karen > Books: nature-will-end-you‎ (65)

...and then I happened to read the magnificent novel Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and thought, "Oh my God, what can I possibly do with fungi in a collapsing Gothic house that Moreno-Garcia didn't do ten times better?!" and shoved the whole thing in a virtual drawer and took heavily to the bottle. (Seriously, put down this book and go buy that one. Then pick this one up again, of course, God forbid anyone not finish the Author's Note, but make sure you've put Mexican Gothic on your reading list.)

But.

Well.

As writers say to each other, "Yes, it's been done, but you haven't done it yet."...and also my fungus was different, dammit...

...and then I happened to read the magnificent novel Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and thought, "Oh my God, what can I possibly do with fungi in a collapsing Gothic house that Moreno-Garcia didn't do ten times better?!" and shoved the whole thing in a virtual drawer and took heavily to the bottle. (Seriously, put down this book and go buy that one. Then pick this one up again, of course, God forbid anyone not finish the Author's Note, but make sure you've put Mexican Gothic on your reading list.)

But.

Well.

As writers say to each other, "Yes, it's been done, but you haven't done it yet."...and also my fungus was different, dammit...

I felt safest in my office, alone with my books, charts, runic symbols, and scraps of old text; and when I deciphered a chunk of language—even a word!—a thrill of understanding juddered up my spine. The distance between me and another human being, just for that moment, was erased. It was as if someone were speaking to me, and me alone.

The word in Inuktitut for climate change translates to "a friend acting strangely"—what a personal and beautiful way of describing a relationship to the natural world.

I'd forgotten the complexity of West Greenlandic, which is a polysynthetic language, meaning the words are composed of multiple elements called morphemes, word parts that often created "sentence-words"—the longest of which is over 200 letters long. Nouns were inflected for one of eight cases and for possession. Eight moods as well as the number and gender of both the sentence's subject and object inflected every verb. Countless subdialects sprang like weeds. On top of this, most things had two names, the common one and the word used for outsiders—white people, called Qallunaat—to confuse them.

"Don't you know the stories? Death birds are said to guide the souls of fallen climbers out of this world. If you believe what the old guides and mountain folk say, at least."

"And do you?"

He smiles. "Did you know mountain rescuers often find fallen climbers without their eyes? By the time they find the bodies, the birds have already gotten to them. Ravens, jackdaws, crows; they pick out the eyes and swallow them up."

"Jeez, really?"

"Ask one of those guides. They say the birds do it so the soul is free to escape. Otherwise it's doomed to stay and haunt the place it was found in. But sometimes the soul doesn't want to leave and it lingers inside the bird for a while. They say that if you listen, you can hear their screams coming from the mountains at night."

Every year, climbers—sometimes entire teams—disappear into deep glacial voids and die in their frozen darkness. If the mountain is merciful, the drop is deep enough to smash them into silence in one go. Most victims, however, are trapped between blue, narrowing walls of ice, and as their body warmth melts the ice, they sink slowly deeper and deeper, until they die very consciously of asphyxiation.

The people in the stairwell are still there.
They're closer now.

He turned to look at me, and, man, chills up and down my spine. On the bandage strips, where his mouth shoulda been, he'd Sharpied a smiley mouth. A black, half-moon curve, crossed at the edges for round Cupid cheeks. Coulda been innocuous, but wasn't. Cuz his head was moving and the smiley wasn't, giving his face the grisliness of a puppet come to life.

But the top half was real, and that was Nick. He made a muffled sound, looked happy to see me.

He typed on his iPad:

Smile!

This way you'll always know it's me and never mistake me for someone else. When I smile, you don't have to be scared of me, okay?

I couldn't tell if he was joking or not. I smiled to be on the safe side and said, "I'm not scared of you."

But I was.

When I looked up, I saw him slowly swing his right arm and put his hand on his Sharpied smiley mouth.

I hadn't even gotten halfway to the village before I wish I'd stayed home. The valley was on the verge of a panic attack. The mountains seemed to have been disjointed. The sky rocked. The cold unhinged. There are November mornings when the cold is clear, crackling, and crisp, but this cold was sticky, syrupy, clung to you. Like it was begging you for help. You, the first organism to have crossed its path, and would you please take it with you and protect it from what's about to happen, because that was much, much worse than the cold itself.

Jesus. The Morose hadn't even got started yet and my metaphors were already going haywire.

I stick my frozen hands under my Gore-Tex coat and in my armpits. The burning pain that takes over my fingers as the blood flows back into them pushes all my thoughts out of my head and I have to scream.

“What do people look for out of a story, Spin? You told enough of them to know.”

I thought a moment, then answered. “They look for it t

“What do people look for out of a story, Spin? You told enough of them to know.”

I thought a moment, then answered. “They look for it to have a good shape and end where it’s supposed to.”

When something big starts to fall, it goes as gentle as thistledown at first. But oh, how it gathers!

Smiling in the face of horrors is a thing you can get better at. It was probably one of the first tricks our mothers' mothers ever learned.

Grief's not a debt we owe. It wells up or it doesn't.

He said it was not so much a thing of flesh and blood for him, what he was, but a thing that was mostly inside. Body is a shadow, he said. When I fall in love, I won't care about my lover's shadow, nor I wouldn't expect them to look overlong at mine.

"They've got that look about them. A bunch of Josephs in search of a manger, as Leonard Cohen would say."

"I don't know what that means."

There ought to be a rule in the telling of stories, my husband complained to me once, after I had brought him some dismay with a sad one. You ought to say before you start whether things will be brought in the end to a good or a bad case. That way them that are listening can gird themselves up somewhat, and be ready when the ending comes.

