Animals

It’s probably a wheel that rolls down a highway when one is lost...

Animals

On a street not far from here one day a cat lay leaping on its black broken back. Griddle hot jumping. Useless legs flailing. A screeching thin woman with wide eyes and splayed bony fingers scooped him frantically into her arms and fled from street wailing.

For this reason you collect creatures?

Maybe. At twelve years old we had a dog. One night she had a foot jutting from her swollen womb, a twisted broken stick. She lay panting on the floor. Darkness filled my gut as we took her to a midnight vet table and the doc removed grayblue pups one by one with forceps, dropped them into a pan. Even drugged, she dogscreamed from the rendering. A motherhood never reached, she died the next day too.

Why are you telling me this?

Suppose it’s from the time in Salt Lake when a smocked man at the shelter smiled grim as he shared a lesson he thought I needed, and maybe I did, when the walls were white and the room he showed me had the day’s dog corpses heaped. Heaped high. I guess there was no room in my life for such an impression. I was too young yet to open my eyes.

Or when the pup fell off the porch behind the cabin and broke its neck on the rocks by the river below. Or when I found a hawk that someone had shot without killing it all the way, as if there’s half kill and full kill, and took my knife from its sheath.

Or when the truck tire hadn’t quite crushed another beast and I screamed my anguish on the side of the road with another smaller inadequate knife to finish it off.

And now you ask forgiveness?

No. I haven’t paid my dues.

They say the circle turns.

It’s probably a wheel that rolls down a highway when one is lost in the blackness of being or has seen too many fleshes flattened. It may be a circle if we talk of things unbroken, but in this case they were most certainly busted up and I think I’ll go back to my room now and watch the trees die from the window if that’s okay.

Shall we visit tomorrow?

I don’t think so. That’s enough dredging, enough wondering what could be done for things for which nothing can be done. That’s enough past.

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Thank you for reading Dynamic Creed. I appreciate all of you very much and hope you enjoyed this piece. Maybe enjoyed isn’t the right word…. but at least I hope it stirred something. All the best. Victor David.

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