And Then It’ll Be Time to Grab a Boilermaker at Rabbit’s
They’re out there. They set traps to foul our ankles, keep us near, to study, but far enough to avoid our claws. As if we’d harm them. As if we cared.
As if we took pains, even, to conceal ourselves. We did have a sort of camouflage, once; we absorb the scents around us. We used to smell green,
green and sweet—sugar maple with a hint of black cherry. We could pass behind you while you set your snares and you’d never know. Then came the lights.
The lights, and the factory that provides them, and the sludge it pumps out into Sutton Lake. Now we smell cold, hard, like something that would mutate fish. You can smell
us coming, smell us from miles away, gray, chalky, rotten. We stay distant, retreat farther into woods that themselves disappear, smaller month by month. Soon we too will vanish.