The Flexing of Predator Feet

The Flexing of Predator Feet

The merlin was an abrupt, low-slung presence beside her as it fell from the tree and belly-skimmed the sand before her. Wasn’t that just the way of murderous things, she thought, appearing fast and out of nowhere? She paused, sorry to have startled it, hoping that it hadn’t sat with too much tension before deciding flight was the safer thing. The coastal road curved just here, the tiny beach an abutment and her arrival, wrapped in a flapping blue blanket as she was, probably seemed monstrous. The bird had been tucked up under sheltering leaves in this autumn rain, and she felt badly for shifting it. It was across the sand in a glide and five quick slaps of its crossbow wings; it braked sharply and was upright for a half-second as the wind suspended it at ninety degrees before the face of a sheer rock. It landed on the arthritic elbow of a scrub pine, glared back at her and then out to sea. In the gloom of the day its yellow feet glowed electric; they flexed impatiently like little lights barely touched at their contacts-on, off, on, off. She moved no muscle but her eyes but perhaps it could see the involuntary dilation and contraction; it did not stay with her but flung up its own wind-worn elbow in answer and dove away, down the other side. She looked beyond the rock for it, over the water, but there was no cut black sliver to say it was there.

The cabin had a coffee pot, a bathroom with a little shower, and a small, wood-burning fireplace. She had moved her two bags from the bedroom after standing and staring at the framed painting above the bed—it was Day of the Dead gone way wrong, wavering child-like lines where there should have been preciseness, doughy limbs, wide white holes for hungry smiles. She almost wanted to touch it, just there on the down-sweep of a slanted cheek where the rust color looked swiped thickest, just to make sure it was real and not mass-produced. She did not. The most desperate spells were made quickly, she knew, for she had made a few herself. Thick paint and wide swipes-there had been no time to pass the brush against the sides of anything. This picture stayed here because it had to, but she wouldn’t sleep beneath it. She nodded to it, I see what you are, and decided to leave the door open, too. The cushions from the couch pulled onto the floor made enough of a bed, and she placed it all in front of the woodstove. It took no time at all to have a fire burning bright behind the glass, coffee brewing. She untied her blue dress at the waist and unwrapped it, slipped it off her shoulders and let it fall over her rainbow striped knee socks. Her slip would dry quickly but her long hair would not; this she tied back in a braid. She went to the long white windows and cracked one open enough to hear the rain and the ocean, one born from the other, both invisible in the dark. She wonders if there are candles and she finds them in a drawer that she must ease open one side at a time, small white tea candles, maybe fifty of them. She pulls out ten and gets the lighter from her own pack, sets them ablaze high and low in the corners. She takes one to the bedroom for the faces, sits it in the far right corner so that it catches the high point in a desperate swipe of black so thick and hurried that the paint nearly curls. She looks at it again, wonders at her odd urge to honor it. Not it, maybe, but the devastation of the creator. Like honors like.

She wrote for hours, through a pot of coffee and four sharp-cornered logs. She fell asleep sitting on her cushions at the little coffee table and woke in a much dimmer room, with the heartbeat of the world booming yet somehow contained in the little flexings of merlin feet. She had such a headache. The fire was nearly out and only two candles burned, but she could see well enough. The pain in her head flowed to her mouth and teeth when she bent over and blew on the embers and she chewed to calm it, like a baby teething. If she pressed down hard enough it flattened out to her ears, which she preferred. It had gotten cold; there was a new distance between her skin and the slip now that the humidity had fallen, she seemed to feel it only on her shoulders and nipples. She found a sweater in her bag, and the whiskey. Headache medicine was handy in a side pocket. She had had to choose between plugging in the tiny freezer or the microwave, and she was glad to have chosen the freezer. She had ice in a smoky amber glass that threw the firelight high on the walls, for a moment she was a cave woman with a torch, and that pleased her. She took the sweater off now. It wasn’t really the cold that had awakened her, it was the dream. The heartbeat of the world. She wrapped in a blanket and lay back down, teeth clamped down, shunting the pain as far away as she could.

There was a miniature green spider on the mouth of her coffee cup in the morning, a tiny, nearly transparent thing that she was too afraid of hurting to touch. She picked a different cup from the curtained shelf above the sink, bright yellow, wider at the bottom than the top, squat. When she went running she ran north, away from the beach and its haunting, hunting bird. She wanted it to have some chance of food before she barged in. She was only three miles in when a Cooper’s hawk crashed into the forest floor beside her, banging up again with something small and dark and dying clenched in its feet. As always, she wondered that there wasn’t a specific word for it, for the urgency in the sudden upbeat of the wings of a downed raptor. A special kind of anxious desperation. No time for wiping off the sides of the brush, maybe.

