The Death of Small Creatures

by Trisha Cull

  We sit in the parking lot like this for a moment. “Wait,” I say, “just wait.”

  “Tell me what’s happening,” my sister says.

  “I’m feeling better,” I say. I hear leaves rustling, pulling me back down to earth.

  A few years before I had arrived in this same parking lot after injecting cocaine with a guy named Leo at the Inner Harbour. He had long red hair and smoky breath. I told Constable John I thought he was beautiful, that I loved him. All the cops laughed. The doctor came and opened my gown, slid the stethoscope inside, prodded down to the butterfly tattoo and ran a finger across the small, raised burn mark above it.

  “Did you do this?” he asked, examining the scar. He asked about coffee and medication, do I frequently do drugs, when was my last period. I believed him too, that it all had something to do with blood rising to the level of the heart, leaving my uterus dry, that it was as simple as bodily neglect and too much coffee.

  “Yes I did that,” I said.

  The body heals quickly, remembers little, absorbs the damaged cell back inside. A new cellular memory replaces the old. We are left with a scar—an omission, a lie. A compulsion emerges to damage the self to remember who we are, the body a minefield of potential regeneration, excavation and reinvention. Out there, wars are fought and civilizations born. Men return safe with the solace of missing limbs, and women with whatever’s left.

  I grab hold of alpine roots, the tubers and turnips of a mountain. We ascend single-file up the steep base into the dark green wedge above. Loose rock trickles, our breath heavy and concentrated. I am a wild gardener, compelled to bite into things, use my teeth, hoist myself up. It is the core of my compulsion, gnashing of teeth.

  Two hours later we come to a grassy clearing. The others cross as silent as shepherds. The yellow grasses bend low across the earth.

  I ask what brought me here after that first near-death experience and several waves of not-deaths in the months leading up to now. Was it only some remote and disabling panic? There was the not-death in the video store when the crowd closed in, and the not-death in the middle of the night from which I awoke plunging into a dark green sea. I dragged the terror with me from my dream’s last gravity. What brought me here with a faint scar on my belly and a hint of wine emanating from my pores two thousand feet above sea level—“okay,” as the doctor said?

  As the grass rises to my knees, I sense the wound of it—a tender place seldom touched but not forgotten.

  Also mounted on the wall above my sister’s fireplace is a picture of The Creation of Adam. On her first trip to Italy she met David, a beautiful Italian man, and lived on a goat farm outside of Rome with him, his dad, his dad’s girlfriend Rita and their five-year-old son Crus. My sister came home with an Italian accent and stories of starving dogs in the hills. Now when I think of Rome I think of starvation—bone-littered piazzas, a gelato vendor on every second corner.

  “They were being eaten alive,” she says. “His dad tied them to the rotten trees in the middle of the grove.” She drifts inside, follows the hindquarters, the sullen eyes. I touch the glossy middle of the photograph—an olive tree. I believe the leaves feel this way in real life, smooth as photographic paper, rubbery. She found the dogs half-mad, red skin split open with festering wounds and colonies of maggots.

  Every night she climbed the hill carrying buckets of food. Her Italian lover, David, sat cross-legged on a boulder playing bongo drums, bobbing his head, his uncanny wiry blond hair afro-like—a shock of yellow. The rhythm propelled her up the rocky slope into the day’s last light. She ran toward it with fierce longing. David laughed at her, but some nights he made love to her in the loft of the barn while thunder rolled across the sky, worshipping her body. She loved him for this, and for his Roman nose and chiselled body, the legacy of his family name. They were not Italians. They were Romans.

  I let the photograph lie flat on the palm of my hand like communion. A dog turns, shrinks into the darkness, looks back yellow-eyed. “She didn’t remember me from the first trip,” my sister says.

  “You did what you could,” I say.

  “We stole them,” she says, “left them on the steps of an animal shelter in Rome in the middle of the night when no one was around.”

  “You tried, then.”

