Animal Graves

The mower flipped it belly up, a baby garter less than a foot long, dull green with a single sharp stripe of pale manila down its back, same color as the underside which was cut in two places, a loop of intestine poking out. It wouldn't live, so I ran the blades over it again, and cut it again but didn’t kill it, and again and then again, a cloud of two-cycle fuel smoke on me like a swarm of bees. It took so long my mind had time to spiral back to the graveyard I tended as a child for the dead ones, wild and tame: fish from the bubbling green aquarium, squirrels from the road, the bluejay stalked to a raucous death by Cicero the patient, the tireless hunter, who himself was laid to rest one August afternoon under a rock painted gray, his color, with a white splash for his white splash. Once in the woods I found the skeleton of a deer laid out like a diagram, long spine curved like a necklace of crude, ochre spools with the string rotted away, and the dull metal shaft of the arrow lying where it must have pierced not the heart, not the head, but the underbelly, the soft part where the sex once was. I carried home the skull with its nubs of not-yet-horns which the mice had overlooked, and set it on a rock in my kingdom of the dead. Before I chopped the little snake to bits of raw mosaic, it drew itself into an upward-straining coil, head weaving, mouth open, hissing at the noise that hurt it. The stripe was made of tiny paper diamonds, sharp-edged but insubstantial, like an x-ray of the spine or the ghost beginning to pull away. What taught the snake to make itself seem bigger than it was, to spend those last few seconds dancing in the roar and shadow of its death? Now I see, though none exists, its grave: harebells withered in a jar, a yellow spiral painted on a green-black stone, a ring of upright pine cones for a fence. That’s how the deer skull lay in state until one of the neighborhood dogs came to claim it, and carried it off to bury in the larger graveyard of the world.