"The Doorman" first appeared in Fire & Water: Stories from the Anthropocene. This piece by Jennifer Morales is the winner of the 2021 Council for Wisconsin Writers Zona Gale Short Fiction Award. Morales has been a Watershed reader, an event facillitator, and has led a writing workshop for Arts + Literature Laboratory.
Ashley didn’t believe in global warming, or climate change, or whatever they were calling it now.
He had to admit, though, that the spring rains started way too early this year, right at the beginning of March. They were heavy and warm, with fat drops that beat the soft ground into a murky pudding.
When he was stationed on Guam, back in his 20s, he endured rains like this. His first afternoons on the base, he would just stand at the doorway of his barracks and smoke while the hot blue storm clouds spilled themselves out. He wondered how there could be any water left in the sky.
These Wisconsin rains were like that.
Since his accident a few weeks earlier—he had fallen on the slick floor of the butter plant, coming down hard on his tailbone and lower spine—he had plenty of time to think about the weather. Ashley still called the place where he worked the “butter plant,” although his line was making ghee now, some kind of hippie half-butter the back-to-the-landers wanted.
It hurt to walk and it hurt to stand. Without painkillers, it hurt even to sit or lie down. He was on disability leave, going to physical therapy twice a week, an agony that the doctors assured would get him back to work-ready condition in three months.
Three months is a long time, he found out. As his pain receded, his restlessness grew. When he got tired of looking out the window at the rain, he watched baseball on TV. It seemed right that the Brewers were having as bad a season as he was. Sometimes he did the large-print word search in the Foxxy Shopper. On Mondays and Thursdays, when the medical transport van picked him up for physical therapy, he was generally able to wrangle an unauthorized stop at the KwikTrip, to get beer and a stack of scratch-offs. He told the driver to take a couple tickets for himself and one time the driver won $75. After that, Ashley didn’t really have to ask for the detour. Back home, he smoked and scratched his way through the cards, each scrape of the foil a plea for something interesting to happen.
His visitors were few and far between. His ex-girlfriend, Carolyn, a health aide, came by three or four times in the first weeks of his recovery. She whisked her way through his space, jerking the vacuum out of the closet to give the living room a once-over, cleanly splitting the Chinese takeout she brought into daily portions and stacking them in date-marked containers in the fridge. It felt more like an extension of her day at the nursing home than a social call.
Ashley wanted Carolyn to talk to him—about baseball, her book group, anything—but she seemed content to confirm his medication schedule and rearrange the pillows on the vinyl recliner where he spent most of his day. He missed her. Their breakup the year before was uncertain and quiet. They didn’t fight, she just stopped showing up. Now, here she was caring for him like he was his own weak father. The distance between them seemed to grow with every visit.
“I just wish I could go back to work,” he said to her as she microwaved his mac ‘n’ cheese. “Sitting around here isn’t doing me any good.”
“It’s doing you a lot of good. You just can’t feel it yet.”
“I fucking hate being stuck. I want something to do.” He straightened out the sleeves of his sweatshirt, pulling them hard enough to twinge his back. It felt like the recliner was swallowing him. “Something that matters.”
“You could invite some friends over,” she said.
“Huh.” Who wanted to come hang out at his place? It wasn’t exactly Party Central right now. Even he didn’t want to be here.
Carolyn delivered his lunch to him in one grand sweep across the open space from kitchen to living room. He liked the way she moved, with long strides and arms spread, as if the world was bigger than it looked.
“Stop showing off,” he grumbled, but he smiled at her. “You could come by more often and keep me entertained.”
She swatted him on the knee. “Oh, you.” Before he could reach for her hand, she had gathered her coffee mug, car keys, and purse. At the door, she peered up at the sky. “Looks like it’s going to rain again. Good thing you don’t have to go out.”
That night, under the pressure of another March monsoon, the edges of the orange sandstone hill behind his trailer gave way. In his sleep, he heard the sand coming, a thick shushing sound, denser than the pinging of raindrops. He dreamed he was pouring out a fat stream of salt from the old Morton’s canister in the kitchen of his childhood. He heard his mom yelling at him for wasting salt, but he couldn’t stop. In the morning he woke to find the back end of his home clutched in a foot and a half of sand, like a ship run aground. The neighbors on the opposite side of the hill got the worst of it, with sand up over the thresholds of their doors. Parts of the hill, thick with trees and flowers until the storm, were flat-faced and barren. For days afterward, the beeps and grunts of earth-moving equipment constituted the soundtrack of Ashley’s thoughts, as the landlord tried to dig down to solid ground.
