Excerpt
Strange Animals
Chapter 1Out and AwayGreen steered his indigo Toyota Prius around another switchback, stitching his way into the mountains. He willed himself to stop clenching his jaw and try to enjoy the beauty of the landscape, raising his thumb to massage a knot of muscle just below his ear. It was no good. Fifty miles ago, the approaching mountainside wilderness looked beautiful. Now, as cell service became spotty and the sun sank low, beauty shifted to threat.
The one comfort of Green’s drive into the wilderness was that he could not be lost because he didn’t know where he was going.
The acorn rested in his pocket, its figurative weight transferring through his leg to press on the accelerator. That strange little object drove him forward. Only habits and memories drew him back.
His condo in the city was sold.
His resignation was accepted in a neutral, businesslike manner.
His uncle in Columbus didn’t object to being his forwarding address while he “shopped around for a new town to call home.”
Given the end of his engagement to Jess last year, everyone seemed ready to accept his sudden need for a change of scenery. They didn’t ask about his motivations, and he didn’t correct their assumptions.
He started his drive a day ago, passing through city, then suburbs, then soy and cornfields, then forested foothills.
The mountains had looked correct from the distance, but here, now, they felt wrong up close. They were pretty as a far-off vista, smothering once he was beneath the cage of tree branches.
The place felt watchful, as if Green’s ignorance were a loping thing that raced through the trees beside him, keeping pace with his car. All the things he couldn’t know perceiving him with unguessable purpose and senses. Unguessable, but real and alive all the same.
There, just beyond his windshield, the woods drank in radiation from a nearby star and used that energy to create oxygen, to reproduce, to send chemical messages in a language older than humanity, older than the warm blood of mammals.
The trees lived among practically immortal fungi and spiders that remained largely unchanged since before the dinosaurs came and went. The place knew the constant ebb and flow of species and wonders for which it needed no spoken names.
He knew none of this, but it surrounded him anyway. It tickled the back of his neck until he checked the rearview mirror again and again. That inescapable pressure of the woods defied his social-media-hiking-boot-ad understanding of nature. This wasn’t a bright portrait of inviting mountainsides or families canoeing crystalline lakes dappled with autumn leaves. This was a dark corridor of trees that leaned down to scowl at you. This was a winding little road through perpetual twilight where help was always too far away to arrive in time to matter.
In the narrow line of sky above the road, he could see the dark silhouettes of three turkey vultures tracing a wheel in the hazy blue as they descended to find their roosts. He swallowed, thinking of coming to
this place to rest, then realizing he was on the same errand.
Earlier that morning, waking in his car, stiff in a litter-strewn parking lot, avoiding busier roads had seemed a pleasant plan. Now, his plan soured as the sun sank low in the west and the once-distinct tree shadows swelled into a unified darkness.
He poked the console to silence the podcast that was dying a slow death, starved for cell service. As real dark arrived, the sound seemed like a liability. He should be listening, alert to . . . what? He imagined the click of a key in a lock, the final time he stepped away from his condo less than forty-eight hours earlier. A sound like a lit fuse.
In the month following his not-quite-death, he had become preoccupied with moss. And ferns. And a certain mental image of a low fire in the twilight, the way the sparks floated up toward black branches stark against a painter’s sunset. Each morning, he awoke to the feeling that he had just stepped away from that fire and the smell of it clung to his pillow.
As the weeks had passed, a growing part of him remained in that forested elsewhere, with the moss and the ferns and the sparks. To Green, these things became symbols. Talismans. Magic that quieted the constant, silent demands of the absurd acorn that rarely left his pocket.
That acorn was, somehow, his salvation. It was also killing him. Not grinding him into the roadway like a speeding bus, but sending the essential machinery of his inner life off into an unknown wilderness until he felt as hollow and brittle as a cicada shell, a cast-off molt scraping along a city sidewalk. It had driven him here to the mountains to try to become whole again.
He’d thought it would be easy to find a campground when he reached the Catskills. He’d also thought he would find it before dark. His predictions began failing more frequently the further he got from the city.
Up the road, electric lights striped the pavement with branching shadows.
Green let out a breath.
Civilization.His headlights illuminated a weather-faded sign with pink block letters reading the count and countess. Beyond, a squat pink storefront stood behind a row of three gas pumps. The station was an outlandish pink-on-pink oasis amid the dark woods.
He pulled into the lot and took in the ambiance of the place, the ten-dollar firewood bundles and chicken wire cages of stacked propane tanks, the analog gas pumps, the running-mascara rust stains on the pink rain canopy supports, and the way the darkness was absolute just beyond the humming halo of the station’s lights.
“
Pay inside first” was written in Sharpie on a “Hello, my name is . . .” tag stuck on the pump.
The lot was abandoned except for a pickup with a plywood tailgate. It had a bumper sticker with no text and a drawing of a vivid yellow banana. He checked his phone. Eight p.m. on a Tuesday in September. No service.
As he walked past his back window, he glanced at the camping equipment piled on the seat. The gear was all new, tags gleaming white. It smelled of rubber and the chemical tang of nylon and preservatives. He had only the most basic knowledge of how any of the equipment was used, but he also had a kind of stubborn, tight-smiled optimism that he would figure it all out in due time.
The gas station storefront looked like an unfinished mosaic built from moths instead of tiles. Green watched the fluttering shapes and thought,
My first glimpse of wildlife outside the city. He tapped his thumb against the acorn.
“Happy now?” he asked the lump in his pocket.
It didn’t answer.
Most of the moths were motionless, but occasionally one would blur in a flurry of wings and skitter in a vertical circle before coming to rest again. Leaning in to study them, he couldn’t believe the variety. Shades from ashy gray to violet with a pattern of heavy-lidded human eyes staring back from the papery wings. Several of the moths had perfectly round mirrored spheres for heads, like droplets of shining mercury. Others gave off heat distortion like the mirages that sway above the surface of summer highways.
Green swallowed and stepped back.
He forced a smile as he turned and reached for the door.
“Nature,” he said to nobody. “Real nature.”
He entered with a sleigh bell jingle, colliding with a warm, damp wall of hot dog–scented air. There were other smells. Dirt. Popcorn. Artificial pine. Motor oil.
Two teenagers beneath a sign that advertised lottery and live bait turned to look at him. One was working the register and the other, a tall young man wearing a banana-yellow hoodie, seemed to be there just to keep the other company.
“Evening,” the Banana said. “Need something?”
His friend behind the register gave Green a deadpan stare while his hands mechanically shuffled a deck of playing cards.
“Some interesting moths out there,” Green said. He winced internally. Somehow, in the twenty-four hours since he had last spoken to a person, he had forgotten the trick of it.
The Banana frowned, looked toward the storefront, then tapped the counter just above a taped-up handwritten sign that read “
Please No Moth Talk Inside The Station.”
“Oh . . . um . . . sorry.”
The Banana shrugged.
“We got a complicated history with entomology here. Plus, ya know, the tax implications. Don’t worry about it. You couldn’t have known.”
“Right. Sorry again.”
Green hesitated.
“Alright, man. Do-over. What can we help you with?”
“I need thirty dollars on pump three.”
The quiet one tapped his deck on the counter with a sharp
click, click, and the Banana looked at him.
“Oh, yeah, fine. He wants you to think of a card, man,” the Banana said.
“Think of a card?”
“Yeah, just think of one. Got the picture in your head?”
Green nodded.
King of clubs.The quiet one flipped a two of clubs out of the deck and displayed it.
“That it?” the Banana asked.
“Uh, no,” Green said.
