Kristen Tracy

Once, there was a year where every romance had fangs. It was hard to open up a novel without a vampire bearing down on a young, virgin neck. Soon, they were on the television. Later, the sidewalks. Teenagers. They owned us with their hackneyed plots. Platinum fleur-de-lis emblazoned on their jeans. How do they wash them? I asked.They don’t, my friend said.It’s part of what keeps them so dark and stiff. An entire generation has arrived dark and stiff. Unlike my pliable, light, pubescent years. I grew up reading Little House on the Prairie. Sweet, blind Mary stole my heart. Turn the page. Oklahoma. Wild mustangs. Malaria. And Pa. Talk about a hero. Now they have boys so angry they transform into wild, shirtless dogs. They are maniacs, these fans. They beg their mothers to drive them to the theater where they burst into dollars and popcorn in their seats. They want the car tossed off their withering girl bodies. Lured from their couches, they are eager to be taken from their lives and placed directly in the vampire’s mouth. Younger and younger.Cha-ching. Is there nothing anyone can do?

A giraffe presented its head to me, tilting it sideways, reaching out its long gray tongue. I gave it my wheat cracker while small drops of rain pounded us both.  Lightning cracked open the sky.  Zebras zipped across the field. It was springtime in Michigan.  I watched the giraffe shuffle itself backwards, toward the herd, its bone- and rust-colored fur beading with water.  The entire mix of animals stood away from the trees.  A lone emu shook its round body hard and squawked.  It ran along the fence line, jerking open its wings. Perhaps it was trying to shake away the burden of water or indulging an urge to fly.  I can’t know. I have no idea what about their lives these animals love or abhor.  They are captured or born here for us, and we come.  It’s true.  This is my favorite field.

They broke up and she, either fed up or drunk or undone, ached to get back inside. Officials surmise she climbed a ladder to his roof, removed the chimney cap and entered feet first. Long story short, she died there. Stuck. Like a tragic Santa. Struggling for days, the news explains. It was a smell that led to the discovery of her body. One neighbor speaks directly into the microphone, asks how a person could disregard so much: the damper, the flue, the smoke shelf. He can’t imagine what it was she faced. The empty garage. The locked back door. And is that a light on in the den? They show us the grass where they found her purse. And it’s not impossible to picture her standing on the patio — abandoned — the mind turning obscene, all hopes pinned on refastening the snap. Then spotting the bricks rising above the roof and at first believing and then knowing, sun flashing its god-blinding light behind it, that the chimney was the way.