Phenomenology

Huh? No, you don’t ever get used to it. 

It’s the time of year. All the things that died in the fall are getting stirred up by the rain. Swamp muck, and it’s months till they’ll plow, and months till they’ll grow. 

I don’t know what they grow. Why would I know that? That’s not a thought I’ve ever had, what’s wrong with you for asking that – What grows in the fields? I don’t know. Crops? I am not one of or for the agriculturally minded. Why would you ask that? I just live here. Go ask a farmer. 

Lately, yeah. Nothing’s been eating the possums. 

There’s nothing else wild around here, besides the possums. Not that you see in the daylight.

The little black birds, I guess. They know how to stay on the side of the highway, the birds. On the shoulder, eating gravel and chip bags and running back into the fields, when anything gets too close. 

I went to the city, once, a long time ago. There was a seagull, broken neck, lying on the sidewalk. The birds here, they’re not like that. Never learned how to die like that, out in the open. Possums, though. I’ve never seen a live one, now that you mention it. 

Well there must be a lot of them. 

Yeah. Hit it with your car on the way home from work. Feel bad, of course. Hope he died quick and say a little prayer and that’s just the way of things, and the body’d be gone by your commute in the morning. Coyotes, maybe? Maybe. Or owls, eagles. Something. Scavenger, something. Big enough to move it off. 

Never seen a coyote, no. 

After Christmas, but before the first snow. In the middle of January then, probably. I don’t know when it stopped. It’s been a couple months since I noticed, but I don’t know how long until the noticing. 

My daughter, actually. She’s the one who mentioned it first. Kept seeing them, lying there, on her way home. She’s young. She asked me why they take so long to rot. I hadn’t thought about it, before then. 

 No, don’t make that face. Don’t ask me how long. 

It’s like trying to make a sock disappear by washing it. The first couple days are red. Fresh enough you can tell what it was.You can think it might still get up again. Crisp lines hard pressed into the animal shape of a body. 

Then the fur wears down. It’s a clean gray, alive. You’ve gotta respect that. I don’t think they’re dirty animals, really. Just stupid. Just don’t know how to live. And then I don’t know when, but it starts going brown. 

And it stays like that. Like washing a sock. And washing it again. Keep doing it over, until you don’t have a sock to wash. It takes a long time, to go from worn down, to gone. Gone completely. Melting in the rain. 

You can see the stain of it even then. You know where he died, you can see it, out in the open, ground into the road. 

I don’t know. Anybody, maybe. Like I said, not something most people wanna talk about.