Her Body Among Animals by Paola Ferrante

Author:Paola Ferrante
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Published: 2023-07-31T15:37:26+00:00

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When we got to the beach on Monday afternoon, the hole was larger. Once we walked the scraggly parkette path and poked through the bushes that hid our beach from view, we could see the grave was almost pit sized, less like the nesting hole of a kingfisher and more like the giant, gaping burrow of a badger. At the bottom of the pit was a crow. A big one. A dead one. It was a blasphemy of feathers sticking out at weird angles, the kind of crow they put in Halloween specials as a harbinger of definite potential doom. (“Gross,” Ryan said, nodding approvingly.) All the dolls were gathered around the edge of the grave in an almost perfect semicircle facing inward. Even Eyelashes. I realized, with the same chicken skin crawling up my back as the time I was five and in bed and my brother told me Freddy could kill you while you slept, that she was not in the pit where my brother had dumped her. Eyelashes was standing slightly behind the rooster doll, and was the only one facing us, and not the crow. Somehow, overnight, the grave seemed to have deepened ominously into a chasm.

We talked theories; after all, there were plenty of reasons a dead crow would be lying in the middle of the beach. And there were plenty of reasons the dolls could have been moved and arranged in some kind of coven-esque satanic summoning semicircle. I could picture those reasons like movie scripts in my mind with their predictable characters, their expected endings, but the tenses kept getting jumbled, like half-remembered shows we’d all seen as little kids and couldn’t quite remember afterwards if our dads had really dumped us on an island with reject toys or left us home alone to fend off burglars. These things could happen. But they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t happen. But they do.

Script one: It was some stupid kid thing. Little girls who liked dolls most likely. Nothing to be scared of. Maybe they were having a tea party or whatever little girls did. Maybe the dead crow was a coincidence. And they tried to bury it. Or maybe they just liked hurting small animals and were on track to starring as the next real-life Michael Myers, slightly worse than Jason Voorhees, who wouldn’t kill a puppy.

Script two: It could have been a largish, slightly ravenous scavenging animal, most likely of the coyote or lupine variety, in any case with canine teeth. Or something tool-using that could pierce through feathers and skin without leaving any marks. If this was the case, it would have been like a whole documentary-type shoot, exploring the natural wonder of predatory instincts and territorial aggression, a fight to the death for the crow.

Script three: Someone filled the pit with whatever goo they could and tried to sink a dead crow, Mafia-style, in a kind of tribute to I Know What You Did Last Summer (which Ryan explained was somewhat of a cult classic), i.

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