White Pelican
She spoke to the animals.
She was walking down a wooded driveway in Shackleford, Virginia when she ran into a javelina and told it to stop. The whole thing happened in her mind. she had no idea what existed beyond the trees and so she began to feel eyes watching her from beneath bark, ivy creeping along the edges of the unknown, she was enraptured by the sublime —a little piece of terror inside endless pleasure. She pictured it—the coming out of a wild hog with fangs and wiry devil hair. The way it stamped its back hoof before running in her direction. There was a tree she could see in the distance and a wild turkey flying from one side of the path to the other. She wished she were that elegant, flight-full turkey so she followed it, flung herself onto the rough edges of what looked like a dying trunk— take me she said. There was one branch, that with the right mixture of luck and adrenaline, she might be able to grab— a branch that would save her from the unforeseen fangs of a javelina.
She imagined it, the hurling of herself, the springing like she’d never sprung before—the calf muscles flaring up, puncturing skin in a way she hadn’t observed. It was all new. That’s the point of our imaginations isn’t it? To find something completely different than what we know, to engage in the unrevealed, to unhinge societal programming and become what we thought we would be—creatures who live on earth fighting to survive like everything else.
She climbed the tree as if that’s what she was made for and The Javelina growled at the girth of its trunk, waiting for her, knowing she’d have to come down at some point. Go away she whispered.
Earlier that morning she’d seen a snake slithering up a set of wooden steps, the same steps she reached her hand beneath hours before, she looked down at her feet, there was nothing there. The evening prior there’d been seven dolphins in the distance —river dolphins— the kind no ones heard of. She didn’t know why there were seven and not just two. She didn’t know which truth she’d remember— the one where she was walking, listening to the birds, or the one where she flung herself into a tree running from a Javelina. She didn’t know if when she was older she would tell some child somewhere that there had been a snake beneath the set of steps and that she only saw it when she did. She didn’t know if river dolphins would come up at a dinner party and she’d say, oh yes I saw seven once in an accent that wasn’t hers. I was in Shacklefords, Virginia the same place I got attacked by a javelina.
She had trained herself at a young age to use her imagination, to allow herself to be taken away from what was— the boredom and resentment of existing in a world she never created or agreed to, the fear of becoming like the people she saw around her — she didn’t like it, she didn’t like any of it.
