Relief bolstered my resolve. I was pretty sure I could fend off a squirrel, no matter what was wrong with it. I lifted the pan and took a step forward.
“No!” said the man miserably, turning his face away.
I hesitated. Was he talking to me? Was I not supposed to protect him or…?
The squirrel flung itself across the man’s face, belly down. Fora bizarre moment, I thought that it was trying to smother him and rushed forward, splashing through the shallow water.
Then I heard the crunch.
Blood poured over the man’s chin. His throat worked spasmodically. The squirrel’s body seemed to collapse but it made no effort to escape. It didn’t even show any signs of pain. It simply stared at me with bright black eyes while the man bit and swallowed and bit and swallowed and red crept over his cheeks and dripped through the wire mesh below.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t recoil. I stopped dead and simply stood, holding the candle and my makeshift weapon, and watched. My mind was a hollow silence.
At last, the squirrel pulled away. It was impossible for it to walk—it was cored to the backbone, like a watermelon eaten clear to the rind—yet walk it did. It crawled off his face and then it fell off the side and landed without a sound.
I circled the prison bed and saw, in the shadows there, a half dozen small bodies. Squirrels, mostly. A rabbit. Something on the bottom that was probably a groundhog. None of them more than a day or two old, all sporting the slack, bloody pockets of discarded warbles. Much later, I would think they were probably the source of the faint rot I had smelled, but in the moment, I have no memory of thinking anything at all.
The newest body lay draped across the others. It wasn’t breathing, but then, it had nothing left to breathe with. It was dead. Ithadto be dead.
You thought thathewas dead too.
It was the first thought to cross my mind in a full minute. It lay in isolation inside my skull, like a specimen pinned to a card.
The warble on the back of the squirrel’s head began to pulse, and the thought went away again.
It did not take long for the larva to emerge. The thing was at least two inches long, so large in comparison to its host that it seemed impossible that it had been contained within the rodent’sskin. I watched it thrash free of the skin cocoon and lay still for a moment, as if exhausted. It was dark brown, its slug-like body divided into fat segments, the surface stippled instead of smooth. I had labored for hours getting that stippling just right.Ah,I thought inanely,the preservativedidwash the color out. I will have to repaint it.
From illustrating the life cycle of the fly, I knew that its next move would be to burrow into the leaf litter and pupate. There was no leaf litter here, nor did I intend to give it the chance to pupate. I stepped forward, slid the edge of the pan underneath it, and flipped it into the water.
Its body jackknifed, but it did not sink. I brought down my boot, crushing it against the wet boards, seeing something yellowish puff into the water, before red clay rose up and covered it.
I looked at the man on the table. Blood coated his face and throat, already starting to dry. His eyes were closed. As I watched, tears began to trickle silently over his skin, etching pale tracks into the stain.
What I wanted in that moment was not answers, not explanations, not even freedom. What I wanted was for thisnot to be happening.
I turned away. I went up the stairs, pulled the drape aside, and sat down in the corner. I pinched out the candle in an effort to save the few minutes of light that I had left. I tucked my hands into my sleeves and pulled my skirt tight so that there was no exposed skin for anything to reach. If I had had a blanket, I would have pulled it over my head to keep the monsters away.
And then, and only then, I let myself think again and stared, dry-eyed and dry-mouthed, into the dark.
I had told Phelps that I believed the Lord only sent us as much as we could handle. That was a lie, but even if Ihadbelieved it, I wouldn’t anymore, because this was too much.
Being kidnapped and shoved into a dark hole in the ground was terrible, but I could probably have coped with it. Other people have dealt with things like that before. A dying man riddled with parasites was horrible, but by itself, I could have managed. Other people have dealt with things like that as well. The history of the world is written in dying bodies and in those who have to pick up afterwards.
Combining the two was right at my limits, but I had managed. I had been coping.
But the gutted animals—that was simply too far. A merciful god would not have piled that on top of the other two.No onecould be expected to deal with all three at once.
And yet, horrified and nauseated and scared out of my wits, I was still a naturalist, and even as I shuddered in the corner, wrapped in a cocoon of fabric, part of me was asking,How did he bite through the fur like that? How did he swallow the bones without choking?
I could still hear the thin crunch of the squirrel’s ribs giving way. I rested my forehead on my knees and tried to stop hearing it.
I wanted this not to be happening. I wanted the world to be different. I wanted it not to contain horrors.
Useless. “Wish in one hand, shit in the other,” Esther had said once, shocking me. “See which fills up first.” She’d been right though. Might as well wish for a world where your father hadn’t died and left you penniless, or a world where his friends had remembered that you existed.
At last, I did what overwhelmed people have done since time immemorial, and slept.
CHAPTER 17
