Charles Harper Webb

Selvakumar had waked too often to the shouts of dogs — come home too many times to an empty chicken coop, stray feathers where dinner was supposed to roost. Finding two dogs in his house one night, he slammed his door to trap them, gathered stones and — the flinging done — gibbeted the bodies from a tree. A week later, he woke in darkness, feeling himself swept down a black, stinking hole the way in Kansas City, Missouri, Inspector Daniel Collins, smacked by a surge of sewer-water, slipped from his safety line and clattered down a 28-inch pipe dark as the grave it seemed about to be. Waking from sound sleep that morning, wolfing a breakfast of high-fiber toast and raisin bran, Dan never dreamed a real nightmare would swallow him. Selvakumar — squeezed by his nightmare — screamed. One ear was deaf; both hands were numb; his legs, too weak to hold his weight, tongue lolling like a dead fish in his mouth the way Dan’s did as liquid filth shoved his head under, while — first thrashing and battering, then not — he rolled/banged/slithered through earth’s bowels in darkness worse than what seized Irmgard Holm’s left eye when, after cataract surgery, she groped for eye drops in the night, grabbed a Super Glue tube, and sealed her lid tight. Doctors took Selvakumar’s cash, and shook their heads. A village healer diagnosed, “The dogs cursed you.” To break the curse, friends caught a stray, named her Selvi — Repentance — wrapped her in an orange sari, and hung a purple garland on her neck. Selvakumar — all in white, but for a purple garland like his bride’s — felt his dead legs quiver as she edged toward him. Even as he pledged eternal love, he planned to wed a woman when his health returned. Unlike a two-legged wife, though, Selvi didn’t hound him about the marital act, didn’t demand a better sari or a bigger home, or nag as he grew more helpless every day. Easy to laugh, invoking Brad & Angelina, Pyramus & Thisbe. Still, on the night Selvakumar found himself rushing again down the dark hole, who can say that Selvi didn’t guide him — as Irmgard’s husband led her to the doctor who dissolved the glue and saved her eye — as Daniel’s cries led rescuers to him, twelve feet underground, two miles from where he began — as the son of Marjorie Potts Gaffrey (dead in her sleep at 99), by sprinkling his mother’s ashes in her favorite flower pot, led Marjorie to wake as an African violet, sun bright on her leaves as it was in Daniel’s and Irmgard’s eyes, the dew of morning like the feel, as Selvakumar lay dying in his bed, of Selvi’s tongue.

One by one, like guests at a late party They shake our hands and step into the dark: Arabian ostrich; Long-eared kit fox; Mysterious starling. One by one, like sheep counted to close our eyes, They leap the fence and disappear into the woods: Atlas bear; Passenger pigeon; North Island laughing owl; Great auk; Dodo; Eastern wapiti; Badlands bighorn sheep.