client. You will find fresh specimens on the surrounding islands. If you need tools, please see Montgomery in the acquisitions tent. If you need transportation, please see M’ling at the boat rental counter. Do you need to hear all that again?” Brianna accidentally selects YES. She shuts off the console mid-dialogue.
This is not the game she was promised. She has listened to her clients. Read the ad copy, watched the playthroughs. Yes, the whole point of it is to customize the animals in a luxury resort setting, to build upon the foundation of Doctor Moreau’s creations. The more creative the customization, the more satisfied the customer, the more money the player can earn and reinvest into the resort, until every building and amenity is unlocked. Officially, the game ends when the player has customized one of each type of animal, thirty types in all. According to the wiki and Polygon pages, there are upward of three hundred possible clients. But Brianna’s patients do not talk about “harvesting desired specimens,” “removing original tissue,” or “grafting.” They talk about combing the beach for sea glass and summer shells; squeezing dye from madder, yarrow, and blackberry; crafting elegant prosthetics from black sand and red clay. When Brianna admired the screencaps of customizations online, she had not realized the source of the added beaks, feathers, snouts, scales. It is not as though Brianna is opposed to violence in video games. She knows it depends on the genre; she has watched Heather cut down enough enemies and hunt enough wildlife in open world action-adventure games. But this particular violence—not just the hunting, but the skinning, the grafting—feels very different.
“I think the game wants me to kill a zebra,” she tells Heather at breakfast.
They sit six feet apart, nearly the entire width of their apartment. They are both essential workers, healthcare, but as a nurse, only Heather is required to leave the house. She breakfasts half-masked, ready for work. Her mask is white, decorated with banana peels, fresh from the most recent package of cloth masks they received. Brianna’s mom has picked up sewing while furloughed. Brianna wishes she could be so uncomplicatedly useful to someone, too.
Heather hums, a neutral sound. She pecks yoghurt from her spoon, eyes fixed on her phone. Her silence depresses Brianna. Heather is the gamer. She is usually expansive when it comes to games, interested and generous, eager to share. But the island with the animals is a sore subject. Heather had wanted to play it together when it was first released. Brianna had not. The mayor had just issued a stay-at-home order. The city had just shut down. What kind of person thought about video games when a pandemic suffocated them in the slow, hot clench of its fist?
It was just one of those things. When you do not mean to hurt your partner, but do, when the insult is too nebulous and distant to deserve an apology. Brianna tried to make up for the initial wound. She asked for Heather’s help with the download. “Is the clinic paying you to play now?” Heather had joked. She had not asked about the game since.
It had hurt, obscurely. But everything hurt, obscurely. Lockdown had sanded away the top layers of skin from Brianna’s most sensitive parts. She is becoming a worse person, regressing, even as her job requires her to help people feel better.
“It’s so weird,” she says now. “The Doctor Moreau character, he keeps asking me to acquire a zebra skin. Like, wouldn’t you have to kill a zebra?” Heather does not answer. “Can you look at it for me?” Brianna adds. She cannot believe a game this brightly colored, this jauntily scored, could require its players to engage in an act of violence. Death already walks around in broad daylight.
“I’m sure the game doesn’t want you to kill a zebra.” Heather tosses her yoghurt cup and reaches for her keys. “Ok, I’m off.”
“See you tonight. Be safe.” Brianna lifts her voice, to remind Heather that this is what they say now, anytime Heather walks out that door. But Heather only shrugs on her backpack, kisses her hand across the six feet, and is gone.
Brianna goes online. Between clients and during a midday team huddle that drifts from the agenda into non sequitur, she searches for alternatives to zebra-murder. She combs the wiki, but its information is neutral, without narrative. She reads walkthroughs and listicles, but all refuse to acknowledge the violence inherent to “procure a zebra skin” and “fresh specimens.” Each article begins, “Once you’ve found the materials Doctor Moreau tells you to find, go back to the clinic…” One includes a link for how to find the materials for the first client’s operation. Brianna clicks. The article is at least 500 words, all of which boil down to “check the surrounding islands.” She watches playthroughs. Only one features the puma, reskinned, tiger-striped. But the streamer is more interested in the results of the operation than the source of the stripes.
