Cerra Cathryn Anderson (Arkansas, USA)
My favorite days are when I die. They don’t come as often as I would like, but they are always worth the wait. Death’s voice is faint only when I am indoors; on the cliffs’ edge she abandons her inside voice and wraps her wordless tendrils around my ankles. Jump, jump. I used to tremble at her voice, backing away quickly. Not anymore. Now when l’appel du vide calls my name, I close my eyes and breathe so deeply. This is when I feel the most alive—not because I could have died, but because I chose to keep on living.
* * *
I am driving home. It is a Wednesday, and the familiar slump of fatigue hovers over my shoulders as I click my right-hand blinker and exit the highway. I woke up too early, produced a hundred lattes, and sat in the most windowless classrooms on the university campus. My breath shallows just thinking about it, and I punch the mute button on my podcast. I need to breathe, not think.
The sky is the same shade of blue I find at boy baby showers, and the wild petunias his matching twin sister. I pass the construction area about six minutes from my house where someone is burying power lines in someone else’s ditch. Five minutes more and my home road materializes, black asphalt patch-worked with the sunlight that survived the net of pine fronds above it. When I crack my windows to let in the scent of those pines, powering down the air conditioner, the boundaries between my space and space begin to merge again.
My neighbor’s field holds the memory of nighttime deer, little dents in the grass like thumbprints in bread dough. Willy and Bill, the turkey vultures that haunt the ninety degree turn in our driveway, wing their way up from me as I round the corner. They disappear beyond the tree line. I wonder if they are searching for a black king snake fatally nicked by the hay-baler. Cathartes aura at war with Lampropeltis getula nigrita, “purifying breeze” against king of serpents. Perhaps the wily snake snuck by those beady eyes in wrinkled heads, slipping out of his old skin, leaving the decoy behind to slink away and nurse his wounds. He may have even escaped the notice of the scissor-tailed flycatcher perched on the barbed wire fence who peers at me now, its namesake dipping and wiggling behind it to keep its one-ounce body in prime viewing area of this strange spectacle.
I must look strange to these animals: a creature who sleeps in a box, climbs in a box with wheels that drives her to other boxes where she shoves her own ideas and prepackaged knowledge alike into boxlike shapes, all while consulting the conveniently pocket-sized box that flashes and dings like a child’s playtoy. The scissor-tail flies away and I roll on past my aunt’s house to my own.
I leave my box on wheels there, and, abandoning my backpack, tromp to the southern side of our property. There is a pond farther down I want to see.
The leaves of the oaks surrounding it are young, just peaking through with a color barely dark enough to be called green. When we reach the height of summer they will tan into the deep, deep green of my childhood, overshadowing the pond that will be depleted and foggy with algae, the surface dim like a poorly cleaned, public bathroom mirror. Pollen will coat the tense surface like a generous dusting of cornmeal on the bottom of a cast-iron skillet; here and there water bugs will dent the surface with spindle legs, scattered by the occasional fish who have sensed the nearby dinner possibilities. Grasshoppers’ wings will beat together so loudly you can hardly tell the difference between them and the cicadas hiding in the white oaks. Everything will be hot and tired and ready for autumn, but not ready enough to forgo the summertime naps in the shade where the humidity will settle like a thick blanket over our bodies. Breathing will deepen, lengthen, so soft we hardly move. A temporary grave.
(Only sometimes can I tell the difference between sleeping and death.)
But that is not what the pond looks like today. This time of year is the time for rain, and the dampness seeps into my shoes, making strange squelchy sounds. I remove them, and the muddiest places cling to my feet. A smooth, slender trail winds its way through the damp earth, and I hope it belongs to that king snake, crafty little devil. It is in this place, with the hope of escape, that I begin to unpackage myself from all those boxes, my shape losing its compressed corners and defined edges. A song, uninvited, creeps into my mind as I approach the waters’ edge—if an edge is something water can have, endless, boundless as it is. Even the biology professor can’t pin it down: is it a gas, a liquid, or a solid? Boundless, boundaryless, non-binary—that’s what it is.
A great blue heron, Ardea herodias, nested near this pond a summer ago, and sometimes I catch sight of her over our back field, flying from one pond to another. A Canadian goose also haunts this area of our property, but she I am not so eager to meet as soon she will be defending a nest. Neither large non-passerines are present, and once it becomes evident that no wildflowers have yet sprung up in the marshiest parts, I retreat to the eastern field where the dreams of flowers have begun to wake—the tiniest, yellowest buds perching on swaying grass stems. I can almost see the golden butter dripping from their waxy, cupped centers.
I make my temporary grave as the deer did just last night, near the buttercups and, as I am not of the category of people who are against harvesting wildflowers for pleasure, I take the smallest bundle and tuck it behind my ear. Then, arms spread wide, I press my back to the soft plants, trinities of leaves crowned with sun-yellow petals.
It is in this place that I come to die.
