The Mink

When the mink ran across the meadow in bunched black parabolas, I thought sine and cosine, but no — the movement never dips below the line. The creature vanished into barberries. Absolute predator who cracks a rabbit’s spine in one bite. And my mind leapt along a track to a summer field where I walked years ago to a stony spit out into the North Atlantic with a young man I hardly knew, and his sister. He was bald, dying of a brain tumor. I ignored his illness and we spoke of history. He was gentle, scholarly. Why do I remember him when it was his sister I painted seated in tall grass, her forehead wide, brown hair framing her face, ocean a cobalt swatch behind? Islands humped in little arcs across the bay. That canvas is stacked in a closet. But it’s the dead boy I’ve stored inside me all these years, scared of the otherworldly light around his eyes. Scared and ashamed of what I didn’t know. Ashamed of my fear that made his death, when it came, unspeakable. So history bounds into the present, glitter-eyed, with musky anal glands and daggering eyeteeth. Because that boy wasn’t dead: he must be killed again.