I told him I was sorry for the hurt to his heart and promised to give him fair warning next time. But I thought more thereafter, and in the end I came to this thinking on the subject. There can’t be any rules in the telling of stories. They’ve got to go where they go, which is not always where you would want them to. And as to the happiness or the sadness of it, that depends on where you’re standing. A happiness for one is sometimes a sadness to another. Or it might only be a happiness when you squint one eye. Or you might not know, even after it’s all done, whether it came out well or badly.

"Sorry to be a disappointment," their mom said, lying down. She paused and looked at the kits with all seriousness. "But you must promise that no matter what you do tonight, you will not go to Bog Cavern."

The kits' ears perked.

"What's...Bog Cavern?" the alpha asked.

"That's where the old storyteller lives," their mom said. "If you go there, you'll hear a story so frightening it will put the white in your tail."

The world is not tame.

People forget that. The glossy brochures for state parks show nature at its most photogenic, like a senior picture with all the

The world is not tame.

People forget that. The glossy brochures for state parks show nature at its most photogenic, like a senior picture with all the pores airbrushed away. They never feature a coyote muzzle-deep in the belly of a still-living deer, or a chipmunk punctured by an eagle's talons, squirming as it perishes in midair.

If you're quiet in the woods long enough, you'll hear something die. Then it's quiet again. There's no outrage about injustice, or even mourning. One animal's death is another's dinner; that's just the way it is. What remains will go to the earth, yesterday's bones sinking into today's dirt..

…the scar on my calf, the remnant of a deep cut from the steel siding of a neighbor’s trailer that opened me down to the muscle when I was trick-or-treating, my Wonder Woman cape getting stuck in between the stacked cinder blocks they used for steps.

I pulled my sock up and told them I was fine, because they were a nice old couple that gave out whole candy bars instead of bite-size, and I’d never had a whole candy bar to myself in my life. I limped home, shoe full of blood, and ate the candy bar in the back of the truck while Dad took me to the urgent care where they charge only half what the ER does and do stitches as good as anybody else.

I was kind of joking when I said zombies, but not joking at the same time. They’re sick people and they turn delusional and violent and they bite, but it’s easier to say zombie than “a person infected with a super rabies virus and no longer capable of making good decisions.”

Danger skulks undercover in the fields; the tall grass bows and waves, whispering of the epic battle to come. The zombie foxes are the first to attack. The scent of their musk announces their stealthy approach. The zombie raccoons are next. Their snorts and chitters fill the air, broadcasting their immutable intentions.

The first book in a

The first book in a can't-put-it-down, can't-read-it-fast-enough action-thriller trilogy that's part Hatchet, part Little Shop of Horrors!

Petra knew from her dad that the little hospital was already overloaded. For most people, it was like having a really bad cold, or the flu. But some people had much more severe reactions—or life-threatening asthma attacks—and needed to be transferred to Victoria or Vancouver—where the hospitals were also packed.

A few people hurried from their cars into the shops, sneezing, covering their faces. A lot of people wore masks—a very common sight since the pollen started flying. Petra had even seen a few people with those scary heavy-duty things with the canister filter. Like in pandemic movies.

…the cache had been ravaged by polar bears and foxes—there were tracks in the thin later of fresh snow. All the bread, sugar, and tobacco that had been there previously were gone, and the rum keg’s bung was bitten off and all the rum gone.

One of these peaks, Mount Arthur, Greely summited alone. The climb was so difficult that Greely had to send Sergeant Linn back, too exhausted to continue. There was soft deep snow on the ascent, and for the last nine hundred feet Greely was reduced to crawling on his hands and knees, his boots soaked and feet freezing. To force himself to keep going, he would throw his eyeglasses five or six feet ahead up the mountain, so he would have to ascend to retrieve them.

I locked our box and carried the deck of mail across the stale, refrigerated room and spread it out on the counter under the warning: IT IS A FEDERAL OFFENSE TO ASSAULT A POSTAL EMPLOYEE. There was a copy of House & Garden with the cover torn halfway off. There was an appeal from the Environmental Defense Fund. There was a flier from Grant City at Bridgehampton. There was a bill from the Amagansett Lumber Co. There was a catalogue from L.L. Bean. There was a letter from my brother in St. Louis. And there was a big green and gray Modern Science World envelope. That was what I wanted.

Amy raised her head. “I just thought of something,” she said. “I know somebody who might have some ideas—somebody who maybe could help.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Tucker,” she said. “You know, the vet. Maybe you could talk to him.”

“I wonder.”

“I thought he was very sympathetic,” she said. “I liked him very much.”

“So did I.”

“Why don’t you call him.”

“I liked the way he talked,” I said. “I think he knew—I think he suspected something. I think maybe you’re right. At least he might listen.”

“I think you ought to call him.”

“I don’t suppose he would be free this afternoon,” I said, “But maybe we could make a date. Maybe for tonight.”

“Jack,” she said. “I want you to call him—right now.”

“Well,” I said.

I opened the telephone directory on the counter in the pantry. It contained three listings for Dr. Tucker. One was Albert C. Tucker DVM res. The second was Albert C. Tucker DVM ofc. The third was Tucker Animal Hopsital. I dialed the hospital number. It was the same as the ofc listing. The number rang, and I waited. It rang and rang. I began to count the rings.

She stood in the doorway, catching her breath.

“What?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, Jack!” She shook her head from side to side. “The most awful thing. I just saw Linda. I ran into her at the store. And Naomi died last night. She’s dead!”

The bar was a harvest table at the end of the living room, and there was a crazy-looking picture framed in silver on the wall behind it. I found a useful bottle among the empties and poured myself another drink and looked up at the picture. But it wasn’t exactly a picture. It was a coat of arms—the coat of arms of a family named Prather. I thought for a minute, and remembered that Prather was Dorothy Winter’s maiden name. So that cleared that up.