Page 173 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

Anna, a crusty sixty-year-old who wears a lumberjack shirt, old jeans and mud-spattered

boots, rolls her own cigarettes and keeps goats. She lives alone in a house with walls

porous enough for dreams and ghosts to pass through. An old stone wall marks her land

from the woods beyond. Like Anna herself, the man-made boundary between the

domestic and the wild gaps open. She knows the habits of her neighbors – the crows,

owls, pileated woodpeckers–she can read the tracks of deer, fox and coyote as they go

about making their living. She has a few human neighbors, of whom Adam, a bachelor

who “cuts holes in the sky” with his chainsaw, is one. He is a quiet, sympathetic man,

willing to be of use where he can, comfortable with long silences and Anna’s strange

ways.

The story opens with Anna attempting to bury the past, literally. Her mother has left her

an urn containing the ashes, not of a person, but of a family album she immolated years

ago in an effort to release herself from sorrow. Anna has a great appetite for the past,

for stories, for memory, for the people who have gone before. Try as she might to put it

to rest, the urn will not stay under the lip of a boulder where she has buried it. Each time

she looks, Anna finds it unearthed. Amongst the ashes, her father’s eyes stare out from

a scrap of charred photograph. His early death when Anna was a child is an open portal

to grief. But this story is not only about her personal loss.

While pondering why the urn will not stay buried, she looks out the window to an opening

in the stone wall, just in time to see a creature stumbling through the gateway. Anna

recognizes this coyote as one she has watched for years. “She watches the slow

crumble of joints, as if disassembled by pulling the connecting thread from the long and

graceful legs, first front, then back, then spine, then head, and finally from the heart. . . .

Poison.”

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