Wildlife by Jeff VanderMeer

Author:Jeff VanderMeer [VanderMeer, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542037457
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories
Published: 2022-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

007.

Zanth receded from Sam for a time; her work intensified and she had weeding in the yard. Geraldine still came over, but not as much. A pattern, or rhythm, to life in the house imposed itself nonetheless, because of work. The ravine faded into the backdrop as Sam focused on her clients. Then: a problem, an issue that she should’ve been able to put aside but couldn’t.

In the early summer, as the elderberry bushes bloomed with intricate white flowers and the swamp sunflower she had planted began to show their strength and tower over her . . . as the rains came now near constant in the midafternoon, the humidity near 100 percent . . . the trail cams died, one by one.

They winked out in ways that at first Sam put down to heat and humidity and the constant rain leaking in at the seams. By the time the third had died, she lay awake that night, unable to sleep, knowing she had only one left, out there in the wilderness.

Sure enough, in the morning, the SD card revealed that the trail cam, while having new batteries, had taken no footage, and checking the screen revealed it had been snuffed out like the rest, despite no obvious damage.

The last footage from the trail cam, from a few nights before, puzzled her, in part for its banality: a snuffling opossum with an ordinary waddle over to the birdbath for a long drink. This clip was followed by just a photo of the moonlit birdbath, ripples across the water’s surface as if something had just left. Very normal—the trail cams often caught the aftermath of some fast-moving animal.

But the surrounding light . . . the light felt like a premonition of disaster. The entire scene had been bathed, for just a few seconds, in an extreme light, washing out the optics and then, inevitably, three or four shots of darkness so total nothing could be discerned within it. Was it Zanth, lurking? Or just Zanth or someone else across the ravine turning on their backyard lights and overwhelming the trail cam? Neither explanation satisfied her.

Here, the trail cam died, and no amount of fiddling with it at the dining room table could repair it. No stills or video footage showed up on any of the SD cards thereafter; they remained as blank as if all the animals had suddenly left the ravine.

As her efforts accumulated in their uselessness, her inability to fix the trail cams began to feel like a personal failure, almost a moral lapse. She knew that made no sense, but the emotion behind it began to overtake her in a way that she found dangerous. So she focused on reviewing the footage and stills over and over again. Which took the edge off. Another alone thing. Tim would’ve had no patience for her attention to detail, or even to the purpose of the trail cams. The more she thought about it, maybe in the end the fundamental split had been outside/inside with him, and while she could be inside, he couldn’t hack the outside.

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