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52 Pinniped Physiology I remember leaving the handsome one, the novelist with the tanned body who believed that even our scars could fall in love. Okay I said. It all turned out really well until it no longer did. Passive and charged he was some kind of capacitor, silent but latent with current. The time I knew he could turn it on and off from a black dial was the time I touched him unexpectedly, and he tensed, pulled away, just the smallest amount. Small but enough to slap me. I can see him now. He is out there on the ice, one of the seals, because I want him to be fat and slow and blotchy, and only able to breathe once or twice a day and only when I drag a circle in the ice and let him come out briefly into the sharp and surprisingly cold air. The spotting scope pans as I count: crabeaters doze somewhere, but not here— only Weddell seals wait beside the pressure ridge not as a pod of, but as a sausage of seals. Other kinds more rare. Everything that is known about the Ross seal (Ommatophoca rossii) would fit into a paragraph about half as long as everything that is confidently known about Sappho. Some things resist completely: breeding cycles, what causes exile, the triggers for fame and neglect. Do the seals regret land, want to go back ever to being dogs? ...

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