Others, Part 1

By the nine-headed fox

It’s rained a lot this February, all up and down the Calizona line. There’s high strangeness in the country’s thin spaces, such as the scattered burns could never muzzle. It stretches from there on up through Nevada, all the way up into the high white Rockies - then up into Montana; and east: onto Arkansas, and the bayou, and spiderwebbing into Appalachia. Torrents unto flooding, rip in the middle of the desert. Twined fingers of lightning cutting circles in neat clearings. Where the strangeness plays, ordinary folk turn their minds away, and their towns begin to die.

It’s been six days since the coyote called Rain came home; she’s already left again. She went in the middle of the night without a word: The sliding glass door is still hanging open and there’s a fresh hole under the fence.

But she’s not gone-gone. She’s busy-gone; they’ll meet up again later. Kip feels this in her heart, which is the only reason she’s not panicking right now.

But she doesn’t know why she feels that, so she can’t say she believes it; she just feels like that must be so, and the feeling is too genius to really grasp. In a vain attempt to get hold of that feeling, she is worriedly pacing back and forth in the sandy back yard of her modest house - the house where she had planned on spending the rest of her life with Rain, when Rain had a human body.

Kip is a human who has a human body, which is normal. Rain used to be a coyote with a human body, which was not normal but was not unheard of. But now Rain, who used to be a coyote with a human body, is just a coyote. She showed up one evening, having transformed so totally she couldn’t even speak or write - she could yap and bark and ooooirrr. And she was still Rain, beyond question: she couldn’t read or write, but as soon as she got home she grabbed a stylus (in her mouth!) and start drawing.

And now Rain, who is just a coyote, is out on her own in a world where humans make coyotes into vermin, targets, and roadkill.

And wouldn’t she be such a lovely prize for any shitass with a pop gun, Kip thinks. Who wouldn’t want Rain, with her matefetch pointy ears and killsharp fangs, Kip thinks. Kip thinks she is hugging her arms to her chest as she pads back and forth in the yard, patchy crabgrass pressing up through her fingers. She tells herself that Rain is capable and clever but she is Rain’s mate and her mate left her all alone in a scary world that is changing more every day. In a world where the rules don’t matter anymore and people under just kind of…let themselves turn into animals.

In her mind’s eye, Kip sees her lover dead on the side of the road, bent-neck with blood dripping down her snout; she sees her limping uselessly, broken-legged, along a desolate roadside, vultures circling overhead; she can’t keep the visions out - she tosses back her head and releases a mournful ululating howl into the late afternoon air. It skips the fences into the ears of the neighbor dogs who jump up and start barking, and blistering white fear cracks against her minds from both sides as they themselves up against the fences; she turns, sprints towards a porch that is wrongbad - moving too fast to even figure out why, she dives into the shelterdark of the crawlspace and whirls around to point her teeth at the entrance, tail tucked up against her belly. In the quiet moments that follow - as the badstink,dogs in the other yards lose interest and amble away - Kip has her first idea of what has happened.

“Did I just -” She tries to say. She coughs, gags, feels an unfamiliar weight in the back of her throat. The sound comes out as a foreign, high-pitched ooooir. Kip’s heart skips in her chest - trying not to panic she breathes in deep, and catches two nostrils full of crawl space funk, dumb-bark badstink, and twenty-odd years of human - which suddenly burns in her nostrils, dripping badwrong all the way down to her stomach. Gasping and yipping, Kip scrambles out into the yard.

Kip is walking on four legs, each covered in shaggy brown fur - she has a tail that hangs down behind her, as a quietly critical counterwight. When she moves it twitches and the sand digs up against her pawpads and flakes into her fur. She yelps and goes stiff, skidding ungracefully to a stop - then splays out on the ground like a newborn pup just learning to walk. She looks back over her shoulder, at a porch with steps as high as her knees; she presses her nose into the pile of clothes scattered in a pile on the ground - they are hers, and they smell disgusting.

Folding her ears, Kip the coyote sits up on her haunches - itching, uncomfortably aware of the sand scratching at the crease of her butt - and takes in a deep breath. She means to calm herself, to take a moment and figure out how she's going to..."fix this", is the thought that comes to mind. But something in the bone-dry air stinks heavy like petrichor and peanut butter: a trail on the ground of coyote goodstink, left where her mate had walked - thin on the sand and fading fast. She freezes, waiting - feeling, that it would only be right - for instincts to spark or for some magical intuition to come down upon her; in some sense for her body to stop being her own. The moments tick by one at a time.

