By Sean Stiny
* THIRD PLACE WINNER ANIMAL ESSAY CONTEST *
Trigger warning: Image of Dead Animal
There's a gray fox in my black garbage. Not rooting for scraps in the tipped-over can.
But skull-crushed and fully rigored. Hit by a hulking bastard of a pickup truck. Now considered landfill carrion. Double bagged and waiting for Wednesday pickup. But I can’t do it, I can’t entomb her in a garbage truck to be emptied out into a heap of food scraps and plastic detritus.
What an absurd end to an enchanting creature. Her chestnut ears are still perked like she's listening for a vole and her tail, her brush, is coiffed and attentive. Her snout is pointed and thin black whispers dart her cheeks. It’s only after observing the blood spatter on the asphalt that I realize a front bumper caught her across the forehead. Yesterday’s rain couldn’t wash the blood, splotches of it remain where she succumbed to internal combustion.
She lies in repose on a dried pine root until I take notice, splayed in the dirt next to my English lavender. She appears calm and napping, curled in bed and contented in the sun. Six inches beneath her, my daffodils are winter hibernating, and I am enraptured.
To whomever ran her down, was any thought given to your foxslaughter? Or did you pull into the driveway and unspool yourself from your beast of metal burden without pause to the blood you just spilled?
Under cover of darkness, I loaded Ms. Fox’s delicate eight-pound frame into an old cooler. Still double bagged, fleas danced to and fro across her salt and pepper rump. I headed to the outer edge of our chic but agrarian town with just one thought: return Ms. Fox to her rightful place in this blended municipal landscape, thus closing the loop that ties her to the vultures in flight and worms in ground. She would go back to the food chain, like always intended, I would see to that.
A turnout next to a field presented itself. The field brown and bramble knee high. Darkness on the edge of our town shrouded my intention. I deemed this to be where she’d rest for the night until the turkey vultures scented her at dawn.
Taking her from the cooler, doubly bagged, I walked a short distance into the field, and laid her (flung her really) from the garbage bags into the cloaked field. She landed with a thud in the cool autumn air. I glanced above at the big dipper and pointed my car home. Her calm terminus, the frightening natural order, now alone in that field where she deserved.
Ms. Fox lived for a time in my neighborhood, not dissimilar to my own self. Walking the road, checking the mailbox, staring up at a crow. Darting through the fields, around groves of eucalyptus and underneath weathered fences, yet to have written off humankind.
Perhaps she had kits, or fully grown kits with mates and kits of their own. And the person who shattered her maybe drove this road every day. From home to work and back again, countless years without furbearing incident until today. Who has the right of way in our modern bewilderment, the four wheeled or the four legged?
Ms. Fox would plainly say, “don’t mind me, just passing through.” Though, it wasn’t enough to deter the tonnage of metal and glass with the power of five hundred horses. It never is.
Sean Stiny grew up in Northern California. A writer, woodworker, and owl box maker, he lives in Petaluma, California. His writing has appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Los Angeles Review, Grit Magazine, Bend Magazine, True Northwest, Kelp Journal, and Wild Roof Journal.
