The last thylacine died in the Hobart Zoo.

Locked in a cage, she stared out through the lattice of wire to the distant warmth of the keeper’s house.

Alone all the long nights, she paced, fretful, the unfamiliar sound of her nails clicking on cement.

She was surrounded by the stink of bears, the roar of lions, the shit-hurling culture of the monkeys, the press and flow of humans.

The last thylacine was imprisoned between concrete floor and iron bars without even a kennel’s shelter.

There was thunder the night she died, and rain.

A springtime cold snap that followed days of merciless heat.

Above the thylacine’s cage was a deciduous tree, still bare of leaves. She called through the night, her high-pitched yip yip yip torn away by the wind.

You’ve heard that hypothermia causes the victim to feel paradoxically warm and you wonder if that’s what the thylacine felt as she died.

You hope so.

You hope she had a dying dream of forest and treefern, of other thylacines. Because the last thylacine’s final vision was strobe-lit by lightning: black and white.

Vertical bars.
Alone.



From Extinct Doesn’t Mean Forever by Phoenix Sullivan

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