And when Kip realizes, after an unbearably long wait of a few seconds, that nothing is going to hand her coyote intuition, she makes her own. She presses her nose down into the goodstinky pawprints and catches the scent on a deep breath - It runs in golden savory scent-drops on the back of her throat, down and up both. She catches the taste of flesh and earthy things while hear heart skips a beat. It is the scent of her lover - complex, unflattering, made of the things she rolls in more than the things she is. It is perfect and it makes Kip's tail wag, scratchy fur shaking against her hocks. Aware that she is probably smelling something awful, actually, she tries to feel some kind of human shame - and fails.

Then - gingerly, awkwardly, a little bit afraid she's going to hurt herself - she approaches the hole in the fence. She lowers herself to the ground and begins to wiggle, looking more than anything like she's taking a dust bath. The dull fence wiring rakes down against her tough flesh, through her shaggy fur; she manages to stop thinking about how weird it feels just long enough to get up underneath it. Then she scrunches up her muzzle and mock-vomits. It's funny, in abstract: doesn't know if there's any such thing as a "bad smell" to her anymore, but there's still plenty of bad touches.

When she rolls over onto her belly again her first thought is that having four legs is weird. There are four toes on each one, pressed close together: when she tests her weight it goes straight down onto the pawpads, and the rugged leather of her toes catches the earth beneath her - what little tension exists is in the arch of the finger, not its base; more of a stretch than a splay.

Well, it's not a finger anymore. It's a toe, on a paw, which she has four of, because she is a coyote now. She's still trying to get used to that. It's a lot to get used to. She's got a lot of questions, the first of which is "How am I able to do anything but scream right now". She thinks of iphones and doorknobs and button-up shirts, and those memories have the hazy distant quality of early childhood - a sort of "oh yeah, I did used to do those things"; she thinks of driving cars and typing on keyboards and opening plastic bags like distant fads, shamefully remembered. She knows, on the intellectual level, that all of those things happened recently. She knows in her heart that they will never happen again.

She knows as well that this should bother her. Philosophically, ethically, on the principle of it. An entire human life just trickled away into memory. She can even feel the thoughts dwindling, like lukewarm soup trickling down her brainstem. She looks down the street, where a yellow aluminum sign says S??G???B ST???T. The letters are a confusing jumble of squiggles, losing what little meaning they have. She thinks that this means she has just forgotten how to read, which was very important to her...once.

One of the other dogs barks and Kip leaps a foot in the air, coming down on all fours with her eyes wide, her ears perked, and her head twisted right at the sound - he was barking at something else, she realizes, or else she'd be in a fight right now. It comes natural; maybe that's how she's able to keep so calm (for a given definition of "calm"). Coyotes are built for crisis.

Or maybe it’s because they are naturally high-strung-nervous creatures. As she takes her first faltering steps (shoulders yolkysoft, knees wobbling) her ears flick towards every sound - little twolegs running over a porch - and they threaten to overwhelm her - someone whisking dough in a bowl - with their senseless detail. She pins her ears down just to buy enough quiet to think straight.

But then come the scents. The tasty stink of the gristlefat bunnypets playing in the backyards; the mind-bending aroma of twoleg goodyboxes, full up with old dinners and soda cans, where the day-ripened stench of half-fermented soda pop calls her name. Intoxicated on her own senses, the desert dog stumbles down the residential backstreet - one step after her Mate, two steps to the goodybox; three steps after her Mate.

She feels the urgency dwindling out of her movements - tries to catch it and it falls just like sand through her grasp. She sidles, tummy rumbling, down a back alley where residence joins business - up to the paint-peeling back wall of a twoleg cookplace. There is a tall green metal goodybox where the twolegs throw away hamburgers and spaghetti. In the midday heat the scent is neon-bright, louder than thunder. Slobber pools at the edge of her lips, as she puts her forelegs up on the goodybox’s lip.