When the sun finally cracked through the clouds for a stretch, sometime in mid-April, what was left of the yard had been reduced to a foamy mud. Small threads of brilliant green grass jutted out here and there, giving Ashley something hopeful to rest his eyes on.
The sunny days brought out the birds. They sang lustily, making up for lost time. A pair of pale brown house wrens courted in Ashley’s side-yard, rattling their wings and warbling ecstatically to each other. He watched them for a full hour as they hopped and shimmied across the tender ground.
A few days later, as he was shaving for his physical therapy appointment, tufts of yellow fluff began drifting past the bathroom window on the morning breeze. In the minutes he had before the medical transport van showed up, he staggered around to the west side of the trailer to check it out.
The wrens had breached the warped blue wooden siding and were emptying insulation out of a hole in the exterior wall, just above Ashley’s head. They chattered happily as they pecked away. Bits of insulation littered the grass, a flock of yellow chicks in the deepening green.
“Now, what in the hell am I going to do about that?” He strained to get a look. The birds grew quiet for a moment, as if considering an answer to his question.
Even under normal circumstances, Ashley never felt as dashing or capable as his namesake—his mother was a huge fan of Gone with the Wind’s Major Wilkes—but since his accident, little situations like this could make him feel entirely useless. He couldn’t swing a hammer or climb a ladder in his condition.
He thought about asking Dakota next door to deal with the hole. Dakota was single, with a lot of time on his hands. With almost 30 years’ age difference between them, Ashley had become a sort of father figure to the younger man, giving him advice about dealing with people at work or the cheapest fixes for his truck. The two of them hung out quite a bit last summer, drinking beers, cooking hamburgers, and shooting the shit on Ashley’s deck. Grillin’ and chillin’, as Dakota liked to say.
But Ashley’s accident changed the dynamic. He couldn’t muster the energy to pull out the lawn chairs or mess with the grill. And maybe the pain was scary for the kid, who was still at that age where a person could think they were invincible. Dakota was spending his evenings elsewhere now. He would come if called, but Ashley had two more months of recovery—he thought he should save his favors for when he really needed them.
So the wrens’ creative destruction continued uninterrupted for a couple of weeks. Occasionally, Ashley would hobble outside to pound on the wall next to the birds’ crater, hoping to scare them away. But they would only fly out for a moment and wait in a nearby tree, returning the second he headed back inside.
When the wrens began tag-teaming live insect delivery, Ashley knew he was in trouble. He called Dakota, who came over after work.
“What do we have here?” Dakota asked, climbing up a ladder to peer into the nest with a flashlight. The mother wren swooped past Dakota’s face and landed on the shed belonging to their widowed neighbor, Mrs. Rudrüd. The bird cried out, a panicked, repetitive call that was soon echoed by the father from the nearby edge of the woods.
“Are there babies in there?” Ashley asked from the ground.
“Yeah, but not for long.” Dakota grabbed the small birds from the nest, eight in all, and shot their featherless bodies, two at a time, into the trees behind the trailer.
Ashley felt the yard spin and he steadied himself against the wall. The babies piped weakly from the leaf litter. Dakota asked him to hand up a piece of plywood and he nailed it in place over the hole.
***
The next day, several woodpeckers arrived, visiting off and on to dig their claws into the siding and peck at the soft spots. When all of them pounded away, the noise inside the trailer rattled Ashley’s teeth. He turned up the TV.
As if he didn’t know, Mrs. Rudrüd came by to alert him.
“I’ve been watching. You’ve got three downies and one pileated. At least. I looked them up in my bird book.” She waved the floppy volume in Ashley’s face.
He tried to be polite to Mrs. Rudrüd, to listen when she talked. Her husband had fallen over and out of the golf cart somewhere between the 7th and 8th holes the spring before, dead on the green. But her telling him the names of the species hell-bent on wrecking his home wasn’t much comfort.
