Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff Vandermeer

Standing there on the sidewalk. Black slush of snow pushed to the sides of the street. A dead robin in the gutter, one torn wing spread toward the drain like an invitation to the underworld.

“As purses, handbags, shoes—even as heads on walls. Or as roadkill, unless it’s a fox or something we haven’t seen a hundred times before. The mind renders them as setting. But now I saw them everywhere—an ongoing, everyday exhibit of dead animals and their parts. A horror show. A vast extermination of lives and minds.”

Does analysis colonize you? Subject matter become the subject. Truth or cult.

The otters playing by the creek gave me a first and second look, then continued with their day. Or so it seemed to me.

this is almost verbatim from Annihilation

I have to compartmentalize. I’m living in the moment but denying the moment, too. I can’t think I can’t think I can’t think.

But the truth was what Silvina had seen: we were already ghosts. We just kept haunting each other for no reason. Even as we kept awaiting the mortal blow. But there would be no mortal blow, just endless depths.

The intimacy that salamanders have with their environment forces them to be sentinels of environmental change. Environmental degradation of air and water from pollution that dumps chemicals will distort and damage the pores of the salamander’s skin. Extinction of P. omena is attributed to habitat degradation. Extinction of H. sapiens is attributed to destroying its own habitat.