Before she follows her heart, Coyote must answer her gut. She leaps up into the goodybox and falls all four legs into the goodstink embrace of old twoleg food. Her tail is wagging uncontrollably, drumming toom-toom-toom against the hopper’s metal wall. She bites into a half-masticated hamburger and realizes that this is how she will have every twoleg meal she eats for the rest of her life. She is done with a La carte meals made to eat on a grill. No kitchen in this country will admit her.

Her tail starts wagging even faster.

With a tinny squeek, a door opens up. “What is goin on out here?” Exclaims a human voice.

Coyote goes stiff and perks her ears, hoping for one brief moment that her silence will be convincing. Then the crunch of gravel; the twoleg is coming nearer. Coyote doesn’t know what to do, per se, but it knows what a twoleg expects: a scared, biting animal, waiting for a man with heavy gloves and a catchpole. And it knows that twolegs will do anything-and-a-half to an animal who behaves according to the script - but that any animal who goes a little strange, gets strange in return.

Coyote puts its forepaws up on the goodybox’s lip, ears flattened out, squinty with snout scrunched up - lips peeled back till she can feel the wind stroking the roots of her fangs. She doesn’t growl: she stands there,wagging her tail, with an “oops-you-caught-me” grin. The twoleg gasps and claps her hands over her mouth, leaping a foot back. A tense moment passes, when she waits for a growl or a bark or any kind of return to the script. But that moment doesn’t come, so she does what comes natural instead: she fumbles for her phone and starts scrolling video, holding back snorts of confused laughter.

“Oooh my Gosh what are you.” She giggles. Still wearing that self-effacing mockdoggy grin, Coyote scrapes at the walls of the goodybox, raking it with her needle-thin claws. She falls back inside with a ooooir of protest and the twoleg erupts into open guffaws.

The moment is appropriate now for genuine effort: Coyote coils her legs and leaps out of the hopper in one bound, landing nimbly on her toes, and lopes away down the blacktop. The girl’s steady laughter is sweet music in her wake: Coyote knows that any animal who makes a twoleg laugh, buys their allegiance. She knew it when she was one of them; she thought it was magnanimity. Now that she has been on both sides of the exchange, she understands it’s more like a trade.

This is a two-star twoleg town, where the people make money-but-notta-lotta-money. (Which is another thing Coyote will never have to think about). It’s not an urban sprawl so much as a scrub - and the residencies are its outer walls. Coyote follows its mate’s trail to the edge of the suburbs, where the pillbox houses yield without ceremony to the shining white womb of the desert.

This is the precipice of the world: Coyote feels it in the scruff of her neck; the tingle in her tail, the itch on the bed of her ears. If she turns back here and craws under the fence this strange becoming will unwind itself - if she puts on her clothes and stands up again she will have a human name and a human shape…and this will be an odd, whimsical episode. A fun trip story for later.

But the tracks lead into the sand; purposeful, straight. Coyote knows her mate does not intend on returning to the house. And if she turns back, then whatever became of her Mate will be a strange story; then a missing persons report; then one of the many scores of things that twolegs blissfully forget as they try to hold their silly selves together.

She lets herself think with her heart and her snout; and presses on without another thought. Names can go; places can change; love is all that survives between lives. She belongs with her Mate. And they are wild animals now - so they belong somewhere else. Life is very strange, Coyote thinks. But strangeness is like gristlefat twoleg food: good for the soul. Maybe in the next little while something will make all of this make sense. Maybe it's just as it seems, she thinks: the world decided it was time for a change.

She sandtrots doggedly for nine hours through the Arizona heat - up through the reservation, where the unbroken desert rolls on for so many miles you can make-believe a virgin earth. She walks harder than a desert dog normally does; no mind for the scent borders of her cousins' goodstink, or the alluring gristlefat bunnies. She drinks from puddles under boulders, and laps up the damp off the arroyo rocks; the water is clean and sweet. Some time in the early evening the skies go from bright blue to a cold shadowy grey; the sun turns his face and puts the desert in dull relief. It is a wide bank of pregnant cumulonimbus clouds, crowning Creation. At sundown, the world is crackling - air cold, blood hot, every rock and plant seeming poised, as if awaiting the arrival of royalty. Then the storm cuts loose.

