Feed Them Silence

by Lee Mandelo

“I wouldn’t argue that a team with no social scientists, people in sustainability, or ethicists is particularly mixed. And spying on the brains of some starving animals sounds more horror movie than heart-warmer to me,” Riya said.

This wolf can’t consent to being studied by you, which involves a nonconsensual surgical procedure. The presumption you’re making in claiming to report on its real feelings, so you can make a name for yourself, violates its sovereign dignity. It can’t correct you when you put words in its mouth. So, yes, as an ethnographer I fucking disagree with the entire premise.”

smell so intense it held texture inside her skull.

“To all of you, more than me,” Sean corrected—though on the inside, she classified all of their actions under the possessive umbrella of her labor and direction. Her team; her results; her lab; her wolf.

“So maybe a toast for her sake, as our window into another world. She’ll be our North Star.”

the inside of her mouth syrup-filmed.

I’d prefer to be the one going on NPR later, you know?”

There’s also, as I know you’re aware, an unavoidable racialized and gendered dynamic to the inequities she’s expressing her concerns over.”

Should be impossible, within the presumptive mono-directionality of the feed.

but a randy, aggravated part of her wanted to shout that this was her turf

Underneath the almost-filmic domestic evening lingered a bad taste, though, a gloss of unreality—as if the pair of them were each acting the life they’d rather be living, for the sake of a minute’s respite.

gulped mouthfuls of time;

her pack

The pack understood linear time in a visceral way: cold was coming.

She’s worried all the time about the others, and feels—nostalgia, I would call it, or yearning for a better future she knows isn’t going to happen. It’s almost like fantasizing? And dread too, of inevitability despite the comfort of the fantasy. It’s such a complex set of emotions, I almost can’t describe it.

scrambling to remember who Myka was.

and her bunny-print slippers;

Shocky regret pounded her heart against her rib cage.

her wolves

An unexpected dislocation, far worse than hearing her own voice speaking back to her on her phone’s answering message, smacked her across the face.

distractedly parsing the mixture of eagerness and almost-laziness as a desire to fuck.

bouncing between prey-stillness and vibrating anxiety.

“When I struggle with whether our relationship is still good for us, my concern isn’t focused on ‘what will the neighbors think.’ Instead I’m worried, am I going to be able to survive losing this, or will sustaining it be the thing that kills me.”

As nested as their bodies were, a hollow distance ached in her bones—like she wasn’t holding her flesh-and-blood wife, but the ghost of a future loss.

If she were god,

her real love—so much more immediate than Sean’s own muddled, resentful attachments.

At the same time, she felt she owed it to Kate. If watching and recording was all she could do, then feeling as deep as possible was her responsibility.

Sean understood, at once, jolting: the interspecies cooperation isn’t group instinct, it’s the group following leadership.

Her rolling eyes flashed as white as the bone protruding from her flayed foreleg,

Elder male, remaining with his wounded—or, worse, already dead—partner for the last stretch of their short, miserable lives.

When amplified by the ghostly, borrowed subjectivity whispering within her memories, the boundary-line of trees called to her with the same ferocity as her front door after a long night at the office.

Longing colored with agony rolled through her, the desire to cross from silent witness to welcomed partner.

Julie of the Wolves.

The moneymen wouldn’t risk their reputation on a clumsy project that failed due to emotionality—not from a woman researcher.

Trying to dive into another being without giving anything of herself in return had been an act of real arrogance, but the wolf had found a way to get inside her regardless.

Shipwrecked on the life raft of their bed and dragging each other under the current, Sean huffed the scent of her wife’s hair for comfort. Neither of them said sorry.

There’s no way to collect it without damaging her, just as you drew out in your project proposal.

It does seem hypocritical to set the life of an individual wolf as our moral event horizon.”

“How is it a kindness to murder her?” Sean demanded, whirling on him as she suffocated in a cloud of her own hubris.

But now, the loss of two strong hunting bodies over the span of one week might doom the pack. The adolescent would have two fewer tongues to clean his face, two fewer warm bodies to curl against through the night. And also—also, Sean wouldn’t ever smell the forest through her wolf’s nose again, wouldn’t share in her pleasures or pains as she lay with her siblings, loped through a cold stream, cracked the bones of a squirrel between her jaws. The colors she saw for the first time, saturated and green-tinged and strange, weren’t hers any longer. Sean was even more alone than before.

The adolescent would have two fewer tongues to clean his face, two fewer warm bodies to curl against through the night.

not the muscled, lean creature who frolicked and adored her siblings and cared for her youngest as if he was her own whelp.

The siblings would be missing her again, worried over her disappearance and the intrusive scents tracked all over her last known location. Unlike the last time, she wouldn’t be coming home.