Essay Experiments#2 Roadkill Blues; #52Essays2017
It lay under a mound of snow against the curb. I was walking to an early morning class, an enormous travel mug of black coffee in hand. If I slipped on the ice, as I often did, bruising thighs and tailbone, I was already holding my life-line. Some people had religion but at a young age I had caffeine, the way it made me feel vaguely sophisticated, viced.
My prayer, please lord, let me not spill the coffee, please lord. Those winter mornings, if the coffee cup didn't weigh at least as much as my textbook, I wasn't going to make it to lunch awake.
I did a lot of peeing that year.
The snow drifts were turning gray. There were ice slicks, eddies, slush piles that collapsed on contact, false solids. Idyllic nature, much? The muted color scheme, like teeth in need of a cleaning, and rivulets of animal urine prevented it. It was just snow. It was everywhere.
And my foot went right through it and into the side of an animal.
--
Dead things generally don't look beautiful. Dead humans can pull it off maybe for a few hours. But then time sets in and rot blossoms. In both humans and animals, there is the rigor mortis horror movies are made from, the physical hardening before decomposition. "Stiff as a corpse" they say. Not "pureed as a corpse." In food, vegetables and fruits, the mush stage comes first. The mold is often a convincing blue, like poorly mixed paint.
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Your pride can die too. It is mammalian, slinking, licking its young. When it dies, it hardens, rigor mortis, then liquifies later, like you or me. Other times, it inexplicably liquifies instantly. You'll know by the circumstance, and because you feel it, as I felt it, puddling at your feet like amniotic fluid when your membranes break. Then, lest you lose all sense of propriety, you harden in response, in a pointless attempt to keep what cannot be kept in its container.
The day my long time lover told his pregnant-with-their-third kid wife we were having an affair, my pride went nuts. It first turned into a raisin left in the back seat of a car for too long. It was tiny, dehydrated from crying, and hard to find in the upholstery cracks. To be honest I didn't look that hard. I was too busy having a headache, staring blankly at my phone.
Then my pride changed its mind, because it was a changeling by nature from years of adultery. It was redeemed only by the figurative, by metaphors that swooped down and rescued it from actual events. Metaphors were the only superhero intervention I had in those days.
My pride ergo became a flooding toilet. I was still teaching Latin students to memorize the important meaning of the word "ergo." Latin language was an attractive zombie: it had survived looming rigor mortis and become something mellifluous, worth keep around.
But my pride? That shit rose and overflowed the bowl. The bathroom rug, meant to keep bathers from slipping, was not salvageable in the aftermath. I threw it out, left my job, and slowly convinced my shadow it was fine to hang out with me again. I was not too depressed to have a gray friend around. We could visit my pride at the cemetery most mornings, a paper cup of green tea in hand. There was enough room to make angels in the snow.
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My husband has dead things in our freezer. Not the filets of cod fish weirdly easy to overcook once defrosted. Not the spinach which, like it or not, also once had a life. But his found birds, wrapped in foil and placed inside old take-out containers. Maybe creatures a neighborhood dick-ish cat batted at lethally but then never ate. Birds that collided with glass doors or windows. Birds that had heart attacks because sometimes shit happens. They were dead but unblemished. I have shoved those frozen creatures to the back so at least it's effort to get to one, those Wallflowers. You rustle through a barricade of ice packs first.
When Ro was born, I vaguely worried some well-intentioned visitor trying to find things to feed us might thaw one out. I had no doubt these birds would be the lovely version of death, frozen freshly killed by natural but unapparent causes. But still, it made me uneasy to reorganize those bodies to make space for the meager breast milk packets I'd pumped, or the borrowed milk we'd need for when my supply was not enough to tide the baby over.
Right there, the lactated ounces hardened to sustain one life, while the dead animal lay in waiting to become models for art or science projects. Those amateur taxidermies sustained a different kind of life, that of the ardent oil painter and observer, my husband who preferred that his fantasies resemble reality, that his myths have workable biology.
It's weird how the mind acts when it knows things. The containers with the preserved birds looked not much different than those with old soup, or those that hold just stock-ready chicken bones for that matter. So why should the bones alone be less disturbing than the entire animal, preserved as was the sanctity of its one and only existence?
Too bad I am not trying to write poems anymore. This would be a good one. One need not look farther than a freezer for juxtaposition that disturbs.
___
Our African Grey, Peanut, is in the nest box John built her when she started acting funning. Gonzo, her mate, who we now know has scored with her at least twice in his decent parrot's life, goes in the box and makes chirping noises. He's buttering Peanut up. She's been working hard. He's been feeding her with great pride. His pride is made physical in seeds, pellets, and an egg kept warm under her birdie vagina. I just wrote that with no scientific idea how bird parts are anatomized. Bird vagina will have to cover it.