Rainwater courses down the wind-sheared arroyo beds, dusty brown into running clear; sand turns to mud under Coyote's paws. There are animals jumping up to life all around her now, rejoicing in its arrival: lizards that scale the rocks and insects that turn the earth - it pulls the stultifying heat from their bodies, puts clear icewater on their eyes. Coyote feels it running over her whiskers, beading on the edge of her lips and ears - it pulls her fur down into an unflattering sog. She has been thirsty all day; this is a welcome relief. But the water is a blistering cold, after only a few minutes - it knocks on her fur until it gets through, and icy droplets splash against her skin. Soon she craves the dry comfort of an outcropping or a cave even just a hole.

That's when she hears the music, sees the firelight: there's a human out here, and he has a voice like an angel.

"One evenin as the sun went down, and the jungle fire was burnin..." It's like something takes hold of her by the chest fur - she feels herself walking towards the sound, entranced, like her own body is a stranger. Her tail is held stiff. The music tickles her ears. She yearns for more.

The rain is battling the voice and the scent but it cannot beat the firelight: coyote sees it forty, fifty meters out. It’s a pit fire - set under a wooden lean-to, right out here in the vast of nowhere. There is a human with a bald head and a patchy jacket sitting on a tiny roughcut wooden stool; he rests a guitar on his knees and strums it. The guitar is sweet music, itch-tickling sand trickling down into the fluff of her ears. But it is his voice that draws her nearer from the darkness - irresistibly, as song once drew in the wolves who first befriended man.

”I’m headed for a land that’s far away, beyond the crystal fountain…”

Coyote skulks up to the edge of the lean-to: it has two walls, but the roof is broad enough to keep the rain off the bodies inside. The singer notices her - acknowledges her with a nod, like she’s people. He’s unsurprised to see her: because, Coyote realizes, he is not alone. Sitting opposite the fire, tail beating like a jackhammer, is Coyote’s Mate, who goodstinks of petrichor and peanut butter. Rain.

The desert dogs meet each other in a wild flurry of tails and tongues; they press their snouts up into each other’s loins and crawl over each other’s backs and roll around in the dirt, yipsqueaking their dogsong, and come to sit shoulder to shoulder, jockeying to lick one another’s muzzles. No questions and answers, no tearful reunion: it’s all clear as day, in the tender flicks of their ears; in the twining goodstinks of peanut butter and chocolate. It was Time for them to be coyotes together.

“Guess’n you two know each other…” The twoleg murmured, in between verses. He had kind of a smoky sandiness in his voice, like the color of his skin and hair; he wore a light jacket and pants, seeming as much of the desert as the wild animals themselves. They barely gave him any mind, which suited him just fine: he went back to playing, and didn’t pause except to poke at the fire.

The drizzle kept coming down - weeping over the tin roof, breathing fog in between the walls. The drifter changed songs - helping himself, now and again from a flask on his hip - from mournful tunes about old Texas, to the great American standards.

”As I was walking, that ribbon of highway…” And it seemed with every song another Animal came in from the rain. Hookfooted Lizard came in and clung to the wall, rain beading on his ridges. Goodstinky gristlefat Peccary, shook himself off and laid down on the sand. Up creeps long-legged stringy Hare - she fixes them with a scart, rusty-edged glare, and bows her head: there are the nubs of antlers. Others come, circle the fire, and go: a dressed up Spotted Skunk who paws at the twoleg, and then the fire bucket, with detached curiosity; a whole skulk of Foxes who move with strange unity - they blow in like water, kiss the Coyotes’ muzzles, and trickle out like a river of fur.

But all those things as belong in the desert, stay until the fire dwindles, and the drifter’s voice with it. Now the rain is a tender sprinkling.

“Fellas, I reckon some’n mighty strange is happenin’a me.” The drifter murmurs, setting his guitar in the sand. He looks into the abyssally deep eyes of Animals who are ignoring their baser natures - at the Coyotes snuggled up packtight with a Hare and a Peccary.

“Then again I reckon somethin mighty strange is happenin’a…

“Ah, fergeddit.” —- Daylight. The camp has parted ways. The Drifter’s gone on wherever; hookfoot left before sunup. Coyotes are going sunbirthways - in the wandering, ambulatory way that is their privilege. Resting in the shade of great rocks, weaving trails around each other. For breakfast they dig up a prairie dog - squeeze killsharp teeth around its neck, one good bite. Sweet, warm, blood trickles into the Coyote’s mouth. She splits it with her mate. Gamey meat, flavor like desert grass. What they don’t eat, they leave out for the vultures - then on they go. They don’t know for sure where they’re going. But they feel the farhome tug deep in their hearts - Sunbirthways, a place they’ve never been; and yet this is a return. They feel there is a place waiting for them; a sanctuary with a different name in every beastly tongue.