Brianna appeals to Quora, then Reddit. Her searches read, “Do I have to kill a zebra,” “how not to kill a zebra,” “how to get zebra skin without killing,” “harvest zebra skin.” The results assure her that hunting zebras is legal but contentious. They inform her of best practices for surviving a zebra attack, optimal shot placement, fleshing and curing zebra hide. She includes the title of the game, in quotes. Why does my resort never get zebra clients? a desperate player asks.
She was mistaken. Error is the only explanation Brianna has. She mistook an innocent request for materials for incitement to theriocide.
A client no-shows. Brianna powers on the console, just long enough to see what Doctor Moreau was actually asking. She will play for five minutes, tops, then complete her clinic notes. On-screen, Doctor Moreau resumes his dialogue, as if he was never interrupted. He instructs her to visit Montgomery.
It is late afternoon. The light on the island is a deep, dusky yellow. The tropical music is more subdued, less of its bright, midday energy. Brianna runs her character toward the acquisitions tent. The pilot greets her, a jack of many trades.
Brianna circles the main room. Three foldout tables line the walls, spread with tools. Montgomery follows her, offering commentary. “Bait,” he says, of the table of fruit, vegetables, and peanut butter, meat weeping red in a plastic box. “Immobilization,” he says of the snares, the live and box traps, the conibear, the fyke nets, the double-spring steel grin of a foothold trap. “Acquisition tools,” he says, of the bludgeon, knives, bolt gun, and fishing line without its rod lined up on the center table. “I look forward to observing your work!” He sparkles, swaying on tiptoe. “Doctor Moreau says you have a steady hand.”
She types his dialogue into Google, word for word.
Your search—“Doctor Moreau says you have a steady hand!” island animals game—did not match any documents.
Suggestions:
- Make sure that all words are spelled correctly.
- Try different keywords.
- Try more general keywords.
- Try fewer keywords.
On Friday, she meets with her 10 a.m., Sage. Sage’s connection keeps dropping. For ten whole minutes, she disappears. “I’m really sorry,” she says, when she finally reappears. “My laptop updated then Zoom did too.”
It is the most Brianna gets from her. They sit in tortured silence. “Good morning” and “tell me about the past two weeks” and “have you had a chance to look over those exercises I gave you?” are dead ends. Brianna almost does not ask about the exercises. She knows Sage has not done them. In the ten weeks they have been meeting—two past the usual eight—Sage has never done the exercises or readings.
They are twenty minutes into a fifty-minute session. Sage starts to say something. “Sorry, what?” Brianna raises her volume. “You cut out.”
Sage retreats. She hunches toward the camera, picking at her face.
“I’m so sorry about the connection.” Brianna grows desperate. “What were you saying?”
Sage readjusts the screen until all Brianna can see of her is the shiny line of her forehead.
Forty minutes. With the late start, Brianna has every right to end on time. She has documentation to fill out, another appointment on the hour. But her throat is full, cancerous with the waste, the pointlessness of this session. The updates weren’t Sage’s fault. If Brianna was a better therapist, she would know how to get Sage talking. Silence is not a bad thing. Brianna has clients who will not open up without it. But Sage is not one of them. Brianna has tried questions, leading comments, short silences, long ones. The most Sage has ever spoken at a time was weeks ago, about the island with the animals. A breakthrough that Brianna had screwed up. She had shut down Sage’s joy. Made her feel ashamed.
More and more, Brianna wonders why Sage shows up. Sometimes she wishes Sage wouldn’t. This is the worst part, the nasty piece of her that wishes Sage would go away. Cancel, no-show, take Brianna’s increasingly obvious hints that maybe it’s time to take a break. A real therapist wouldn’t have thoughts like this. A real therapist would be proud that Sage continues to show up. Sometimes showing up is all you can do.
“Tell me more about the animals on the island,” Brianna says.
Sage straightens. Her face is muddy, indistinct in the gloom of a poorly lit bedroom, overhead light grimy and piss-pale. “What about it,” she says, without inflection.
“You were so enthusiastic. It seems like you were really able to find a sense of peace and connection. I’ve, uh, started playing it. And I…” Brianna swallows. “What was your first acquisition?”
