The coyote, the crows, the dog, the cat--they did nothing.
The coyote, a familiar friend, watched from the edge of the burnt siena
forest.
The crows perched in the poplars, cawing.
The dog, black and white, maybe once a coonhound, frothed behind a log, eyes gone dark.
The cat had ran, a ginger dash against monochrome tawny hills, cracked red dirt dunes, and dead young people--pines, pines, we were out in the country, it was pines.
I watched it move, a magnificent s.
I watched the snake, the green, black-striped snake, writhe and made dirt puff.
It was a mutant, like all of us now. It bore two heads, one at each end, and made me think of the rat king carcass I’d found in my grandmother’s attic.
It was the symbol for the new world,
the symbol for the old world.
For light,
dark.
Indifference,
passion.
Peace,
chaos.
Angels,
demons.
It was everything. I think it had once been a Rattlesnake, even if the colors were wrong. I wished it to be a Rattlesnake, not a Ribbon Snake.
More venomous than poisonous. Mutated in coloration, but with teeth that still offered a death that the desert beyond didn’t.
I pulled back white-gone-dirt sleeves and held my wrists to the serpent, and when it turned its resentful hisses towards me, I saw its mouths were missing teeth, just had black tongues flicking at the dry air, scenting.
Disgusted, I stood up
and then stomped on its center. I heard bone crunch.
The crows flung themselves from poplars, the coyote fled, but the dog stayed staring dead at a patch of ferns.
“I wish I could eat you,” I told the dog, “but nothing’s right anymore.”
It wasn’t, so I ate canned spinach and pears and the odd pickled eggs and pigs’ feet found in my grandmother’s cellar.
I fed Californian rabbits blue-tinted prairie grass and waited for the day their offspring stopped having eyes in the wrong places.
I put on my grandmother’s prom dress and then her wedding dress and danced in the thorny apple orchard until both were useless, and burned them with the stillborn lambs.
I burned them with all the skeletons, partial or otherwise, I had managed to drag from town.
There were so many imprints of people, silhouettes, and I wondered if they’d ever blow away. The clouds had. I’d vomited, some of it bloody, for the first few days, but I didn’t die.
Same as I hadn’t died when all the children thought me a witch, having cat’s eyes.
Same as I hadn’t died when trampled by cows, hadn’t even had a bone broken.
Same as I hadn’t died when the children taunted us, us in the pines, for being inbred.
Whatever I was born as, I’d always been like them, the mutants. Grandmother had died in the first few days, so she didn’t have it in her genes enough. I had.
So I sat down, a few feet from the now dead snake, and started picking
fuchsia coltsfoot and violet daisies to make flower garlands,
ignoring the humming of suddenly docile, odd-flying hornets, yellow jackets, and wasps, but watchful for the stutter-flight of suicidal wood bees.
I squinted against a glare of sunlight and the flowers blurred into blood and the wasps into bombs.
I stood up, shivering, and crushed the flowers underfoot, easier than the snake spine, and walked straight-legged for the house.
The dog followed, but stopped, as if it heard something, and fell to the side.
It fell where I’d been melting spoons four days earlier. It didn’t get back up.
I hummed to myself as I looked at my captured horde of oddities--my naked chickens; my goggle-eyed rabbits; the black triad of sheep and the blind ram; the goat with horns along its back, bone protruding like dragon scales from its spine; and the pony whose feet returned to that of its ancestors, hooves opened a week ago and blossomed into clawed feet.
The clouds went back over the sky, casting the world to dusk, and I looked at the stack of used cans I would use for shooting practice if I finally managed to get a gun, looked at the blue-white gleam of the metal, and thought
I would do all right in this world.
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