Sometimes the parrots sit on John's shoulder while we eat dinner. They love our food. John feeds them a roasted chicken wing. I watch, abhorred, while they poop down the back of his shirt, lift a little talon, and delicately eat the meat off the bone. Bird cannibalism. Have they no species pride? John launches in about how their relationship to a chicken taxonomically is no closer than ours to cow. OK. I still privately consider them heartless cannibals.
When they are done they drop the picked-clean bone wherever. Right on our wood floor. So much for kindred feelings.
___
We threw a spontaneous holiday party and invited the neighborhood. Build community in 2017, when aspirations for goodness and fairness all feel like political roadkill.
A parent had asked if there were any family-friendly happy hours. I offered, my house?
This is the best kind of party-- I don't have to manage to get out the door. We're forced to tidy a bit. But this party had one condition: no effort. I could provide wine and popcorn, which in the end I didn't even pop because people arrived with so much to eat and drink, random stuff, blueberry muffins, puffy cakes, a burrata with smoked salt, a whole pizza, pickles...
One couple came without any child. They were the only ones. It's a parent group, so we're assuming they had a baby, but neither mentioned it. Neither pulled out a phone and said, hey, here's my cute kid at home playing with my mom, isn't she nice to give us the night out?
The man stood in the corner in a sweatshirt sweating and eating pizza quickly. His wife looked around at John's paintings carefully. "Who's the ornithologist?" She asked. Like that was the only reason our walls would be plastered with half-bird half-humans.
I saw her eyes travel from painting to painting, like she was at a crime scene collecting clues.
"My husband paints them," I said. "He loves them."
"I can tell," she said, the way people fill in space at parties with empty phrases.
She sat back down on the couch, a bib of sweat appearing on her sternum.
I looked at his paintings through a stranger's eyes. They were twisted with life but made from dead creatures. My husband saw the guests sweat, and graciously, silently turned on the ceiling fan, and the birds whooped from their cages.
__
Those winter mornings in Providence, I woke early, never sleeping well. The sunrise came in right at my gabled window and threw itself on the floor with high orange drama.
I don't remember my routine exactly, but surely I exercised-- maybe by then in snow pants and with a rickety space heater plugged in beside me so I'd sweat well.
Then I'd make a strong drink and sit at the wooden desk and wait for the words to rearrange my understanding of things.
In the tape player, because that's what I still had, archaic and functional, was a recording of Chopin Etudes my boyfriend's father had passed along to me. The father had anger problems. I listened to this tape over and over, getting up only to flip from A to B side and again and again.
While I listened, hypnotized by emotion, I wrote poems on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, carefully. Those slow steps he took from his twice dead, no, super dead, evaporated-type-dead beloved, his pride pulverized by not getting what he wanted. Music had never failed him before-- fuck.
Now I think-- maybe it was different than I imagined, or maybe I can imagine it differently. He came out of that tunnel to hell without the person he'd gone in confidently to retrieve.
It never snowed where he was from, but there it was, snowing, fat wet flakes that stuck to his face. He looked back at the mouth of the cave to be sure this was not just some bullshit, and his new wife would come running, tripping on the hem of her dress. Nah. The cave mouth was just a mouth, hard and dark. He could not even see deep enough to its exposed tonsils. The stalagmite looked like angry teeth of someone with poor oral hygiene.
As Big O turned back around, his sandaled foot stepped on something lumpy, and then slid into what could only be ripped open guts of an animal. He could not easily extricate it, and stood there, cold and cursing, just a touch of pink showing up through the broken snow drift.
Maybe that was how it was, or how it would be. Befuddled by death, you step right into the fact of it.
__
That morning in Providence, I impulsively turned around to see the flattened body of a squirrel. Weren't there rules about this? People whose job it was to collect animals after accidents? To keep death safely out of view?
I stooped and idiotically put my text book and coffee down in the snow to free my hands. Like I would do something, like I would touch that animal, or had any reason to. It was early for a college campus, but still enough people were hurrying around me to get to class. One asked, "Lost your keys?" Her breath punched the air.
"No," I said. And then I lied, "A contact lens." That would suck, surely.
I could only see the animal's back, its thick tail. I had felt the rot slide under my boot, saw it in the treads of my shoe.
"I'm sorry," I said to the squirrel, my stomach turning.
I saw a few people look at me quizzically on my knees in the wet, risking my text book.
I have no affinity for animals, naturally. But I was sorry for the loss of dignity. I was sorry that it was such a cold, brutal winter, and my pant legs were always wet, and I was too thin, and my defenses were brittle. I was sorry that creatures died because of other creatures, and that dignity was only partially within our control. I was sorry. I picked up my coffee and book again, and kept walking, but just as I reached the lecture hall, I felt my chest tumbling, a hammer of worry. I looked back like people do reflexively at car accident scenes where someone has died and emergency personal flock and hover. All you could see was regular unbecoming snow pushing up against the curb, not that much bigger thing that lies waiting for each of us.
