Emergency by Kathleen Alcott

Author:Kathleen Alcott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

PART OF THE COUNTRY

In that part of the country where I tried to live alone, the burned-out California of nobody’s dreams, I measured time in the disappearance of roadkill. A deer on the shoulder took less than a day to be removed, a raccoon at least a couple. Braking around the curves in the road where these shapes remained, I spent my idle thinking on the barking dog. Each night, the noise seemed not to echo through the redwoods around my property, but come amplified, and encircling, from them. By the time I abandoned that house, a damp place of warped decks and spectacular views, I was sleeping little more than three hours a night, and living like prey under the threat of something bigger. Even now, I don’t think I could describe the sound of that dog, menacing and pitiful, though I believe I could make it—it sometimes happens that we’re afraid of a sound because we know, somewhere in our bodies, is the same one.

A county over from the house were the remains of a town a fire had erased the fall before. I drove through it only once, turning left at cinder-block foundations already white with sun. Twenty minutes in the other direction, another had flooded so badly that the stop signs, in the photos we’d all seen in the news, appeared halved. Joseph, hearing where I’d bought as I packed my things—I meant it as a surprise for the both of us, I’d told myself the seasons before as I skulked real estate late at night—peered at the photos and gagged. Do you hate your life, he asked, or just your money? But the house, the warming planet, did not seem to me so much bigger a risk than many I’d taken with my safety: to love a person born with the privileges he was, for instance. This was something my mother had warned me about, the spring I met him, but by then I saw her advice like something in the back of a fridge, likely past its expiry and suspect anyway for how rarely one had reached for it.

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