The Death of Small Creatures by Trisha Cull Read Free Book Online Page A

lying there on the plate, its flesh and blood not so remotely foreign from my own, evolutionarily speaking. We all come from the same cosmic sludge. Still, I salivate when Leigh cooks meat. Torn: I want to bite into it, and I do not want to bite into it.
    The relationship between depression and my simultaneous conversion to vegetarianism is remote, but I am convinced there must be some correlation. It has something to do with countering thoughts of death by decreasing my consumption of it. The flesh and blood of once-living animals has become surreal.
    I have been popping my pills in triplicate, waiting for that cloud to lift, for the medicine to do whatever it’s supposed to do, counting down the minutes until my next appointment with Dr. Pastorovic or my psychologist, Fiona.
    Dr. Pastorovic says I should not be ashamed: “This is a medical condition, no different than diabetes.”
    Fiona says I am in crisis.
    Is it enough to say that daylight is shocking?

    I sit on our back porch watching for shooting stars and drinking Pinot Noir, thinking about death. What happens? Where do we go? The streak of light from a shooting star is a tiny particle of rock being extinguished; it’s the friction between high-speed debris and the atmosphere that makes the fire in the sky, yet we believe the star burns itself.
    I like the idea of reincarnation the best, to come back as Gateau, the cat named “cake.” She lives a good life next door, lounging all day on the porch overlooking the garden. Sometimes I lean out my kitchen window, whisper in a French accent, “Allo Gateau…
Je t’adore
,” and Gateau stares back, uninspired. Every time I speak French to Gateau I think of my South African French teacher in grade one, Mrs. Hartley, singing at the front of the classroom, holding up a picture of a bird:
Alouette, gentille Alouette… Alouette je te plumerai… Lark… lark… lovely lark… I am going to pluck you… going to pluck your head…
    Something beyond rhythm and rhyme is lost in translation. I think of Mrs. Hartley’s fingers fluttering through the air to give the effect of feathers falling to the earth.
    In my mind, the feathers are always black.
    I always felt sorry for the bird.

    I’m six years old. Grandma places a newborn St. Bernard pup on my lap, shows me how to nurse it by squeezing drops of warm milk from a turkey baster into its tiny mouth. I watch Grizzly Adams on TV, pretend that Grizzly is my father, and he and I and the bear all live together in the mountains. Beef stew simmers in a Crock-Pot in the kitchen. The floors smell of lemon oil. This puppy smells pink, like a baby. My knees are skinned from climbing high up the apple tree.
    I squeeze milk into its mouth, one drop at a time, then two drops then three.
    It pants softly, gurgles, closes its eyes.
    Grandma comes in, looks down and says, “Ohhh…” takes the puppy from my lap, cradles it like a baby and disappears into the kitchen.
    Later, I look in the garbage can, see tiny velvet ears sticking out from a tightly wrapped cylinder of paper towel—a little cocoon.
    The body is warm, but the ears are cold.

    Vegetarianism has been growing inside me for years. Perhaps it began with the dead fawn nestled into her mother at the side of that highway near Lake Louise, the faint trace of blood pooling out from under both of them, how soft and peaceful they looked—the mother in mourning, the fawn dead.
    Roadkill.
    Everything has a reason, a root. For a long time I stopped believing in God, but I’ve come to believe again.
    Part of my problem is an inability to decipher truth from lies, to get my teeth into something and hold on the way life requires you to hold on, to settle into my skin and breathe, like a robin settling into her nest on a warm spring day. I can’t get a foothold.
    My wings are trembling.
    The sky is too big.
    This branch is weak.

    This morning, I pass by