Fuck you said the shrew. Fuck you for feeding the cat that plucked me from my grassy itinerary and left me to die on the ignominious vinyl of this nineteen-seventies kitchen floor. Fuck you said the shrew, for ending my life before I was ready and the lives of my unborn shrew-lets asleep in my belly, who now will never taste the sweetness of milk from my swollen teats. Fuck you for making me die so slowly and for making me twist my tapir-like proboscis at your human stink to try and make sense of it all. Fuck you too, to the ticks that still hold fast to my neck’s velvet nape, even as my life seeps away from me and my little swarm of fleas skitters toward the baseboards.
Happier Days – A once plump Mittens napping on a sunny couch
I wanted to inform all of my cat-loving friends about the passing here on Good Friday of our dear and ancient friend Mittens. She’d been withering away for the past year or so, becoming progressively more matted and skeletal till finally, reduced to a dusty husk, she decided it was time to die. What had kept her going these past few months was her indomitable appetite. Deaf and nearly blind, with an arthritic spine and fur falling out by the handful, her tiny clotted heart still quickened enough for a hobble over to the dinner bowl if she caught the scent of an open can of “Fancy Feast”. Mittens lived for food and when she stopped eating a few days ago, it was clear what was to come. In the end, she stumped down the basement stair and curled up under the work bench to die. When we brought her a little heater, she dragged herself away and settled onto the concrete floor. Warmth was not what she wanted. Perhaps she had a fever. It was there that we found her the next morning, stiff and cold with her eyes still half open, like she was trying hard to pay attention. Goodbye old friend. We’ll miss you…
a single, giant cell
Newly hatched duckling
one day old duckling
10 day old duckling
But with ending comes new beginning and the three Khaki Campbell ducklings that hatched out in the incubator last month continue to grow apace.
When I ask myself, “What did I do in the past month?” I don’t come up with much. But a duck egg develops from a single, albeit giant cell, into a fully formed, walking, squawking, opinionated ball of fluff in just about the time between two credit card statements. A duck egg gets fertilized about 10 days before it is laid, and then takes 28 or so more to hatch. The math of cell division is astonishing. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations: It is commonly estimated there are about 10 to the power of 14 cells in an average human – which is 100 trillion, in non-geek terms. Assuming the average weight of a human to be, say 70,000 grams (70 kg), and a duckling weighing around 50 grams at the time of hatching, the duckling already has 7 trillion cells when it pecks its way out of the shell. Seven trillion cells that have divided, differentiated and self-assembled into a coherent constellation of throbbing, sentient life, made up of the same raw material that might have been my breakfast. And it happens in a month!
Though our technology might be enthralling, nothing we as a species have ever constructed comes even close to the amazingness of an egg. Not surprisingly, in many cultures the egg is seen as the foundation of the universe.
In the Kalevala or Finnish national epic, the world unfolds from a duck egg that is laid upon the knee of a goddess:
One egg’s lower half transformed,
And became the earth below,
And its upper half transmuted
And became the sky above;
From the yolk the sun was made,
Light of day to shine upon us;
From the white the moon was formed,
Light of night to gleam above us;
All the colored brighter bits
Rose to be the stars of heaven
And the darker crumbs changed into
Clouds and cloudlets in the sky.
It’s that time of year when the days are short and the color has been sucked from the world.
I woke up this morning to find an egg lying out in the snow. Even the air has changed somehow, stuffing my ear canals and sealing me into the blood-throbbing confines of my memories. I think of last spring and the redwood grove I saw, ancient and sighing, oblivious to the sliver of time in which I must be satisfied. Yet there among the swirling gloom had grown the child of their ghosts, its needles white as a tapeworms, glistening with formaldehyde. It tried to kill me, you see, and hurled a branch in my direction when I got too close. And now after all those months, the great gray quilt of sky has pulled down over me and breath itself seems difficult. But high above the ragged trees, the white wraith swans churn savage wings again toward the ends of time. With bleating songs of ice and metal. I thought they’d gone extinct. . .
albino redwood
