Being Still
Jerome Smith has always been better with things that don't talk back. Insects pinned by heat to a windowsill. A garden dragged from soil that didn't want to give. A dog so traumatised she flinched at her own shadow. He grew up fifth in a household built on faith he couldn't feel, and he learned early that the safest way to belong was to be useful without being loud. The silence that makes him good at what he does is the same silence that lets everyone forget he's even there."
Fifth child in a household that ran on faith and routine. His parents prayed. His brothers led. Jerome sat in the scrub behind the house and watched things — birds, insects, the slow work of a garden his mother built from hostile ground. He brought home injured creatures and tried to fix them. He preferred the company of anything that couldn't lie to him. Quiet, patient, easily overlooked.
He studied zoology because it named what he'd always done. He adopted a dog no one else would touch — traumatised, flinching, epileptic — and earned her trust by being still. She was at the vet the night his parents vanished through a wall. Jerome followed. Not a decision — the absence of one. He can't go back. The dog was brought through later by someone who could.
Now he keeps things alive for a living — displaced species, fragile ecosystems pieced together from instinct and memory. He builds enclosures, adapts feeding systems, monitors creatures no textbook prepared him for. The faith his family brought with them never took. The work did. He has never told them what he actually believes. He has never told anyone what he actually needs. The patience that makes him irreplaceable is the same patience that lets him disappear.
