BY Rabbitfeet
When the heat was too much, a terrible canary beating its wings beneath my skin to leave purpling
blooms along the surface, I fled. The train windows were open, swirling warm air through warm air, like
an arm cutting through bathwater. there was no life to that air, that crept in as slow and heavy sludge to
heave its way around the carriage.
Home is parched straw and baled hay and the second unfurling of buds after a mistaken autumn. But the
sky is the same as ever; cloudless and heady and curved. It is blue; Cornish blue, Devon blue, a Somerset
sky. Whatever you call it, it is a bright pin in the map, fixing me, squirming, to the place I know best.
I walk by the lake, climbing beneath blue so thick I flinch when it flutters between the leaves overhead,
fearful of its weight overcoming its determination to remain aloft. The trees are wind-bent, and sickle thin
youngsters are cradled in the shadow of their watchful parents. I wonder if the older trees are able to
swallow their fear of the heat, of the early-dropped leaves, of the parched earth. I wonder if they keep it
from their children with stories of the cosmos and star-spotting games, or if they pass that fear to them
with grave and regretful necessity.
I fit my feet between loose rocks and hogback roots with their bellies twisted to catch the sun. My feet
know every loose and rolling hole in the earth, and miss the wet sponge of moss and mulching leaves.
Everything crisps and snaps now. The stones here are light, embedded in reddest clay cracked as my lips,
and I think, out of all of us, they must be the least afraid. They have nestled down here for years; you can
see it in their weathered skin, aged and pocked with lichen and run through with a black roadmap of the
years. The birds are quiet, too tired to sing, so I content myself with the quiet rumbling of the trees, the
almost-imperceptible settling of the rocks.
When I come through the gap in the tree line to look down over the lake, my legs are boned coneys. There
is a deep hurt where the water used to be, an empty and toothless mouth. I scramble down to the lake’s
edge, ankles wriggling over the showering pebbles, and land hard on what used to be the bank. The
ground is cracked and patterned with sludge and bone and a stratigraphy of disaster. I want to cry, but it
feels cruel to water this ground so lightly, so I chew on the inside of my lip until I taste pennies.
The blood in my mouth makes me furious, but I shore myself against the flood and step carefully around
the lake’s perimeter, on the off chance that something is surviving here. At the far end where the lake
tapers into a point, where the water was so deep and busy with sharp-toothed rocks our parents used to
warn us never to dive there, something moves. A dread takes me, a deep-rooted fear that skitters in my
stomach and rises to my throat. I know with certainty and without interrogation that something terrible is
here. step by creeping step, and worrying the ragged hole chewed into my cheek, I route over bones and
old bike frames and the wide skin-splits in the ground.
When I get close, a stream of crows goes cawing into the sky, and a fox goes rattling over the stones.
Half-heaved onto shore and bloated like whales I've seen videos of washed up on beaches, there is a body.
It is blue as the sky, rotting into purple and green and yellow. There are inky ripples of colour shot
through its seal-skin body, round with blubber, like the shadow of the northern lights. Its neck is long and
curved, thrown back as though in desperation, and its beady black eyes are wide and bounce the sun back
at me. It has spade-shaped flippers and its open mouth shows me yellowed and conical teeth. It lies alone,
chunks taken out of its sides and back; red-pink raw gives way to orange at first, then yellow-pale
adipose, snug against bleached bone. The sunlight catches the creature harshly where it lies among the
rocks, drying the shiny skin. Its back flipper is pierced on one of the rock-teeth, suspending it as though it
were still swimming. I weave across the lakebed to it, and put a hand on what would have been its cheek.
There is nothing like you in the world, I think, and there will never be again.
I am struck, watching my reflection in its black eyes, by the desire to scream. I should call the newspaper,
call the cops, call the council, call someone, anyone, everyone. I should get it down, drag it home, take a
million pictures. I should sell pictures to journalists, sell the body to government scientists. I should bury
it in a deep and unmarked grave beneath the lake, beneath the trees, beneath the stars. I should leave it
here for the wildlife to take care of.
My anger returns when I realise all these options have my fingerprints inextricably mixed up in them; my
hands are deep in the earth whether I like it or not and how can I do the right thing by this animal, this life
cut down by my species, and not bear the guilt though I refuse implication? How do I mourn this thing
without making a sideshow of its flesh and bone; its stilled and quiet heart; its unmoving lungs? How do I
fix this thing that is not my fault, that claws at my smallness with its largeness sharp as cat’s teeth?
A voice calls down to me and I realise I have been holding my cheek between bruxing teeth. I spit blood
onto the lakebed and turn. Shielding my eyes against the white heat of the sun, I look up to the rocks
above the lake. There is a man there, older than me and breathing heavy from beneath his hair like a
wispy cloud. I recognise him vaguely, a neighbour of my parents’.
“I called the council,” he shouts down to me with an air of smugness, “they’re sending someone to sort it
out in the week.” I know he wants me to be grateful, to say thank you, sir, for solving this problem. For
your no-nonsense attitude to this community issue, which is akin to someone leaving their bins out too
long or their lawn unshorn and just as monumentally important and forgettable. For taking it out of my
hands. I shrink smaller than an ant and my brevity of self makes me vulnerable which makes me angry.
Afraid of hurting him, I neither move nor speak, only stare until he shrugs and walks away.
I hike out to the lake every day that week until the council come. I hope for some kind of vigil; alone time
with this rotting corpse, that I might sit beside it and comfort its soul. But this is a big animal and a big
discovery and everyone wants a piece of something so concretely organic. People from the village come
to gawk and hack and tell their friends and soon city people and country people alike are tumbling like
termites to swarm the site. They carry off parts of it, take photos of their violations, leave offerings and
prayers and protest signs, sing and shout and slice.
So little is left of the animal by the time the people from the council arrive that there is almost nothing left
for them to sort out. I watch them spend hours figuring the best thing to do; pacing and fondling and
chattering before they can come to a decision. Photographing and categorising and breaking the body into transportable chunks. They sweep away all the candles and flowers and poetry and leave the lake empty.
Then it is gone, and the earth turns. The axes of the world are apparently stable enough to withstand such
a shock, despite the shudders it sends down my spine. I have a picture, from that first day, of the creature
as I found it. Its eyes are blank and its tongue hangs loose as an unfilled glove from its slack jaw. Behind
it the sun glares and the rocks are so oversaturated beneath its gaze that they glow white. Above is the
sky, bluer than blue.
When the world moves away from my hometown and leaves the lake to fill again in winter, I find myself
angrier than ever. I move like a shadow through a world inverted. Everything is normal, and I wake in
terror from dreams of turning my body through the water like a sea angel and finding my face pressed
against sad, dark eyes. When it overwhelms me, pressure threatening to split me along my seams, I think
of that picture. I think of the animal laid out beneath a sky so blue it fixes us both beneath glass like
pinned butterflies. There is a strange sort of hope that comes from being caught in a snare; there is time
enough to loose the wire, and take seal-slick skin between my fingers, and find the ones who lit flames
and left cut flowers at the end of the world.
Rabbitfeet (they/she) is a queer, non-binary writer who enjoys exploring gender, queerness, and nature. Their tales are those of the very human through the lens of the non-human. Expect mangled word choice, a little terror, and transcendental joy. And animals. Lots of animals. Find them on Twitter: @rabbitfeetpoem