He called the animal control number at the county and talked with Ole. They were in the same class in high school but didn’t talk much since.
“We don’t do birds,” Ole said. “And anyway, the woodpeckers will just keep coming back unless you do something about the underlying problem.”
“Which is what then?”
“Bugs, I’d expect.”
So Ashley called around to a couple exterminators in town.
“Wood-sided trailer, huh?” one said. “We’re gonna have to treat the whole thing.”
“With poison?’
“Yeah, poison.” The exterminator laughed. “What? You want me to bring my .22 and shoot the bugs? I can schedule you for next week Tuesday if that works for you.”
Ashley thought of the baby wrens and their translucent purple skin. The parents had hovered over the wreck of their offspring longer than Ashley could bear to watch.
“I’m going to call around some more,” Ashley said. “Thanks.”
***
The physical therapy was helping, Ashley hated to notice. Not that he didn’t want to feel better, he just wished he could give the credit to something other than the painful treatments. It was getting easier to stand for minutes at a time and getting out of his chair was no longer a torment.
On an early May afternoon he got a burst of energy and decided to cook himself a real dinner. He’d been living mainly off of microwave entrees, breakfast cereal, and beer, but his ambitions suddenly extended to a hamburger and a side of pre-cut oven fries. He let the TV prattle on while he cooked, which is why he didn’t immediately hear the squirrel.
When he went into the living room to change the channel, he saw it: a chubby gray one, with a black nose and a wise eye that gave Ashley the willies, hanging off the lilac bush and chewing through the window screen near the TV. She bounded in just as Judge Judy was about to render a verdict on the roommates’ furniture dispute.
Perched on the window sill, the squirrel snorted, as if she didn’t approve of the trailer’s smoke-stained air. Before Ashley could stop her, she leapt off the sill and dashed toward the kitchen, disappearing behind the cabinet door to the left of the sink.
Ashley hit the mute button on the TV. The squirrel thumped once or twice and then came the manic sounds of gnawing teeth.
“Oh, no you don’t.” He grabbed his heavy-duty flashlight and a half-empty bottle of water from the end table and went to look. He opened the cabinet door and clicked on the flashlight. The squirrel leapt out. Startled, he threw the water bottle toward the beast, but it missed her by a foot and flew into the cabinet.
The squirrel rushed back out the way she came, clambering up the shredded screen and into the lilac. She cursed at him for a good five minutes before disappearing over the roof. Ashley shut the window.
That night, he was awakened from his drug-muffled sleep by a loud smack and a crash of glass. He had just been dreaming of hitting a home run, the thwack and shudder of the bat still alive in his arms. He peeled one dry eye open then the other. In the washed-out glow from the street lamp out front, he picked out a beaver in the lilac’s branches shaking glass from its tail. While Ashley tried to recall how to move his limbs, the beaver jumped through the broken window and waddled toward the same cabinet the squirrel had disappeared into.
“God, no.” He turned on the lamp next to him, just in time to see a cluster of bats swoop in through the broken window and head for the cabinet, too. One of them wedged its furry body between the door and the frame and held it open for its companions.
“What the hell?”
He picked up the phone but set it down again: It was going on 3 o’clock. Who do you call at 3 o’clock in the morning about a beaver breaking into your house?
From his seat in the living room he had a decent view of the kitchen cabinets next to the sink, but if the beaver and bats were up to anything in there, he couldn’t see or hear it. He got up and moved cautiously into the kitchen, pausing to grab a knife from a drawer near the fridge. Standing off to one side, he opened the door wide and waited. Nothing. He leaned over as much as he dared and looked in. Darkness. Silence.
“Hey!” he said into the void. He knocked the knife blade against the cabinet frame. No response. The animals must have found another way out. That was good, Ashley thought, although it puzzled him how he wouldn’t notice a draft from a gap big enough to fit a full-grown beaver. He would look more closely in the morning, when there was better light.
He settled back into his chair before realizing that he would have to do something about the window. Damp night air was dropping in through the empty frame. He roused himself to find an old cardboard box and some duct tape and sealed it up as best he could. It wasn’t a real solid job, and he couldn’t bend to pick up the broken glass glittering the carpet, but it would have to do.