They walk until mountains loom ahead of them, godly shoulders caped in rising green. It is hot in this part of the world, in a time when it is normally very cold: 4 feet of snow sit liqueous on the lowlands, running in a chunky slush that feeds the tenscore winding brooks that color the mountainside.

Though the air is hot the ground beneath them is hard and greedy, drinking the heat out of their pawpads; even gentle winds bitterly prick their ears. Coyotes’ ears twist against it, coiling tiny pillars of muscle. Yet there are such sweet sounds that the ears always go up again. Always there is running water that skips and drums against the flat stones; and there is birdsong here - tweetyloud one-bite birds, delicious and crunchy but ever out of poor Coyotes’ reach. Here, there is always music in the air.

Here there is also a place beneath the notice of most: a hamlet in the foothills, tucked between two creases of earth. Here once dwelt maybe some quarter-thousand twolegs, whose way of life had been built on the back of road-trippers who no longer came. It had been stable in those days, though never grand; now, it is a lean shadow of itself, where dwell some forty people arranged in six or seven families, who do not live near each other and only dimly remember one another's names. The roads between them are long and suncracked, half given up to the clawing earth. In the tumbledowns that line the main street, the lights are out - excepting one old mostly-stucco gas station with an attached cottage, which is the clerk's home and prized possession. It is surrounded on its left and right by picturesque paint-peeling rats' nests that once were this town's lifeblood.

Coyotes cross an old concrete bridge two years out from collapse, pass a sign that's all squiggles to them - the moment spurs them. They both sit in front of it and stare at the meaningless white-on-green, remembering a time when understanding the information printed there would have been second nature - unavoidable, even, as soon as they'd seen it. Now they stared uncomprehendingly into bold-face English; and even if they'd wanted to learn it, there would've been nobody to each them. They looked at each other and wagged their tails, grins creeping up over their snouts - then they were on each other again, laughing and yapping, belly-to-belly, nose-to-loins, squeals of glee echoing up and down the empty main street.

The weight is off of them, the fire is under them: no more acreages of front-page lies; no more look-at-this-graph, no more just-asking-questions; no more you-are-pretending, no more it's-just-a-phase; no more breathing the same air as vile men. No more of humanity's cruel, tiresome, humiliating, rituals. They are living honest lives for the first time since they entered their ex-mothers' wombs.

Even though they have never been to this place, in either life, it is where they will live for now. Not home: that was found in each other's tastes and scents. This is not the desert where they belong. They are just living here for now. It was a transient agreement - without the accoutremants of humanity, it is as simple as picking a place and marking it as their own. They squat at the mouth of the bridge, leave skrunklesnout-heavy scent markers, and mosey on.

The sun is low when they enter an old house that used to be some kind of stately, all dressed up in expensive silks. The door is off the hinges and the rooms are empty, but the wallpaper still waft of cologne and wine. They pad across the dust-stiffened carpet and nose at the holes where generations of mice have come and gone - their scents heavy on the floor, subtly distinguished by age. The little things are living in the walls now, nestled safe in the insulation from both ordinary cold and the snap heat. When they smell the predators, they scurry up into the ceiling, little feet pitter-pattering overhead. The dust comes loose in lazily wafting falls; the evening sun comes in through the window and turns them into drizzling gold.

Up the winding hardwood stairs over scratchy wooden carpet, carried only by their curiosity, the Coyotes find a room where the things have not been carted away, but draped with cloths and left to gather dust, waiting for twolegs who will never return. The things under the cloth are soft and stretchy, meant for biting and ripping: setee chairs and bedspreads; chests of clothes and antique flags of the dead nation. Neither the things nor the symbols mean much to anyone now: play comes natural. They rip up the fabrics in their teeth and dig into the safebox chests full of old clothes; shred up the stuffysoft furniture, gnaw on the hard legs. They unmake the meaning of the things: peel off the symbols, erase the icons, leave the materials behind. It is nighttime when they leave.