  “I’ll never know what happened to them though,” she says. She places the picture in the photo album and turns the page. Our grandmother appears, a blown-up print occupying the whole space; she is smiling in front of the stove with a spoon in her hand, a green checker apron tied around the plume of her stomach, her glasses blacked out from the flash. We joked, called her Mafia Grandma. She seldom slept, woke up to any sound. You passed by her bedroom door in the middle of the night and smelled cigarette smoke; blue tendrils twirled in moonlight. In this same picture, a pot of oil is boiling on the stove. In the pot are balls of dough. The room is filling with steam, though you cannot see this or the adjoining living room through another door, or the large orange sofa that always smelled of smoke and cat piss.

  She turns to a picture of me in a blue raincoat, second year at university—nineteen. Already I have shed some of my small-town, meat-and-potatoes weight, adopted the crisp culture of the island, its salt and wind, its delicate foliage and ephemeral green soul. I am looking up, laughing under a shower of white cherry blossoms in front of her apartment on Beechwood Avenue. She is laughing too, shaking the branch.

  On the next page, my sister leers at the camera through pouring rain, thumbing a ride outside Spokane, Washington. She is wearing a suede cowboy hat, blue jeans and the big-red-lips Rolling Stones T-shirt, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth.

  On the next page, an orange kitten struts across the keys of the piano; he is bristly and arched. A second ago someone called out to him, the flash shocking him into his present bristly state. The camera jumped ahead and captured his moment of shock.

  These things inside the frame come from behind a yellow tint, red-eyed and creased, chemically altered.

  Everything outside the frame is lost.

  We cross a glacier in a gully of rock; the ice slopes at a forty-five-degree angle, and the bottom edge cuts off and drops three thousand feet into Moat Lake. I shimmy across the soft top layer of ice, skid down on my heels. The others pause like Stonehenge in a staggered line above, stare at me in contempt then prod on, silently jabbing their staffs into the snow. Another fifty feet and I would have been soaring above the valley.

  How long would the falling take? When is letting go? How long does letting go… fall? If prolonged for several moments, would my pulse quicken or slow by the end? Would the wind and inertia of that final leap off the bottom crest carry me into the centre of the lake far below?

  Leigh speaks only to describe the geology—layers of rock, granite, slate, agate—reminding me of biology class, the cross-section of a cat’s flank, layer by layer, fibrous grains of muscle. “The glacier did this,” he says, pointing to a purple cleft of stone. “You will not find this anywhere but here.”

  But I am only reminded of broken blood vessels, the final stage of healing in tender burnt flesh. These can happen anywhere.

  The light plays tricks; the spectrum up here is broadened. At this altitude and on such a stony face, there is little to obstruct the vision. A person could go mad, but there would be no point. Myths evolve from such landscapes. The universe curves from the small of the mountain’s back. We believe the Inuit have so many words for snow in order to carve meaning from white: soft deep snow, snow adrift, water-filled snow, snow in air, new-fallen snow, my snow, your snow. We believe that in West Greenland there are as many words for ice: sea-ice, new ice, hoarfrost, rime, calved, hummocked, ice at the edge of the sea. We believe in language to cleave consciousness of desire, hunger, thirst and love—openings the sea can flow into.

  But the mountain keeps no language; it exists in the context of an interminabl
e sky stunned silent. We succumb to a methodology of limbs moving to an ancient chronometer, each step closer to a mouth-less summit too small for habitation and too high and unpredictable to warrant a vocabulary. As I step onto the narrow plateau at the top and look out across the range, I cannot reconcile the grandeur with my own being. I understand the folly of self-worship as never before.

  The valley behind unfurls into many valleys, Moat Lake surrounded by a dozen other lakes—a reminder of the glacier that once crushed everything and left these tiny deposits behind. Before me, a valley narrows into a dark green crux where three other mountains jut upward four thousand feet, as if an arm’s length away, snowy peaks receding into haze.

