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Body of Stuffed Female Swift Fox, Natural History Museum
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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39 Body of Stuffed Female Swift Fox, natural History museum Nothing ever was this slinking, vicious, glass eye embedded in its slitted red, skin husked and sealed forever in a vacuum: the false gray sedge where no dog hunts and it’s lost its sleekness as it’s lost its sun. She ages terribly behind glass. Nothing ever was this slinking, vicious, so why should we admire or hate her, husked and sealed forever in a vacuum, the frozen attitude of cunning strung over wire, razor nails replaced and aging terribly behind glass? Imagine the wounds she could tear into a body. Why admire or hate her for them, why not call her existence, simply, honest: an animal practicing its craft designed by nature? Now she’s strung over wire, the razor nails replaced with plastic as her forest was itself replaced by us, the many wounds we’ve torn into its body. Years ago, signs across the neighborhood listing all the cats found mutilated declared a man was busy practicing his craft, nature redesigned by violence. We have to find the killer, they said, before the forested park fills with bodies, the cats turned into girls and the girls into women. Months later, the signs were torn down, the notices listing all the cats found mutilated declared a mistake. The culprit was a fox. Now, behind glass we’ve found the killer: the violence we think we cannot be or feel more than, 40 the once-red body that fascinates us labeled female, the signs beside it torn, notes on its habitat in disarray due to construction. The culprit is a fox. Behind glass lighting flickers, throws down shadows so that we cannot see her. She raises up a paw and the once-red body that fascinates us freezes in its shabby immortality, stands disfigured in its habitat, in disarray due to our construction of a world that keeps her always different from us; in our imagination of ourselves, degraded. We cannot see her. She raises up a paw as if in supplication, cone nose tasting the air frozen in its shabby immortality, disfigured by the box we’ve locked it in, as we’ve locked in her, imagining how she’d slip from the forest to drink at a puddle of rain, the vision of herself degraded by a car’s headlights that cut across its surface. She lifts her head, cone nose tasting the air and the wind lifts too, riffling the grasses, the trees, the fur at her throat; a movement that, as she stops to drink at her puddle of rain, could be herself, the wind, or nothing: an absence in the headlights that cut across the surface. She looks into her puddle of rain but will not imagine more, does not need to, like us, a wind riffling through grasses, a movement like water running down a glass room. Nothing ever was this slinking, vicious. She could be herself, the wind, or nothing. Instead, she’s husked, red. Sealed forever in a vacuum. ...