by K. Victoria Hernandez
My eyes wander to the Pomeranian in the corner of the cafe, leashed next to their owner who is having coffee and conversation, while I neglect my own. The coffee, and the date. Why I bother to go out Saturday nights anymore is beyond me. Old habits, I guess. The Pomeranian pants and sniffs at the air, taking each paw on and off the floor with an uneasy, restless rhythm.
“Hey,” says my date. “Are you okay?” One of his eyebrows is in the air while the opposing hand taps a stiff staccato into the table. We were talking. Or rather, he was.
The Pomeranian stops, all four legs straighten into vibrating columns of fur. Its body reminds me of a dandelion head with ears. The ears are rotating, at full attention and searching, for her.
I have not been paying attention. “I’m fine, sorry. I was just distracted by the cute dog.” I point it out to him. He seems satisfied and keeps talking about himself. He is also in his 50s. Divorced. Distraught by the ever present beating of time—or maybe that’s just me, interpreting his fretting over the old-movie-theatre-turned-dance-club as something with more substance than that.
I shift my body so that I am facing him, but my gaze is just behind where he sits. Several love seats behind the Pomeranian and its owner is a little table with various creamers and sugar shakers for patrons like me. It is draped with a second-hand table cloth, and all the art is “vintage” or artificially run-down to look like it.
There is a fake deer’s head hanging over the fireplace, made from a local artist who moved last week when he couldn’t afford his rent anymore. It’s made of metal and 50s patterned linen, but the antlers are real. When there are no zoos left,—I think to myself—we’ll be feeding peanuts to taxidermy. I trace the exposed edges of the wall in my mind and imagine concrete statues poured over bones. I know this and yet, here I am, drinking coffee from a plastic cup because I conveniently forgot my own, and with whole milk because—well, at least there’s no straw.
The table skirt does not reach all the way to the floor. It sways in a windless room, and I recognize it’s rhythm as one of steady breathing. She’s hiding.
Slow and focused, my breath matches hers. The stranger across from me goes on about hiking, trying to impress me. Two large, furred paws smoothly come out from under the skirt. Each claw is the length of my middle finger. I hear nothing, but the Pomeranian is searching with radio dish ears. My date is from Tennessee. He says he misses it and hopes to go back someday (“Great place for kids. Do you have kids?”). A massive jaw and snout lifts the black skirt of the cafe table. Cats keep their heads close to the ground when they hunt, it is the perfect position to pounce from. Her one tooth is dagger-like and dull; it scratches the floorboards. There are supposed to be two, but the other has been snapped to reveal the marrow within. She eyes its prey, leaving scratches in the floorboards with each inch closer. My date asked me about my scar when we first walked in, and I haven’t listened to him since. It is across my chin, the scar, from falling as a child. No scandal, just a remnant of days past and the versions of me that won’t come back. Some people see a body as a museum, some an autobiography, and others, a eulogy. I am on of those people. I haven’t decided which one yet. Lately it’s been the latter.
She—I had decided this cat was a she, based on my knowledge of extant big cats and what I can, and cannot, see—she reveals the length of her body, sunken in between every rib. I can count the vertebrae in her spine and tail. Her fur is patchy and dull like an old teddy bear. Chunks of it are missing. The Pomeranian is yapping now, trying to jump onto the lap of their owner. Their owner apologizes to their guest but refuses to pick up the rabbit-sized snack. People are starting to notice. The poor thing is crying as it writhes to get away. She inches forward still, unmoved by the commotion.
“Baby! Shhh! I’m so sorry, he’s usually so well behaved.” My date is sighing and rolling their eyes at me; he packs his things. She has stopped moving. Her stance is steady, and every muscle tightens. Short and powerful, though malnourished, they send her further into her back legs. The Pomeranian is practically screaming. My date says something terse but I don’t flinch and can’t look away—he must think I’m playing dead. Maybe I am. She leaps. He gets up. Claws and jaw dive first into the rat-dog’s neck. She clamps down,—the door swings open, shut—and there is quiet.
The dog sits, confused, as does the extinct cat. Her paws have gone straight through the dog. She stares at it and tries to bite down again. New grief revives black tear stains matting up her fur, and she keeps trying. All of the cafe goes back to talking; the Pomeranian lays back down in peace, paying no mind to the dead thing trying to eat it.
I grab my things and walk over. “May I pet your dog?” Though annoyed, the young man consents. My knees and back ache as I lower myself to pet it. There was a wolf here, once, I think as I rub under the pup’s well-groomed chin. While I am down there, I lean close to the hungry ghost, her massive head drooling and desperate. I whisper, “let’s go.” And we do. We leave the cafe, and I call work to tell them I’ll be working remotely next Friday. They are no surprised, but consent and I hang up. Her massive head rubs against my hip as we walk down the busy city streets. Women apparently impervious to a fifty degrees wind chill walk past in cheetah print and stilettos, stopping at the cross-walk up ahead.