  The others sit scattered along the ridge, chewing sandwiches. They extend their thoughts across the even keel of the horizon, minds slaked of worry, bodies slaked of work. They become empty as potters with clay in their hands, empty as artisans moulding earth into bowls. They become empty.

  I clear a space in the earth. My mind curves around the process, the hollowing, as when I first learned the world is concave. The teacher drew a lens on the board, emphasized its inward curve; she said, like a bowl.

  I gather stones and stack them above the space in the earth. It becomes a marker, like those that led us from the bottom of the mountain to here. We sought them out eagerly at first, each one appearing suddenly and faithfully upon a boulder—in the middle of a stream or along the path. But as the day progressed we passed them indifferently, wanting the surprise of some new configuration that burgeons and says, You have entered a new geography… you are this far from becoming lost forever.

  The teacher drew another lens above the first, its convex opposite, rounded like the exterior of a sphere, and within, an enclave; she said, to enclose, do you understand?

  And yes; we said yes.

  Leo takes my hand, a syringe pressed between his lips. He holds my wrist between two fingers and ties a rubber band around my arm above the elbow. He puts the needle in for me because this is my first time and I can’t do it.

  “God, I hate needles,” I say.

  A moment or an hour passes.

  “Can you feel it?” he says.

  “No, I don’t feel anything,” I say, extending my arm. A light rain falls. I am Adam like this, limp and listless, my fingers dipped downward. I stretch across a basilica of sky. He is coming—God, smouldering across the harbour. “Oh yeah, I can feel it,” I say, and my head falls back.

  I lean into him, grind my body against his, wrap my arms around him. His long hair falls about my shoulders, smells of rain and smoke; this is the scent of the nights he’s absorbed from living on the streets so long. A person begins to smell of tin, the hard corners of city blocks, rusted drainage grates, parking meters, paint and brick, sour glass, the salty stench of the underbelly of the bridge and faintly, grass and roses. I feel his longing, to take me in and love me, to enclose me in his arms where once there was no one.

  But now a slick of red and blue flashes across the wet pavement. Leo fidgets, turns toward the harbour, then turns back as a police cruiser coasts past.

  Now there are police officers here. Everyone seems to know each other. “Hey, Leo, what are you up to?” one of them says. Constable John tells me not to move, to sit down on the pavement. Now they are cuffing Leo. They frisk him, his jacket and pants. It comes to me from twilight, a light in the hall. What am I doing here? I am a good girl. I have always been a good girl.

  They find a package of needles in a baggy inside his pocket, little pink needles a child would inject into the supple plastic of a doll’s arm.

  “What are you doing to him? Leave him alone!” I shout, as if I have known him my whole life, as if my life depends on his, as if I am in love with him.

  Leo looks down at the pavement. I see now that he is humiliated, he is in pain.

  Constable John pushes me down against a parking block and takes my pulse, tells me my heart is beating too quickly. Now he is talking to me, holding my hand.

  I love you, Constable John.

  Every gesture flits past, burns gaps into time. The false gauze of darkness disintegrates. The true sleek black barks alive, shouts inside my head, says: You are here. This is now.

  I wake in the night, tender from the day’s hike. The upper loft window is flung open above the lake—a circumference of stars where water and sky meet.

  Leigh lies naked in moonlight. Soon he will slip out into twilight to fish and watch the sun rise. I roll over and kiss his shoulder, savour the burn in my forearm.

  By morning the lake may be whitecapped, sparks from the fire sputtering through poplars. This makes me nervous, though it tempers the mosquitoes and whisky jacks. I prefer a solid unattended flame sealed to the wood, a fluid, uninterrupted burn. But windy days we disperse into private nooks around the island, pass each other silently through sparse trees, fall into books at the water’s edge, barely speak until nightfall. We gather for dinner around a new fire, open a few bottles of wine and engage in conversation again. The whisky jacks and mosquitoes return. Everything huddles.