She has not touched the game in three days. Heather had asked if she “killed the zebra yet,” unsmiling. Too late Brianna understood it as a joke, a tenderness instead of a mockery. But in the moment, the moment when understanding was needed but did not come, her face did painful gymnastics. Heather backed off. Brianna agonizes. Why does she always feel slighted, when Heather is the one who still has to go outside? Why is Brianna the one always hurting, always defensive, when her pain is so small?
The slivers of Sage’s eyes are downcast. Silence yawns. “Sorry,” Brianna says, “sorry, that’s off topic. Forget I asked.”
She realizes Sage is frozen. Brianna sighs. She is officially late for her next appointment. She types into the chat, I am sorry about our connection issues today! I will send you an email…
“Did he ask you to get a tiger skin?”
Sage is back. Brianna falters over the keyboard, message unsent. “No. A zebra. It’s just…it feels wrong.”
Sage frowns. “It’s what the client needs.”
Brianna inhales. Sage’s screen blurs. An alert declares, Your connection is unstable.
Back on Isle Moreau, Brianna visits the boat rental counter. It is run by Montgomery’s copilot, M’ling. Freed from his helmet and the constraints of the seaplane, his species becomes clear: bear-bodied, tall and thick, with an ox’s horns and a dog’s long-ankled hindquarters and slavishly wagging tail. A customized creation.
M’ling takes her out on the boat. The first island they encounter is a quarter of the size of Isle Moreau. It is mostly trees, a stretch of shore dotted with seashells and green cliffs thick with flowers. Brianna dashes from the pier. The online community has assured her that the game lacks subtlety. It will provide her with the materials for her acquisitions until her task is complete. Sure enough, she spots a movement on the highest cliff. She adjusts the camera. It lifts high enough to reveal a flash of black and white striping. The zebra retreats into the underbrush.
Her inventory is full of tools from Montgomery’s tent. She still feels nervous about the task. But she recognizes a second chance when she sees it. Sage has shared something important with her. That she understood Brianna’s apprehension, her distaste, feels almost intimate. Brianna will not make the same mistake with her twice.
She climbs up into the cliffs. She aims for a spot as far from the zebra as she can get, but the cliffs are a wedding cake, narrowing to a single flat-topped peak. The zebra spots her just as she spots it. The zebra bolts, hopping down the cliffs like a mountain goat. The game has no interest in verisimilitude.
The mechanics of climbing are slow, clumsy. It takes her forever to chase the zebra down to the shore. She understands the utility of the snares and foothold traps now. No matter how hard she pummels buttons, her character lags behind the zebra’s gallop. The zebra leaps a tributary that Brianna must navigate by either pole or by picking her slow way around.
She opens her inventory to consider her options. The live and box traps are too small, the conibear for crawling animals. Brianna lays down a line of foothold traps, then makes her way back up into the cliffs, to come at the zebra from behind.
Back on the shore on the opposite side of the island, Brianna watches the zebra mill about. She brandishes a throw net. This is a different animal from the puma client, from M’ling—walking on four legs, no customization, all raw animal. The game starts off easy; clients become more bestial, the customizations more elaborate, as players grow in skill. Brianna wonders if one day Doctor Moreau will have a zebra client under his saw. If it will already be walking and talking, or if that will be the challenge: to break the legs until they stand straight, to slit open the throat and install a voice box. And where will the voice box come from? Certainly not from another animal.
It is like leaning from a rooftop and thinking, academically, about jumping, this sudden, intrusive burst of curiosity. She is so taken aback she nearly misses the zebra’s approach. It minces along the shore, shedding sand from its hooves, no longer alert to her presence. How peculiar, that a game with no subtlety, no verisimilitude would include such little details as a raised hoof, shaking free of sand.
Tips and tricks from random posts scroll through her head. She crouches. There is no true camouflage, just bushes she cannot hide behind, palm trees too narrow to conceal her. Still, the crouch is stupidly effective. The zebra comes closer. Brianna’s hands twist, hot. The controller creaks at its plastic joints. She thumbs the action button, judges the distance. Watches the hooves.
She hears Heather’s key. She scrambles for the pause button as the door opens. Her character rises from the crouch. The zebra bolts.
Heather drops her backpack. She looks between Brianna and the TV. “Damn,” she says.