“You see that,” I point out the corner building across the street. The line goes half-way down the block. Even in the evening light you can see how the bones are old, but paint is so new it almost looks wet. “It used to be a movie theater.”
***
It is Thursday night and I am sitting cross-legged on my bed, prepping my backpack before setting off for the weekend. She (I never name them) is laying against my back, her massive head resting on my pillow like an heirloom. Her coloration is sandy, with dark splotches across her back and legs. She aimlessly twitches her tail. It is chopped, no longer than a modern lynx’s. Fun fact about the Panthera family: they cannot purr. She, a Scimitar toothed-cat—or Homotherium for the taxidermically inclined—, “chuffs” instead, a form of vocalization that tigers make to communicate with each other. She chuffs and yawns and sometimes growls at the bear when it gets too close, flashing dagger-like canines.
The short-faced bear is very young but still bigger than her. Its left flank has been split open, three arrows are embedded on the right. He no longer bleeds, but when he did it matted the fur in thick strips down his long legs and hefty bodice. Imagine a grizzly bear but almost three times as big, legs twice as long, and its muzzle halved in length.
In the corner of the room are two shrub-ox, a pregnant camelops, and one giant armadillo. They dwarf the space like a wolf does a doghouse. All three prey animals watch my bed, remembering how the predators used to hunger. I hesitate to call their memory a kind of fossil, but I don’t know what else to call it. What do you call it, when herds of bison run from nothing? When deer hide in wolf-less lands. If fossils are what remain of an extinct past, then I may consider my room a kind of museum. I collect Vinyl and cassettes and VHR tapes I have to specialty order from an online dealer. I have books that haven’t been printed in decades. Most of my clothes are second-hand or hand-me-downs—this was first out of necessity, but my taste has grown for it. I am comforted by the smell of aging paper and worn-in wool. I hesitate to clean my things when I buy them because dust is but dead skin and so it too is like a layer of fossil and it all seems so romantically melancholic to me.
I am not angry at the passing of my high school fads, nor do believe this generation is taking it all to hell. I just like to remember what, it seems to me, most won’t bother to, even if that means a bit of mourning on my end. What is remembering if not a private kind of seance.
I count each one of my guests and mark their species in the books I have for this purpose—encyclopedias of long and recently gone species, some plant ones too, just in case. My bag is packed and when I rise, they rise too. Even in death their bones struggle to hold up their bodies, remembering the weight of living.
***
I have never liked Tetris, nor the idea of clown cars. Somehow we all find ways to fit in my van (a 90s Honda I rescued off a college grad, who thought themselves worthy of an upgrade) except the bear, who chooses to lay on the ceiling instead. It is fine, no one can fall off or hurt themselves now. They only think they can, and I entertain them. It is early in the morning and we have many hours before we reach Yellowstone. I plan very few pit stops, as usual, and we set off.
I stop at the nearest gas station before entering the highway on-ramp. When I first began these trips I was young and driven by the hope for change; in wanting to be a part of that change I would often start these trips with a great sense of guilt, filling up my tank with “fossil fuels” to inevitably burn and heat the world. Wretched irony—I deplete the remains extinct animals for the sake of other extinct animals. I could try to find ways to excuse it, maybe, but I just try not think about it all that much. Did you know that all petrol was made before the existence of fungi and other decomposers? Did you know that we are burning up a fuel that may never exist again? Did you know that even this poison, this global-greenhouse gas goo monster, can be driven to extinction? Ignorance is not bliss so much as it is a way of surviving. I am not always very good at it. I still remember the things that used to live here. I see them everyday.
At this gas station I gain a new passenger. A flock of sherbet-bellied passenger pigeons perch on a phone line above my car. I start the engine and they take flight, following us down the highway running north.
The second stop was for food. I refuse to eat gas station snacks as my first meal, but drive-throughs are okay. I open my window to pay and when I do, an odd looking rabbit jumps in. He looks like a cartoon old-man rabbit; long body with a scruffy face and white on its feet, tail, and ears. The rabbit (a Hypolagus, I think) lands on my lap and, on seeing the cat in the passenger seat, jumps to the back.
The third stop was to pee. No new species here, just a few extra camelops and one more rabbit. The flock of pigeons has become significantly larger, although I do not know when this occurred. I assume they will just gain more and more members until, like when they were alive, their flock blots out the sun. I have a caravan moving behind me now. I drive at twenty, fifty, sixty, eighty miles per hour, but always in my rearview mirror their pace remains the same. Slow and undistracted, we march towards the sunset.