He had only just fallen back to sleep when a series of titters and squeaks startled him awake. A family of raccoons hustled in, busting through his cardboard barrier like it was nothing. They were followed a few minutes later by a pair of herons. Several neon-green frogs with poor timing sprang through between the birds’ feet and a heron snagged two of them with its beak.
Ashley felt pinned to the recliner under the combined weight of his fear and curiosity. He tensed, but the animals didn’t approach or threaten him. They went straight for the cabinet without a glance in his direction.
It went on all night: Ashley was terrified when a group of rattlesnakes slithered in off the lilac bush and right down the face of his TV, but even the snakes didn’t pay him any mind. A soundless parade of fireflies drifted by, some blinking white, some yellow. Next came a bunch of possums, a clutch of rabbits, a long black trail of ants, and then, around daybreak, six eagles.
He was surprised by the awkwardness of the giant birds’ gait. He thought of them only in flight, inspiring and majestic, but on his kitchen linoleum they were clumsy, their feathered shoulders hunched like hoodlums up to no good. Still, he couldn’t help feeling that the eagles were some kind of sign, arriving at the start of a new day. He was a patriot, after all. It made him think that, whatever it was these animals were heading off to do, maybe he shouldn’t get in their way.
He waited out the day in his chair, half-watching TV. His head abuzz, his thoughts scattered and incomplete, he felt as if he had drunk too much coffee. Ashley was unsurprised by the occasional flick of the curtain as a finch or two slipped in, then a pileated woodpecker. He thought the woodpecker looked like the one that was trying to knock through the wall weeks before, but it was hard to tell. How long had these animals been planning this?
He shook his head. Animals don’t plan, you idiot.
By early afternoon, his curiosity got the better of him and he decided to investigate. At least then when help came, he might be able to explain something about the whole ridiculous scene.
He got his headlamp from the hook by the door and went to the cabinet, where he bent down, gasping, to peer into the dark interior. Two years ago there had been a rat in here. It still rankled with the greasy, sour scent of the animal’s waste. Above that he caught a whiff of forest floor and water. Not the mold-riddled smell of the wallboard, damp from the leaky u-trap, but fresh water.
He flicked his headlamp on and then off.
The cabinet had no bottom. The animals had removed it, or their ins and outs had worn it away. And beyond the bottomless space, a light pointed back at him. He stood with the legs of a younger man, breathing fast, and kneed the door shut.
Ashley pulled himself along the counter to a kitchen chair, and turned it to face the cabinet. He sank down and let his shoulder blades wedge in between the spindles, his back muscles throbbing from standing so quickly.
He eyed the phone, the cordless handset resting on the counter near the stove. Maybe he should call Carolyn. And say what? He had a zoo in his kitchen? He was afraid of squirrels? At this point, the whole thing was too embarrassing.
Maybe there was water in the cabinet, pooled from the leak, and the light he saw was just the reflection of his headlamp in it. He would feel pretty stupid calling Carolyn if that’s all it was. He hoisted himself up for another look.
This time he looked down before turning on his lamp. Sure enough, there was a light down there. It was yellowish and soft, like a good spring day, but far away and small. The forest scent snaked around his face when he leaned in toward the hole, but he barely dared to breathe. He turned on his lamp and ran his fingers along the hole’s edge, felt the kind of precise chisel marks made by mice and the spoon-shaped hollows that must be the beaver’s toothwork.
The hole appeared to go on for some time, well beyond the layer of gravel spread beneath the trailer. He sat next to the open cabinet and thought. The animals had done this, but why? And where was the light coming from?
Drained by the shock and the effort to get a closer look, he fell asleep. He woke to a rustling sound. It was dusk and in the half-light he caught the form of a crow on the countertop near the microwave. The bird had found the remains of his morning’s instant oatmeal. Pecking at the crusted grains, it sent the bowl toppling to the floor. Ashley reached to turn on the ceiling fixture and cursed.
The bowl was upside down, bits of oatmeal making a ring of mess around it.
“Now, how am I going to pick that up? That’s just going to sit there until somebody—”
The bird strutted toward him and tilted its head, as if trying to catch Ashley’s eye.
“What, motherfucker?”
The bird straightened up and blinked.
“Did I offend you?”
