The Coon

He lay interred on top of a bed of ice in a cooler in the hatch of my uncle’s SUV, his limbs curled inward, cringing, posed in the attitude of one who has just been shot. He was naked—vulgar, almost—but for the fur at his feet and on his human-like hands held up high near his furry face. His back was hunched—vulnerable, pink—like an old man’s, and like an old man still, his belly pooched obscenely over his feet. The tail, firm as a whip, curved around his body. One eye fixed me to its blank black glossiness; it seemed to be filled with the vestiges of life. (The whiskers seemed as if they would twitch at any moment.) “They keep the feet and the face on so we can tell it’s a coon, not something like a dog or a cat,” my uncle said. I nodded, still staring at the coon. The coon stared back.