Sleeping in the Summer

Documenting Project Roadkill was an emotional process.

1. The road starts to feel like a death sentence in my hands. Asphalt becomes sandpaper when you lick it, like it or not. The cars are like wizards with mad spells, like rusty teeth, like a painted red nightmare at 3am

the witching hour. At 3am our bodies are weakest, did you know that? I didn’t until I pulled myself out of bed and in a halo of blue light, went to every room in the house. The parents, doughed up in blankets. The sister, star-sprawled on top of the covers. The dog was like a bean in a bed, snuffling. Their bodies were so mashable then, foldable, blooms made of tissue. I could touch them, shape them, kill them probably. Their bodies were entirely at the moon’s wishing; no, our bodies. I floated through the rooms, looking for witches.

2. In a brief quiet spell, I walk onto the road. My feet bare, they taste the ground, diluted and black and full of hot sun. I lie down quickly-- I like to think it was quick, but I was just another slow animal leaning into death. Whole body. Stretched like a star, like a rhythm. I widen my legs and spread my arms and part the spaces between my knuckles. The sun talks to me, it says: You fool.

3. I run off the road when a car hums close. I don’t have the energy for this. A road, however tough, makes a good hammock. It molds tight like balloon skin, presses into your god-willing spine, tries to teach you a lesson. A girl like me, though, refuses to listen.

4. Macbeth stole crowns and titles like a disease, but he was just a carrier. The witches, four, were the vector and the needle and the flesh of it. Speaking in rhymes and riddles and poetry, they could cast spells with their tongues. Their bodies were cauldrons. I imagine their blood was blue and thick with magic. I’m not a madwoman; I didn’t cut myself open and taste my own sorry liquid. The best I can do is keep myself bandaged up like a coward. Macbeth collects crowns, and I find carcasses, and nobody wins.

5. I think I was the witch.

6. They keep dying in front of me. I think because I said the words; I said I would find them and I did. In a 75 meter stretch, I count the deaths on my fingers. Six: an opossum (old, flattened, ribcage inflated mid-breath, tail uprooted like bone), a rabbit (only a head, ear attached, body not, red stuff dribbling out, searching), a raccoon (on its back, jaws frozen open, teeth white as milk), another squashed speed bump of fur, another.

The way back: six more. As if, this road were a tongue spitting myself back into me. There is a squirrel whose insides bloom a string of red lights across the road. But not a single car stops. A great-horned owl flipped inside out, feathers splayed and crumpled-- like what? Like fingers? But beautiful and lifeless, like fingers crushed in a door.

7. My fingers feel like tallies of death, or candlesticks melting. And Death looks me in my eyes and takes my hands; even he understands what they’ve done. On them, he counts the seconds they all have left: the deer in the hills, the coyote on the ridge, the killdeer chicks who can’t scale a curb. When they keep dying in front of you, how can you blame anyone else?

8. If you’re not careful, you’ll become roadkill yourself, they tell me. I don’t respond. Just wonder, in this bright place of mine. What is the road like at 3am? How many headlights peel past? How many creatures freeze on the road, scalped by light?

9. The deer in the dirt. The pebbles of dirt moving in a mass. I stuffed my mouth with the hood of my jacket and wished for nine more eyelids, or nine more lives. Dirt crumbles were not dirt, they were maggots shifting and rising and crashing like a wave. Mouth full of maggots. Flies so blue, as if struck by lightning, on its nose. Soon every feature would be of death, and who would complain?

The coyote like a dog. Silver and russet fur. Solid, unlike the rest. It could have been sleeping. It could have been as large as a whale or small as a freckle in my palm. Could have been on the verge of opening, maybe it had pups, were they girls or boys? Could have been on its way back, or the way towards. It could have been, could have been, could have.

10. I pray for them their individual heavens, even tacking on an amen. Amen. Even in god-speak we insert ourselves, we interfere. We can’t help ourselves: a-men.

11. If these hills are my hips and these roads are my limbs… or something even more intimate: a vein, a bloodstream. Then they circulate, crying a cacophony in this body. They inflate my lungs, they make homes in the whorls of my ears, my belly, under every stained nail, in the swell of my ankles

the coyote moans a moon song, the killdeer mother a high helpless howl, the opossum screams from its wishing well throat, the owl with one yellow eye hoots so lovingly I start to cry, but the deer, the deer is silent. The deer stares with black eyes. And I can’t tell. If they’re there or not.

12. Sleeping in the summer, we get cooked medium-rare. My skin gets pink and soft and damaged. But. The twilight is gauze. The twilight swallows time and in a few hours we start to melt, it turns out, it turns out, it’s not only my fingers made of candlestick.

At 3am I jolt awake in a pool of my own simmering memories. I go to every room, I go to my sister first and her hair is finally loose, her whole body loose, she is weak without knowing. I go to my parents bent in petal shapes, less than shadows, less than silhouettes.

And I press my dripping thumbs into their flesh like a sponge, or a baby, trying to fill them in with wax.

13. The deer waits for me back in my room. Hello, girl, I say to her hairless face, her eyes were so so blue before the maggots devoured them, like water mirrored in the moon’s face. I’m sorry. Aren’t we all? Her eyes are silver now, almost white. They are opening in the night bloom. Unfurling with blue. I freeze, wax and all, girl in the headlights.