It seemed so. The crow didn’t look at him again as it finished its journey to the cabinet, coming within reach of Ashley’s boot. Ashley had half a mind to kick the creature but knew that he’d be risking his back. The crow slid its beak between cabinet door and frame and hopped inside.
Ashley rubbed his face. “I’m talking to birds now, am I?” he said aloud. The evening was getting on. He could have one more painkiller before bed, forget the crow, sleep solidly through the night. He swiped the pill container from the counter and back down again in one motion. He was beginning to wonder if the meds were part of the problem. He knew he wasn’t imagining the invasion—there were paw prints across his floor, for god’s sake—but the sense he had that the animals were speaking to him directly, that wasn’t right. Was it?
He left the bottle and went for a beer from the fridge instead. He drank it sitting in his recliner and waited for sleep, certain that more animals would appear once it was fully dark.
He was right. A half dozen foxes showed up around 10, gleaming red in the lamplight. Then seven turtles of various shapes and sizes. An entire colony of wasps. A barn owl and a screech owl, arriving separately. Two tiger salamanders, followed by three brown pelicans, their pouchy bills sloshing with water and small fish.
At the darkest part of the night, when a group of badgers nosed their way through the window, their claws cutting into the wallpaper, he began to rethink not calling someone. If he called Dakota, he could come with a board and close up the hole inside the cabinet, just like he did with the wrens.
The memory of the wrens turned his stomach. It was late, anyway, probably two in the morning, and the damage was already done. As long as they didn’t break anything else, what difference did a few hours make?
He called Dakota around 7, although he knew he’d be getting ready for work.
“Hey, it’s Ashley. Yeah, I need some help over here.”
“What’s up? I’m heading out in a few.”
“I know. It’s just that something broke my window and I could use your help to board it up.”
“Now?” His voice was tight with complaint. “I mean …”
“Forget about it. I know you got to get to work.”
“You sure? It’s probably those damn kids in that brown trailer on the lower landing. Those little fuckers are always breaking shit.”
“Yeah, maybe I’ll ask their dad to come up and help. You take it easy, man.”
Ashley hung up and considered his situation. The carpet, muddy with animal prints, sparkled with broken glass. He could ask Carolyn to come and vacuum up the debris, but then he would have to explain the animal tracks. He should have said something to her and Dakota right away when that squirrel busted in. Maybe then it would seem less weird now, him letting all these animals just march into the house.
The May weather was mild enough. If he pulled the curtain across the opening, he would at least be spared some bugs getting in and he wouldn’t have to look at the damage. And that would have to do until Dakota got home—if he was even willing to help after a long day.
Around lunchtime it occurred to him that if those animals could go into his cabinet they might, at any moment, all come back out. He hesitated to go to the kitchen to get lunch, but his hunger got the better of him. He decided on ramen, made in the microwave, because it would get him out of there the fastest.
He took a little nap in the recliner after lunch and woke to bright afternoon light pressing through the red curtains covering the glassless window. As he sat there, adjusting to the feelings of being awake, he shivered. The oatmeal bowl, which the crow had knocked mouth-down onto the floor, was right-side-up.
Ashley’s body didn’t want to hoist up from that chair but his mind sure did. He flipped the lever to drop the footrest and held himself still while the waves of pain and vertigo settled down. As soon as he could manage, he stood and hurried over to the bowl.
Not only was the bowl upright, it now contained three small stones. River rocks, from the looks of them, smooth and round and blue-gray.
Ashley popped one of the painkillers and drank an orange juice while he waited for it to kick in, all the time staring at the bowl. When he felt the trademark cascade of looseness roll down his back, he breathed a deep sigh and bent to pick up the bowl. He rinsed the stones under the kitchen tap and put them, wet, into the pocket of his sweatpants.
Except for PT appointments, he had hardly ventured outside his trailer in weeks, but he made the short trip around to Mrs. Rudrüd’s place while the drugs were still tricking him into feeling OK.
“Can I borrow that bird book?” he asked.
Mrs. Rudrüd smiled. “Of course. Come on in while I look for it.”
Ashley stifled a groan. Mrs. Rudrüd was a master at turning a quick, neighborly request into an hour-and-a-half social call.
He sat on her velvet floral couch while she rummaged through her bookshelves.
