Jenny Irish
In the desert plants are tough-skinned, thorny, armored and spiked, designed for self-protection, evolved to keep their soft innards safe, to guard the precious liquid there, narrow bands of flowing moisture scientists have recorded with specialized microphones, capturing a slow pulsing not unsimilar to the push of blood through the human body.
Soundtracks of such living things can be bought in stores that sell tasseled ottomans and red currant candles in hobnob glass, tree of life wall tapestries, and lace bralettes with dozens of intersecting straps.
A bird's beak is a spike of sorts. A rat's teeth, a version as well. The black snake, which can appear matte, flat, without gloss, turns bedazzled when struck by the sun and can be longer than a man is tall and is beloved because it will kill a rat and eat it, and then the rat will not eat its way into the cacti that bloom so prettily in an otherwise empty gravel yard.
In nature, there are many things designed for the undoing of other things, and many things have learned, on top of these natural gifts, specialized arts of undoing.
A seagull, having scooped a sideways-skittering crab from the shallow safety of the water, will carry it up until the gull is only wings, the v of a child's drawing against the blue background of the sky, and then, as it passes over the jag of a seaside cliff, release its catch to crack the crab open on the rocks below.
In the damp places in the northeastern forests, in the laved, low lying places where leaf litter degrades back toward dirt, places where darkness is freckled by light, places black with stagnant moisture and maroon smells, golden mushrooms grow, delicately stemmed and with a jaunty frilled cap: the beloved chanterelle and its toxic sister, the false chanterelle, which are nearly identical in appearance. The first is protected against harvest by the second, and so both live and thrive.
Assisted by an unguent made from the entrails of a sacrificed infant, reports recount that a witch might insert a broom handle into the anus of a goat allowing it to carry sixteen children to their sabbath, where, upon arrival and unloading of its passengers, the goat would remove the broom handle to play the flute and dance upright by the light of the witches' fire.
In nature, there are designs that seem cruel. Why are elephants, for example, given the capacity of memory necessary to cross great swaths of changing land and also an understanding of loss? Why year after year, for a long, long life, must a herd mourn their dead matriarch, mourn first one, then another calf who couldn't take another step toward water, collapsed and was scavenged upon, eaten until too rotten to eat, and finally left to rot away, only the bones left behind, which each year, are paused over, grief an even greater pull than the need for water, the bones caressed even after they are craggy with age. What is the benefit of an elephant understanding loss?
On the West Coast, a mother claimed her son's teacher would flush her little boy down a toilet into a secret warren of rooms underneath the school where rituals to honor Satan were performed. The youngest students, she said, were sacrificed then consumed raw in orgiastic feasting, the plump pink of a nipple in the mouth replaced by the plump pink of a baby's toe, softness with an afterburn, like an oyster sprinkled with horseradish and swallowed down.
Children, the mother said, were tortured with power drills applied to their armpits. Children dropped off in the morning, the mother said, were spirited away to Mexico in hot air balloons, made to swallow live black snakes and eat fistfuls of feces then brought back and cleaned up just in time for pickup.
How obviously this is ridiculous. But so rich is fear that fathers and mothers descended on the schoolgrounds with shovels and buckets, a backhoe even, digging to prove the impossibility of secret rooms of black candles, black robes, red lights, and red vessels of red babies' blood. What did they find? A turtle's shell. The cracked plastic pedal of a tricycle. A plastic snack bag patterned with Mickey Mouse, dragged under the earth by a rat.
Encouraged, they kept digging.
And of course, the mother who made the accusations was insane. Her brain was wild with chemicals out of whack. And she ruined lives, of course she ruined lives, with her wonderous accusations, investigated by authorities for years upon years upon years. And of course, she didn't mean it. Of course. And of course, she didn't understand what she had done. And of course, it could be said that she was a victim too. Of course, that could be said. Of course.
And I could rock myself to sleep to the lullaby of a hate filled heart that truly meant every evil it ever did. I could finally sleep well at night if only every awful story had a villain equally as bad.