“The Death of the animals”

Liam McMichael

A man in a road-workmen's uniform was sitting across from a lady who had eyes that seemed to be too open. She was dressed well. He was wearing a silver anklet, it had a toenail shaped disturbance across its mirror-like surface. The man had been speaking of the nature of freedom before the open eyed woman asked a question. The one she always wanted to. 

He put down the fire-engine-red cup, pursed his lips, made a little bird-like twitch on his right eyebrow and began. 

“She never wore makeup, my dear, she never did. Until my fathers funeral, it was a nice day, actually pretty clear skies and mild weather for June, was an old man and very geriatric, you could’ve never gotten much self disclosure from him. I did love him. Her lips were painted red and stood out against the mourning-black of her dress. I actually liked it. 

“The funeral was sad, but it was at the right time for he was in pain. That night she forgot to take the lipstick off. She went to bed with it on. As the year went on and the markers of the fourth and then Christmas passed I began to be worried. She was wearing it more and more, almost all the time. It was not like I really cared either way but it was strange to me for some reason. 

“ I cornered her one day and started yelling, which is something I rarely do. I shouted that she had a parasite on her face, I shouted that I understood the temptation that sorcery like power over your own image, I said that I knew of how those little alchemy-like bottles whispered and promised from their miniature shelves. I said, I knew because I was an alcoholic. I told her that she had not made her bargain with the little bottles but with lying and that we had the same addiction to lying now and I would help her. She looked at me with dolls eyes. My rage came back, I screamed that it needed her to live, that it needed her to have something to grow on, to

possess, I told her that she sacrificed her time, that she worshiped it by lying for it, I said it didn’t have emotions and how I’ve noticed her being offended on its behalf, hating on its behalf, loving for it. 

“She said that since I had nothing worth dying for, so logically speaking, I had nothing worth living for. 

“So I could not understand. I told her to make me understand. When she was a child in the south there was a legend about a particular field of kudzu, the preacher-man had a sermon about the thing in the kudzu he claimed that as human bodies are composed of different members and have souls(or was it the other way around?)that the field had a creature-of-great-ugliness. That night she was dared to walk into the field, so she did. It was surprisingly open under the vines and she could walk upright, and so could it. 

“ Its body was cloaked in kudzu leaves shaped to look like animal skins and the tortured faces that sometimes show themselves among the clouds right beside the happiest faces. It had the head of a goat with no horns or ears or fur, but a consistent red bark of a vine for skin, the nose was a small elephant trunk thing, but more phallic, its eyes moved incredibly quickly because she said that they were taken from some person who was still aware of them and could see through them and who must be mad now. He, she started calling it he at this part, had a limp. 

“He came to her and whispered that her countrymen falsely believe that freedom of speech is good, that freedom of speech takes all the risk of speech which floods the market with cowards and that it turns speech into sound. He said that that truth was only possible under oppression. 

He said that Kudzu was as healthy as spinach. That he was a hero without a villain or journey, and that all monsters were too. He claimed that mirrors would be very bad for me. He told me to

stay away from them. There are moments so perfectly similar like when we hear a psalm sung from the past again or when we walk into your grandmother's kitchen that the mind of the past and present actually melt across time so perfectly that we almost never notice. Only some perceive it. Sometimes five or six of them fired together in a sort of great chain of the same minds, innocence with experience married and magnified. We are in our purest forms in those moments, divorced from the disunion of age. The old heroes used this talent to clear the world of things like him. 

“He said that he was nameless but he would take hers in marriage. So they went to an opening in the Kudzu and he handed her a flower and chanted some words and told her to leave, or so she said. She also said that she had polished her wedding ring the day of the funeral and had looked into it. She told me to take a walk and think, I said she was making things up. I went on the walk anyway. Then I came back.” 

“Well now you’re out, you shouldn’t have to go in there again. That wouldn't be right.” He made a little whirlpool in his drink with the motion of the cup. Scratched the skin imprisoned under the band of metal.“I guess…”