“What bird are you interested in? Wrens? It’s a shame about those babies.” He noted the kindness of her delivering this comment while her back was turned, a kindness he knew he didn’t deserve.
“No, not wrens. Do you know anything about crows?”
“Right where I left it.” She found the bird guide and brought it to him. “I can tell you more than is in that book. There was a special on the other night, a show about a girl—I don’t remember where they said, New Jersey or one of those places—and she had a pet crow.” Mrs. Rudrüd screwed up her eyes. “No, ‘pet’ isn’t the right word. But anyway, this crow, she had been leaving it peanuts on a tray every day for about a month when the crow started to bring her little doodads, trinkets and such.”
“Doodads?”
“Like beads. And an earring someone lost. Links from a chain, some pieces of colored glass. Legos. And the crow would always put it on the tray, just so. And she’s not the only one. Other people get presents, too.”
“What about rocks?”
Mrs. Rudrüd shook her head. “They didn’t mention rocks.”
“Did they say why they leave things for people?”
“Well, to thank them, I guess. Or, I don’t know, maybe they think we eat that stuff. But they’re smart, those crows. Did you know they can count?”
“I should go,” Ashley said. “I should get back to my place before the drugs wear off. Thanks.”
He took the book with him because it would be weird not to after asking for it, but he didn’t think it was going to tell him anything important.
Back at home, he took the stones out of his pocket before settling into the recliner. He let them rattle around in his palm, then held each one out to examine it. Nothing special about them. Besides being delivered to him by a bird, that is.
He clicked the TV on, since he did his best thinking with some background noise going. He paused on the baseball game but kept on until he found something mindless: a nature program.
Why would the crow bring him a present? The show Mrs. Rudrüd watched made it sound like it was a quid pro quo kind of thing. What had he done for the crow? Let him eat a few bits of leftover oatmeal?
His line of questioning was interrupted by a terrible noise from the television. The program’s narrator said it was the howl of an exhausted polar bear calling her two cubs, urging them on across melting ice. Ashley watched for a moment but didn’t want to see the babies fall into the water. He turned the TV off.
That’s when the deer arrived. Five of them, a doe, a buck, and three fawns. The doe came first, her narrow head pushing through the curtain before her leap into the room, then the fawns. The buck came through last, a 10-pointer. His antlers caught on the curtain and pulled down the thin rod, cracking it in half. He tossed his head back and forth until his antlers were free of the fabric.
The animals stood blinking at him long enough that Ashley stood up, as if for guests. It was the first time anything larger than a woodpecker had arrived during daylight hours. His heart thumped in his chest.
The buck stepped between Ashley and the young ones.
Ashley held up his hand. “Hey, I’m not going to hurt them.” He felt behind him for the chair and sat.
The doe and fawns made for the cabinet, crouching to fit inside. The buck waited until they disappeared to sniff around the frame. He turned to face the living room and Ashley worried that he was going to charge. Instead, the deer gave a decisive kick that split the cheap countertop in two, collapsing it and sending the coffeemaker and a pile of dirty dishes into the gap. Then he jumped in as well.
From his chair, Ashley felt a breeze rush up from the hole, and with it a scent of the woods. Shaking, he walked toward the wreck of the cabinets and looked in.
He had a wider view now, thanks to the deer’s destruction. He was high above another world—or maybe a second layer of this one—but how far up, he couldn’t tell. Three thousand feet? Four thousand? Below him was an enormous plain bordered by tall trees. A river wound across it and animals moved along the banks. If the deer were down there, they were mere specks from this height.
He braced himself on the edge of the sink and leaned over as far as he could. He didn’t see any kind of ramp or ladder or anything. How were the animals reaching the ground?
It was a beautiful day underneath the cabinet, peaceful and fresh-looking. The eagles were making graceful circles in the sky underground. He had an irrational urge to let himself fall in. The animals had jumped and landed safely somehow—he knew they had—and he probably could, too.
His half-formed plan was interrupted by the doorbell. No doubt Mrs. Rudrüd had noticed his latest visitors.
She stood on his little stoop, grinding her hands together, the white hair piled on top of her head trembling.
“Ashley.” Her expression—eyes shiny and wide, mouth taut—was the face of someone waiting in line for a turn on a terrifying rollercoaster. “The deer.”