  But this morning I dress by flashlight, climb down the ladder and latch the door behind. Leigh’s footsteps scuttle over rock in the distance, a cough now and again as the cold air tightens his asthmatic lungs. I love these small weaknesses, anchor myself to them, trace his flesh the moments before making love—an older man’s soft stomach, the thick layer of flesh around the waist, wrinkles around the eyes, speckles of grey.

  I find him sitting cross-legged overlooking June’s Cove, a fishing rod in one hand, a tin coffee cup in the other.

  “Hello,” I whisper. He startles, touches his forehead, afflicted.

  I scuffle down and join him. He kisses me on the forehead, passes me the coffee. We sit this way for a while in shadows. Every few minutes fish jump, but we never see them. Cliffs curl around on both sides. We look up as the sun refracts off Castle Rock and filters through the forest.

  “What are those birds?” I ask.

  They have been darting through the air, skimming the water’s surface. It occurs to me that they are abnormal, unearthly.

  “Those aren’t birds,” he says. “They’re bats.”

  I shudder, having never been in the presence of bats before and not knowing my fright of them until now. I don’t like that they resemble birds but are not birds, the transformation imposing upon my impressions and altering the atmosphere without warning, instilling me with fear I’ve not yet had time to analyze and slot into all my other fears.

  “I don’t like them,” I say, taking the rod. I cast poorly, only twenty feet.

  “Here,” he says, reeling it in. I cast again, a few feet farther.

  Although I abhor the idea of fishing, I hope for a snag, some tug on the hook. He will kill whatever I catch, I know, though we’ve never talked about it. He will slip his finger inside the gills and pull the hook from the puckering mouth, find the appropriate grip under the fins and around its belly, and snap its head onto a rock. I have faith in the quick kill, believing he was born with it, dexterity derived from the unobstructed logic of a boy’s body—nimble fingertips exacted upon the various parts of a disorganized world.

  Two bats almost collide in the middle of the cove, but stop suddenly, hover, twirl around each other then spiral off in opposite directions, never having touched.

  “Why do they move like that?” I say.

  “They move by… what is it? Radar?” he says.

  The line goes taut. He reaches, places a hand lightly upon mine.

  I want this fish, engage briefly in the process of the kill. But a moment later the line goes lax, unravels back to the catch. The rod falls to my lap.

  Leigh continues casting as the sun rises above Castle Rock. Voices burst softly over the crest of the hill. A fire crackles. The cove brightens into day, insects and pollen filtering through a haz
e above the water’s surface. The bats disappear.

  I think, sonar.

  I light a candle and place it on the rain-spattered windowsill. I am eighteen years old, not yet accustomed to the incessant rains of Vancouver Island, faithfully anticipating a first snowfall and a white Christmas like the rest of Canada.

  The room smells sweet, the dresser littered with torn chocolate bar wrappers and an empty pizza box. Through the adjacent wall, my roommate’s voice moans, a mattress squeaks, a headboard thuds. I lie naked, circling my stomach and breasts, and pant out against the back of one hand while massaging a nipple with the other. My breath repels back, acidic. My throat burns from vomiting again over the toilet. There are tiny purple bruises up my forearm from where I take the weight of my body on the lid of the bowl each time.

  I imagine my roommate’s delicate body—her flat stomach, her small breasts bouncing tightly as she throws back her long auburn hair.

  The moaning grows louder.

  I close my eyes and take her place, gyrate on top of the man; the next moment I am a quiet observer in the corner. Sometimes they are aware of my presence, other times not. I climb up on the man behind her, enclose her in my arms and press my hands against her flat stomach. Together, we ride into climax, the motion of searching easing to numbness, as though what she feels (dark and wet) comes back to touch me the same. I imagine her body is my body, that her pleasure is my pain.

  The crucifix above my bed bears down upon me—the sinewy body of Christ.

  I think of the crucifix my grandma wore around her neck, and her cigarette smoke twirling to the ceiling, sliding across like Moses’ plague of the firstborn. I think of my sister absently stroking the fur of the orange kitten purring in her lap, and Grandma’s voice for the third time calling, “Will you come and eat your dinner?”