* * *
I am not a morbid person. My thoughts are more curious baby things than the rumination of a full-grown creature. I am in a time and place in my life where “passing on” holds a magic still, a mystery, and very few things in my life are encouraged to be a mystery anymore. I graduated that class with an A+, no late papers submitted. The university model is by definition against mystery, and the ten year plans, retirement funds, and helpful zoo plaques that strike all efforts at ignorance from this Western brain only emphasize what my mentors encourage. Far be it from me to wonder about the future, to spend my pocket change on pastries, or stand in uncertainty regarding the evolutionary steps involved in developing an orangutan. No, for I am civilized folk, committed to expending every possible brain cell in the process of eliminating this mystery that keeps me up at night. Anyway, I can sleep when I’m dead.
When I make my temporary grave, I try to make it like the deer would, or like the snake. It has become a kind of unifying ceremony to me. More accurately, it is a reunification where I abandon all sense of civilization, breathe the trees and hear the flowers, and do any little thing I can to thin the line between my own being and that great Mother whose womb is churning beneath my slowing heartbeat. It is a consolation for me—this ritual, this part of the earth. The names of flowers and birds coat the tip of my tongue like the cherry-flavored cough medicine I took on a sick day in middle school. Tyrannus forficatus—scissor-tailed flycatchers. Ranunculus fascicularis—early buttercups. I do not say them. I am dead, and the dead do not speak. Only collect flowers and catch tears.
In this community of mystery I truly rest in peace. Gravity thickens and pulls on each vertebrae of my spinal column until I can almost feel my ribcage unfolding and rooting into the Arkansas soil, leaving my heart exposed. I allow this place to work on me in this undocumented way. It is Mother Nature’s turn to churn and plant and water and guard: to churn my sedentary spirit to wandering; to plant a little seed of a thought, just the right size for a haiku; to water the driest parts of my body when I stand for five hours and work for a vague and faceless crowd; and to guard me from the pencil bags, tablet case, and due dates that are uprooting the years of work my human mother put in to keep me at least a little wilder than the rest of my generation.
My generation has an interesting way of consoling themselves: with screens historically known to raise anxiety levels. In this we find comfort. I say we because, though my mother was quite prolific in her promotion of books and bread baking, I could not escape the harm of humanity completely. I still reach for my phone when stress arises, thumb through colorful ten-second videos, and talk—talk, endlessly. I produce my own words so often I forget to listen to the word of God. In the beginning… in the now, in oxeye daisies and oxymorons and oxford commas. In robin wings and snail shells I thought were abandoned. In surprising, jarring revelations of word and nature, which are synonymous (obviously).
This natural, universal mystery is what I come to find when here I die (by I, of course, I mean my whole being, not simply my body): do I, by dying, end; or is this where the completeness of reunification begins? I must emphasize that I do not come here to solve this mystery. I come only to find it again and again in all its gravestone glory, in the gray area where I end and decomposition begins. To become a little more like water: less binary, with fewer bounds and boundaries.
A cloud’s shadow overtakes the sun, as if to add clarity.
* * *
I am awoken in the aftermath by a cricket crawling over my hand. He rubs his spiny forelegs together, antennae bouncing in the levity of sunlight. A vulture circles above me, and I wonder if this is how that snake felt—lying belly up, earth pulling down, cricket and ant crawling over, vultures floating updraft to updraft until those broad black wings close and we lock eyes. I feel the snake, I am the snake, but not the snake wounded by the hay-baler, bleeding and slinking away to die alone. I peel away from the ground like it is old skin, and look at my daytime impression in the green, a little dent in the grass like a thumbprint in bread dough. I am no longer woman—Homo sapien ruler of Kingdom Animalia. I am simply one of the kingdom with a reunified body and soul and spirit. I am made up of need and desire and heaven, with blurred edges and unboxed self—something a bit more like water.
“How do we learn to trust ourselves to hear the chanting of the earth?” By lying in the empty field and allowing the cricket to examine my body more than I have examined it myself. By embracing the sunlight and cold shadows of clouds with equal vigor, fingers of my soul clawing for any warmth or cold that reminds me that I AM, not I do. With each temporary death I leave behind another skin as evidence of my ritual reunification to the singularity of animalhood. One of Many. Many of One. Myself, only.
Each time I die I must eventually rouse my corpse, return to my home and do the best I can to make it not a box. I will have to write the paper and study for the test, but only after this consolation. Above all else I must remember I am simply one member of one species in a vast collection of diverse organisms, each with our own lives to live—or rather, deaths to die each day. I am not a scissor-tailed flycatcher or a sleeping deer or a skinless black king snake. I am not water in every state of matter. I am not food for vultures—yet. I can only pray that when those vultures come, be it in seven years or seventy, that they gorge themselves well on a newly skinned body, lush and rich with the quality of life. But before they feast, I hope they say their own prayer of thanks to the boundless, non-binary God who waters the buttercups over my grave.
Cerra Cathryn Anderson is a junior Interdisciplinary Studies & Theological Studies double major at Harding University in Arkansas. While her hobbies include playing cello, sketching, travel, and various temporary craft obsessions, her two most loved pastimes are nature walks and writing. She has written personal essays, a novella, a novel, and various flash-fiction and poetry pieces. Her post-graduation plans have yet to be formulated, but will most assuredly involve people, creative communications, and plenty of the great outdoors.