Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories

by GennaRose Nethercott

It’s true—you can’t really be angry with someone without loving them first.

When I was young, I believed this was magic. Now that I am older, I know it must be a science I do not yet understand—which is only another way to say “magic.”

History is only history when experienced and subsequently reported. Our reality is nothing but what we perceive it to be. Nothing exists outside what is perceived.

Did you know humans instinctively lift their shoulders to their ears when in danger? This is to protect the neck, the most vulnerable part of the body. For a while, humans removed themselves from the food chain, but the body never knew this. The body is blind to time. It continues its same old dance. Instead of lifting the shoulders to keep the jugular hidden from a wildcat’s bite, the shoulders would rise in heavy traffic, when a meeting ran late, before a blind date. Little annoyances or anxieties that the body mistook for peril.

Some of these trees are thousands of years old. Can you imagine? To be a sequoia in an old-growth forest, let to live and live and live and keep on living. Let to reach so far toward the sky, lesser beings can hardly see the top of you. And as your body grows, you become a home: termites and weevils, owls tending to their downy young, webbed pouches of hatching moths, squirrels fattening in a hollowed branch. Your body, a city. Your body, sustaining and feeding and sheltering so many—and all the while, you never have to die. You never have to kill.

I heard once that everybody dies twice—once when their heart stops, and again when their name is spoken for the last time. But there is another sort of dying in between, a crueler death: when those you love begin to make choices they would never make if you were there. If you were alive. Things that would be thoughtless, brutal even, but in your absence, become benign. Like giving away your clothes. Or removing the flurries of magazine clippings you carefully curated across your bedroom walls. Isn’t it strange, how the rules change so fast? How an act that would be unacceptable one moment becomes instantly harmless, as soon as the burden of ownership is lifted?