On hour 8 I find that I am hungry again, but too close to stop. My stomach growls and the cat next to me is chuffing. She perks her ears to find what part of me is starving. Her giant paws reach for my gut but go straight through. More tears run down her eyes, and I am overcome with guilt. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you remember. I’m sorry.” She curls back into herself while the other passengers shift in the backseat, watching her still. We drive for another half-hour until I see two yellow arches. I stop and eat until I feel sick. I won’t let my stomach speak again.
***
The stars are hanging loosely over Yellowstone. There is no ranger at the entry station to ask for my money or ID. It does not matter, I have an annual pass, and some of the rangers here still know me, if not as their ex-coworker, then as the crazy park regular, driving hundreds of miles every other weekend for what? A sunset and some coffee?
There is one area in the park that is only open to back-country pass holders, (which I am); it is a large field of grass on the side of a hill, open to the west with groves of wood below. A single stream has carved away part of this hill, exposing the sedimentary rock underneath. Millions if years of it. I used to come here on my days off from watching the park and picking up careless visitors’ litter. I enjoy the timelessness of here, how little seems to change and yet everything has. I hold the memory of it in my mind and the park map in my hands. The car is parked near the ranger’s station. I wake an hour before dawn, take up my backpack, and we walk.
***
She is struggling. The pads of her feet landing deep into the mud, each step heavy with dead weight. The others fare no better. We walk nevertheless. Living, extant birds are singing for the chance to make more life, but my pigeons stay silent. Several deer cross our path and my cat does not try to hunt them, not even the fawn hiding lazily in the bushes. I wonder if they—my ghosts—still crave things like food and the heat of one another. I step on a twig and the deer, interrupted from their meal, run.
***
We reach the field through a patch of forest on the hill’s east side. When we exit from under the trees, all the grass has been stained red. The sun is bleeding onto Earth’s canvas. There is no living thing still roaming here, unless you count the clouds—they are in the shape of mammoths, a whole herd making their way across the sky towards the horizon line.
The shrub-ox are the first to go. They run down the hills into the groves below and vanish. The camelops are next, their outlines fading into the sun. I do not get to watch the armadillo leave; I look behind me and they are no longer there. Appropriate, I suppose. The rabbits jump, each kicking my cat across the face before running off into the sky. Even in death we can be vengeful, and maybe a bit humorous. I watch them float up, until they too fade into clouds and empty sky. After the hares, it is just my cat, all the pigeons, and I standing in the grass. I feel no wind, but the pigeons stretch their wings against some force and I can see she feels it too.
“Go on. No need to linger.” She, my cat, looks up at me. I have never seen such a starved thing in all my life, living or dead, but this is not the tragedy. The tragedy is, I will never know a version of her that is well. I will never see her full-grown and satisfied by some large meal, caught by her own blood-stained claws. I will never know the version of her that is unpierced by arrows, her own bones, or some combination of both. I cannot even know her descendants in their truly wild form, as many of them now lay as rugs and mounted heads; or if they are living, are doing so just barely. Every one, her and all her children, are all but bones now. I want to remember them; I want to share them; I want to resurrect all the eras that lived and died before me—it is the bitterest part of nostalgia, to cry over a life that was never yours to begin with. I am haunted by the murdered ghosts of a still dying earth, and remembering is a sort of private seance with so much mourning on my end.
She looks up at me, and I down at her.
A tear falls from my face. I gasp, as it lands squarely on her cheek—not through, but on—and all the pigeons fly. The flock blots out the sun. I am surrounded by sunset-colored feathers and all of their shadows. My eyes close for a moment, overwhelmed by the rush of it. When I open them again, I am alone. No living thing roams this hillside with me. Although, I suppose, they never did.
The sun has set, and I drop my backpack to the floor. I will sleep here tonight and walk in the morning, back to my car and the nearest coffee pot. The small diner I went to last time was playing Planet Earth II instead of the news and somehow it depressed me more, so I left early. Upon arrival, I found two more neighbors packing up their things; now every time I go home there seems to be less of it I recognize. I want to tear it down. I want to scream and moan and I think maybe, if I can become this bitterness, I can hold them at bay.
I am a haunting thing. Do not exorcise me.
K. Victoria Hernandez is a writer and early-career ecologist. She is graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Workshop, 2018. Her writing has been featured in Daily Science Fiction and often covers topics of feminism, ecology, and Latinx identity. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her family, taking space in cafes much like the one above.