The road ended on a rock, an overlook. A rocky overlook made it sound like it was an accumulation of many rocks but no, it was one giant rock, eighty feet long and thirty feet high. It was surrounded by others like it and many smaller, but this one stood abreast of the ocean and bore the undercut of her. There was one small trail onward from here, with a chain and a No Trespassing sign, so she let her hair out of its night-time braid to feel the wind and sat for a few minutes. There was another thing that had no word in the English language. Another urgent thing that once upon a time had pulled her from a sound sleep. Fuck, there had been a pair of Merlin there, too, she remembered, accustomed to her presence after a few days and now casually grabbing dragonflies, flex, flex, out of the air before her. She got caught swimming naked there, by a kindly old man who offered to turn his back while she dressed as his grandkids were coming up the trail behind him, who awkwardly asked if she’d seen the beavers, then started laughing uncontrollably, thin shoulders shaking in a green windbreaker, when she’d giggled. But what had woke her that day, the thing that had no name, was the sudden slap of a wave when there had been none, when the tide had gone out and been out and the shore birds had eaten and the peregrine flown over and the silt had just started to think of drying before the wet edge starting to slowly creep back in… at some point, in the coming back of it, there was momentum. In one instant the seep became urgent enough to roll up on itself and make noise, and that had woken her. She had sat on her sun-warm rock and eaten dried mango and sesame chips and thought that if anyone had a word for it, it would be the Japanese. If they did, she still hadn’t found it.

Her run back was nearly all downhill, she let her legs go and didn’t really have to think about the work of it. At the cabin she realized she hadn’t tied her hair back and it was tangled into something windborne and salty at the neck of her. She felt the knotted swing of it heavy on her bare back and waist when she changed into her swimsuit, she wondered briefly if the red of it covered the white of her scar. The spider was gone so she took her first choice of a mug, sea green and blue and grey, filled it with hot, black coffee, stepped bare feet into her brown boots and wrapped the blue blanket around herself.

She thought there are a million ways to announce yourself to a wild thing, and its hearing is good. The walk to the beach was maybe a half-mile, and there was no rain to cover the sound of her--still she thought, I would like to be as respectful as I can. She had a good voice, and a great repertoire of songs, but she took a minute to ponder what might be appropriate here. She settled on Little Wing, the Valerie June version. She was through it once and to “when I’m sad she comes to me with a thousand smiles” when she was abreast of the tree. There’s no swoop but she doesn’t stop; raptors, much like her, don’t like to be seen. She walks over to the rock, the far side. If it has sat then there is now fifty feet of wrack line between them but still, she doesn’t look. She is knee-deep in the water when it launches, not out and away but up. It grabs at a yellow warbler that has flown up from the autumn olives, one leg stretched out impossibly long for a small bird, shoulders back. There is a yellow leg and a yellow songbird and then they are separate things again and the merlin is lined out in pursuit into the dark forest across the road. She can see the warbler a second more than the falcon, a tiny bright spot, and she does not know if it is the forest or the hunter that snuffs it out.

That night beside the fire she types “Merlin images” into Google. She would like to see all the details of those electric yellow feet. The page fills with pictures of an actor, a wizard, and she clicks out with a sigh. She’s long known that people aren’t so anxiously desperate about the same things as she is. Does anyone else wonder how long you must be a bird hunted by hawks before you learn to hold still? It’s been years since she’s had more than one whiskey a night, but she pours another. She’s had three drinks when she thinks to deal with her hair. Wind and salt water have made ropes of it, so she takes handfuls of coconut oil and runs it through as best she can. She ties it up to sit and saturate, types “Merlin bird images” into the search engine. Flexing yellow feet.

The only bathroom is through the bedroom. She leaves the bedroom dark, turns on the bathroom light, turns the shower on, hot. She takes the tie out of her hair and it falls, heavier now, below the straight white scar that never tans and runs across her lower back. Another thing she doesn’t have a word for, not even hurt. Whatever happened, her brain had erased it, whatever caught her and let go, she escaped it. She reaches a hand back and runs her fingers across the skin but she cannot feel it; it healed clean and well. She would like to know what touched her in such a manner, straight and clean for six inches, this thing that bleached her. No matter how brown she gets it does not darken, she is sliced, ripped, carved. If it had been a curved beak that plunged in just there she would no longer run, would she? No longer be able to fly away. She imagined jellied nerves being methodically pulled away, the white pain. She wonders if it wanted to consume her, if it came out of nowhere or if it was something she hid from, prey-like, for any amount of time. What marked it as too much? What was finally a thing that she needed to be protected from after all the other things she had endured? She wonders if she died, if something reached through her back and grabbed her heart and held it still, and if that is why she sometimes wakes feeling the heartbeat of the world, the slow flexing of predator feet.

There is only the light of the bathroom behind her as she towels herself dry, facing into the bedroom. The Faces are just as ambiguous and impressionistic as they have been, voids. They were another unknown horror, written out as well as they could be, just like the millions of words in her multiple journals. Sometimes the best she could do was the bubble of it, the specifics sang in the bushes. Here was the frantic of it, the breathlessness, the cutting and sucking of a bit of the poison, the balloon ugly of what you had to release so that you didn’t die. You really didn’t care what it looked like, did you, so long as you didn’t taste it anymore.

She puts a light green dress on, runs fingers through her untangled, wet hair, and leaves it down. There was light rain again, and she could smell it burnt on the stones. She wondered if the merlin sat its tree, hunched and glaring, or if it slept in the tenebrous half-light. She sipped her whiskey and fingered the slim ivory arch of the razor clam shell she had brought in with her, smiled at the memory of once being told there were no razor clams on the east coast…people did like to talk about things they did not know. She didn’t believe in words like no and never and always and forever. If you sat still enough for long enough, something would prove you wrong. Something would rise from its diapause, resume, make a noise, make a wave, make a scar.