The buildings had grown fangs, the street lamps whiskers. Billboards flocked to the skyline, pecked at star-scatter. Town cars beaked their way between gnarled claws of traffic. In the metro, a litter of grunting piglets shoved her aside to suckle an oncoming car.Â
So she left her city husband and found, instead, a seaside spouse.Â
One day, she surveyed the sun-jammed scene: wailing siren of toddlers, weary mothers honking after them; a gang of pint-sized construction workers drilling plastic shovels into sand; neon bathing suits blinking stop go stop go; seaweed guttering the tide; the careless molt of crabs littering the dunes. On her way home, she squatted in the sand to inspect the graffiti of teenage lovers before brushing away their sloppy-hearted vandalism. She tried to explain her dismay to her betrothed. He only blinked his sewage-cover eyes.
So she eloped with a mountain man. She had been drawn to his beard, also the way mud clung like suckerfish to his steel-toed boots. But now, marooned in the woods, nothing for miles but waves of mottled birch and pine, she is unhappy. Tonight, she stays at the campfire long after he’s gone to bed. Wind breaks against the trees, bobbing them like buoys. Across from her, an elderly cat circles the yard’s perimeter, spine rising like a fin. He sinks to his haunches, moans a long, low fog horn, rotates his lighthouse gaze. When his yellow eyes fall on her, she wants to jump up, wave, cry out. But for what? Too late, something moves in the woods behind him. The old tom’s ears periscope backwards. He dives into the brush, disappears. She squints after him, considers giving chase. This beastly life, the impossible tail she is perpetually unable to catch, reel in, hang on.