Brianna follows her gaze to the screen. The tropical soundtrack is as chipper on this tiny, nameless lump of cliff and sand as on Isle Moreau, the plucky ukulele, the flugelhorn and bongos bright and giddy. The sun drifts toward setting, dusting the sand in gold, deepening the neon of the palm leaves and the matte of the grass, gilding the flowers in shadow. Waves slide in and out, darkening the sand, outlining it in the spit-white of foam. And where Brianna laid her barricade of foothold traps, the zebra fights and screams, hoof caught in a steel grin.
She wishes for the bolt gun.
Immobilization is not enough. Brianna must subdue the acquisition, then skin it. There were no ranged options—according to the internet, those are upgrades. She took the knives, the fishing line. In the tent, they had seemed safe choices. But out here, on the beach, the zebra bucking, the chain of the foothold trap skidding to and fro, throwing up white arcs of sand, her choices feel too intimate, too inadequate.
Heather watches from behind the futon, arms crossed, still in her scrubs. Brianna skims through her inventory. The zebra thrashes. Pinkish blood weeps down its legs where the foothold trap has sunk into the meat, big, exaggerated drops, like cartoon tears. Brianna has seen pictures of actual animals trapped: the paw dimpled but bloodless where the trap clamps down. She thinks, with horrified giddiness, that the lack of blood must have been too boring to keep.
The zebra crashes to its knees. The chain snaps taut. Brianna’s hands sweat. She hovers over the knife but cannot bring herself to equip it. She chooses the fishing line, that she now realizes is a garrote.
The programmers have mercy. All Brianna is required to do is get close and press the action button. The sequence requires no input, once started. Eddie, smiling that blank, congenial smile, leans down to the zebra, garrote raised. A loop around the neck, a twist and yank of the line. The zebra fights, head thrashing, hind hooves furrowing the sand. Little red seams appear in lieu of Eddie’s fingers, to convey the strain. It is over in five seconds, start to finish. The zebra goes limp. Eddie does a gleeful dance, pumping nubby fists into the air. Triumphant music plays. Congratulations! reads the dialogue box. You made your first acquisition. Now it’s time to skin it. Choose your tool and press A to begin.
The skinning sequence is much the same. Brianna selects the knife. Her character crouches over the zebra. Jets of blood and spray strings of gristle firework into the air as the knife carves in. Its steel glint rises and falls in the clench of Eddie’s fist.
It’s time to head back to the island, the game advises at last. Let’s go talk to M’ling.
Brianna has asked Heather about having hobbies. People like Heather and Brianna’s mother have them, people who can focus through the learning curve long enough for hobby to become habit. Brianna does not have that focus. Only doomscrolling taps into her concentration the way nothing else ever has. Only doomscrolling—besides alcohol, the occasional edible—has ever lifted her out of herself.
“You’ll do it if you love it,” her mother says. Sometimes she will substitute “want” or “care” in the place of love, but the meaning is ultimately the same: Brianna has never cared, wanted, or loved anything but work enough to stick with it. And even work is suspect, months into lockdown, Brianna’s sense of self unraveling with every client she cannot reach.
Heather is kinder. “It’s runner’s high. You just keep going until you reach this point where you’re not thinking about it, you don’t even have to focus. You’re just doing it.” The prerequisites necessary to keep going—the care, the want, the love—are implied.
Sourdough, Tiger King, puzzles, Duolingo, cross-stitch—Brianna is trying hard, so very, very hard, to find something to love. She did not realize how very small her love was, how limited, until lockdown.
Doctor Moreau meets her on the pier. The zebra skin is a black-and-white square in her inventory, filling a once-empty spot, neatly folded. She selects it. Doctor Moreau startles, an exclamation mark spiking above his head, his tiny pink hands lifted, palm out, in eagerness.
“Well done, Eddie!” he says. “I knew I was right to hire you.” The zebra skin changes hands. “Now, would you like to follow me to my lab for the vivisection?”
Options appear. Brianna hovers her cursor for a long moment, then tabs the joystick past NOT TODAY.
“Of course,” she says.
(Editors’ Note: “The Island with the Animals” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 63B.)
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© 2025 Stephanie Malia Morris
