Page 16 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

I dreamed once of a

long line of baby

elephants ambling

by, and awoke with

the words, our

nearest orphans.

Martín Prechtel says

that in early times,

when hunters killed

an animal mother,

they understood that

they were now

responsible for its orphaned young. This is how we came to have pets.2 How many,

many orphans have we created?

An unexpected memory swims to the surface. When I was a little girl, my grandparents

used to vacation in Hawaii. On one of those trips, my grandfather went sport fishing and

caught a Marlin. A few weeks later, it arrived in Los Angeles, stuffed and lacquered in a

permanent, exuberant arc. For years it hung above the louvered doors of the His and

Hers changing rooms by my grandparents’ swimming pool. I always hated walking

beneath it, always felt ashamed and vulnerable, as if it might crash down on my head, as

if any one of us would have deserved to be crushed by the obscenity of its ignominious

end. Years later, my friend Tom told me that Marlins mate for life. I thought of her then,

the swimming widow spawned by my grandfather.

Tom worked as a termite inspector. In his early forties, he contracted pancreatic cancer

from exposure to Chlordane, a pesticide developed and manufactured by Monsanto and

used from 1948 to 1988 for fumigation of corn and citrus crops and for termite

eradication in over 30 million homes. It has a half-life of 30 years.3 Tom died in our arms

the year before Chlordane was banned. The notion that ‘pest control’ is necessary and

can only be accomplished by eradicating entire species of insects is identical to the

2 The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise, by Martín Prechtel
3
Wikipedia

3