Otter

That day, at the start of everything, the bakery released me early to chase a sunset. I had flour in the squint of my eyes and fire in the press of my bare feet on pedals like teeth. Leaning, racing, I scuttled around walls and angles which stood between me and those vital strands of slipping salmon pink.

Sidewalk to road to trail, I knew only direction, only the growing hollowness in my chest, gradual removal of ribs as more and more of the greying sky revealed itself. Walking eyes scuffed quickly over my tight lips or rested unknown on my back as I swerved silently past. And then there I was.

A child on a bridge over a culvert which lets one of the little rivers preform its ritual exhale into the bay. Bodies on the bridge, stuck to the edges and boulders by the water. A rock in the child’s hand. Indistinct sounds of early summer ease: blissful ignorance of the passage of time. A rock flying through the air from the child’s hand, and only once it was released did I see the sleek flash of river otter skull; the object of its flight. It struck the head, and the head went down. The child cheered. They all cheered. By the time I registered this wrongness, my legs had churned and pushed me over the bridge, around the corner, and I was gone.

And that was it. I didn’t know it at the time, but I know it now, knees aching, breath lurching, crouched between branches as thin as my wrists, witnessing violence and seeing nothing but otters.

           At first, I thought it was just a group of friends, full grown but juvenile, tempting the patience of the mudflats. It was further down the trail, out where the coast stretches flat for a mile or more at the lowest tide, all silt and semisolid. I faded into the alders as best I could, my first instinct to avoid, to wait out their intrusion.

           My phone screen pulsed a dim 11:34 p.m.

           Their sneakered feet passed from sand to grass, grass to mud. One pair hesitated. A girl—the only girl, I realized, in the group of five. Smart. We are brought up on tales of people consumed by the mud, sinking farther down the more they fight, eventually drowned by the incoming tide. Even in groups, it is not safe to venture too far out, but the others were cajoling, leering at her, tugging her shirt and arms toward the sea in short, birdlike bursts. She slung around, laughing, making for the shore, when a hand fastened around her elbow, and a voice sounded, gruff and old. She cried out and the first blow landed across her teeth.

           It was 11:39. My fingers dialed 9-1—and my phone screen went blank and empty, dead.

The urge to turn around, to yell something consumed me, roiled like hot liquid and I a glass shell, hurtling away, away, digging myself deeper into meaningful indifference with every angry push of my legs.

I skidded up a hill, jumped off my bike, and sat down facing the inlet. Still too north and east to see what scraps of the sunset were left, I felt in limbo: unable to advance to beauty after what I had seen yet too abashed to turn around and address it. Instead, I tried to absorb the jagged edge of every leaf silhouetted in the dying light, as if by subsuming every point and edge of the natural world, I could somehow atone for the cruelty of my species.

Elizabeth Bishop writes, the art of losing isn’t hard to master, and inaction is always a kind of loss. Loss of self, loss of community. And every time it reinforces itself. I said nothing about the otter. A couple of months and several bodies of water away, my good pair of sunglasses sunk slowly, like a leaf, and I did nothing to retrieve them. After a night concert next winter, my father walking me back to my car three blocks away, we passed at the base of the Town Square sign the thinly shod bones of a woman wracked with convulsions. His same stalwart grimace told me without telling me, there’s nothing we can do.

Pretty soon, it becomes a way of life. A sport, to dodge guilt, to skate around problems, to let your bones calcify into a position of unfeeling neutrality rather than curve to meet all the ugliness of the world.

           I flinch at the sound of flesh striking flesh. It is nothing I have been prepared for, puny slaps chancing the distance to my ears. They are kicking her in turns, and I am screwing up my eyes against it, curling into my own body through the crescent dents left by fingernails in my knees and arms.

           The heroic root of me screams I should do something, I should do something, I should do something, but louder is the voice of self-preservation, of self-doubt. I am small. I am weak. There are four of them. My cheeks are wet, and they are not my tears. I bite my lip, and it is not my blood. If they see me, they’ll hurt me too. I don’t want to die. I can’t let her die. I should do something. If I move, they’ll see me. Small. Weak. If I run, they’ll chase me down. I can’t do anything, I can’t I can’t…

           And how could I be thinking of an otter at a time like this, but that was it, the start of it all. It was the first moment when I should have spoken up but didn’t; when I set a precedent of denial. The too-solid plop as the rock struck the wet head of the otter. The unknowing cruelty of the child, paling in comparison to the cheering support of the others on the bridge.

           The girl’s cries are growing less frequent, and I imagine that her attackers are peeling them off like layers of onionskin, one by one, until they get to the center of her, the newest part, and their searching fingers find no more purchase. When they are done and she is silent, they drag her as a connection of cells, nothing more than the weight of a human, farther out where the quilted ocean will soon tuck itself around her in a final embrace.

           They race back to the trail, still crowing like beasts, like men, and I am a tree stump as they pass, inanimate and crumbling. Only when all their cacophony subsides do I uncurl, stumbling like an unskilled marionette on numb and disjointed legs, my eyes fixed on the girl I saw reduced to this pile of used flesh.

I fall, and fall again, and the third time, my knees crash down just feet from her head. My eyes drink her in a flood, in a split second. I know this girl. Beneath the dark blood mixed and clotted with cloud-light mud over lumped and swollen skin, I know her. I know her in the flash of an arm pulled back, the edge of a maniacal laugh. They all cheer in my head. The river otter dips beneath the surface. They cheer and cheer. I reach out, quaking in the colorless breeze, to feel her neck.