The materials' uncrossing by Coyotes' claw is followed by rebaptism in the darkness of nonperception.

The sun rises many times on this place, each time meeting the Coyotes in a new building - each time un-homing, un-making, erasing these many things which never belonged. They never go to the same building twice, and never go hungry, for all the popcorn mice. They drink sweet water from the many streams, ranging out of town when they want to run and jump like wild things, but returning ere the sunset each night. They don't remember for sure if they sleep; sometimes they coil together, snouts on each other's flanks, and dream.

One day they are in the building opposite the old twoleg's gas station. He is a ruddy-faced man with fat babylike cheeks, a lonely shock of white hair, and gleaming excited eyes. When he sees them through the dirtstained window of the gas station, he watches them like he's seen a pair of unicorns - they give him no notice. That changes abruptly when he opens the door: they snap up their heads and retreat into the darkness of the building, baring their teeth reflexively. Through the narrow band of the opened door, they see he is holding a bright red bowl, heaped up with wet with dog food. It smells greasy and raw and brown, loud across the street. Both of their tails start wagging; they share a look.

Now they are sitting in the dirty road eating wet food out of the red bowl, while the old twoleg slurps down a drippy roast beef sandwich he made in the store. They hit the gut more-or-less the same way. When the old man is done he extends his wrinkly greasestained hands to the Coyotes - who eye him warily, expecting him to try some of the usual twoleg trickfuckery. They slowly extend their tongues to lick the grease from his palms; he is soft and wrinkly like elbow skin. He giggles joyously, and when they are done he turns his hands over and hooks them into claws. Their eyes light up with recognition - they can't pass up the chance.

They bow.

When a twoleg scratches your ears it's like the clouds are bending down to kiss you. You feel it as needle-points of heat and sensation that break on your skin, cascade as warm little nerves down over your neck. The Coyotes go unsteady on their feet, unable to hold their tongues inside their mouths. For a couple of seconds, as the stranger digs his nails into their fur, they are somewhere far from this imperfect broken-down place. Under a loving twoleg's hand, warmth and comfort are the default modes of being, and strife is a foreign country.

But then the moment passes. The baby-faced twoleg does not want more than he has earned: no fucktricky thoughts about taming the desert dogs, leashing them out back. He withdraws his hands, takes the tongue-cleaned bowl in his hands, and waddles back into the store with a song on his lips. Coyotes saunter back into their next fixer-downer and get back to work.

The days again pass without incident. Babyface comes out to feed them, sometimes; other times just to watch and listen. He sits on a pair of milk crates, whittling dog head shapes out of wood blocks. He is dispassionate as they rip through the town museum - he has preserved what he wants of its history; that which has been left to gather dust so far, may be left ever after.

Eventually they have been to every building on main street. Everything in context this town has been unmade; its symbols and histories have returned to the mother of the ten thousand things. Babyface, now a man out of place and time, presents them with two wooden likenesses: he didn't do the snouts quite right, but he caught the matefetch pointy ears. He lays them in the road and gives them both a sad little smile. Both Coyotes lay on the ground next to their effigies - they have no things to give in kind; they give him acknowledgement and comfort, which are the gifts that truly matter.

"Hope to see y'all again sometime." He murmurs. As he reaches to collect the totems, they both bend down to lick the backs of his hands. He tastes faintly of salt.

On the other side of the bridge, Coyotes see the squiggles on the roadsign have faded away - all that remains is the deep green backing, and the vines which wind around its struts. The newly nameless town is framed in silhouette by the setting sun; they watch, thoughtfully, and turn their ears towards a new steady rumble. There's a car coming up the highway: flat-color panel truck, done up with some logos they can't read anymore. It comes to a stop, and twolegs in overalls get out.

Quick, workmanlike, the twolegs enter the first building the Coyotes ransacked. The sun sets a few degrees lower; the shadows deepen on the nameless place. The twolegs emerge minutes later with armfuls of unbent planks; boxes of new nails; bolts of umblemished fabric; rolls of copper wire. The dying is done, the rebirth is begun. The changes continue.

The Coyotes turn their backs and descend the mountainside. Homefeel is taking them far from here, back into the waiting embrace of the rainy desert.