Ashley opened the door wide to let her in.
“I’m not going in there.” She shook her head vigorously until she realized Ashley wasn’t going to argue with her. “Am I?”
“Suit yourself.” He let go of the door and turned to walk away. She followed.
He had to admit he was relieved to have company. At least if someone else saw the animals, he could quiet the nagging feeling that he was going crazy.
“I saw a bunch of deer come in here. Right through your window.” She looked around, her arms crossed. “They’re not still in here are they?”
“Well, yes and no.” He pointed to the shattered cabinetry next to the sink. “They’re in there.”
“What are they doing in there?”
“Take a look.”
He pulled his old hunting binoculars off his knickknack shelf and handed them to her.
“Come with me, Ashley.” She linked her arm through his and they inched toward the kitchen.
“Look down there,” he said, lifting the binoculars to her eyes.
At first all she said was, “Oh!” and, “What in the world?” Then, after a few minutes, “It’s beautiful. What is it?”
He led her to a kitchen chair, where she sprawled as if boneless, shaking her head in amazement.
“I don’t know what it is. Another world, I guess. Or another level of this one? Or something.”
“You got any whisky?”
“Brandy, maybe.”
“It’ll do.”
He brought her a shot and placed the bottle on the table. She drank it down, poured herself another one, and returned to the edge of the hole.
“What are you going to do about it?” She wiped her mouth. “Are you going down there?”
“No, of course I’m not going down there.” He wondered now if she had seen him getting ready to climb into the hole earlier, as she waited for him to answer the door.
“Huh.” She sat back down. She sounded a little disappointed in him. “Do you think there’ll be more?”
Before Ashley could speculate, a plump gray cat leapt through the window into the living room. Six more followed: an orange tortoise shell, two Siamese, a couple calicos, and a black one with a white chest.
“Watch,” he said, nodding toward the cabinet.
One by one, the cats passed by the kitchen table warily and jumped into the hole.
Mrs. Rudrüd said, “I’ll be damned.” She scurried back to the hole. “I don’t see them. They’re not floating their way down there or anything.” She leaned over. “Is there a stairs or ... oh!”
Ashley pulled her away just as she was about to fall in. A lick of pain shot up his lower back.
“I don’t know how they get down there,” he snapped. “What I do know is, I don’t want to be responsible for you falling down after them.” He got one of his pills and washed it down with brandy straight from the bottle. “Now if you’re going to stay here and watch, sit at a safe distance.”
They sat for hours, Ashley standing every once in a while to stretch and get them soda or a snack. Mrs. Rudrüd only got up to use the bathroom, coming back each time in a rush asking, “Did I miss anything?”
A swarm of bees and a mass of centipedes made them both shudder, but that was only the beginning of the deluge of insect life. A sheet of mayflies flew in and covered the refrigerator, their wings pulsing, until their scouts discovered the way to the hole. A conga line of daddy longlegs was followed by a squirming procession of ticks, earwigs, and beetles.
“I liked the cats,” said Mrs. Rudrüd, after the last beetle dropped out of sight. “There should be more cats.”
Within minutes, a pair of bobcats and a Canada lynx obliged.
“That’s not what I meant,” she said, when they were able to breathe again.
“It’s just a coincidence.”
“Well, I won’t do that again anyway. I’m just going to sit here and take it as it comes.”
They sat stock still when the skunk arrived, until its striped tail dropped below the edge of the hole. A set of minks slipped in so quietly, Ashley and Mrs. Rudrüd didn’t notice them until they were under their chairs. Next came a few porcupines, another beaver—this one with two babies in its wake—and a mixed flock of songbirds.
“Songbirds! At night?” Mrs. Rudrüd announced each kind with excitement: chickadee, cardinal, warbler, nuthatch, titmouse, goldfinch, and finally, breathlessly, the scarlet tanager and the indigo bunting.
“How lucky are we? They were that close.” She glowed, holding her fingers an inch apart. Then her expression darkened. “Wait. They’re not all going to go down there. All the birds?” She looked up into his face. “Right?”
He shrugged. It was four in the morning. He was getting tired of company, tired of the questions. Mrs. Rudrüd looked wrung out as well, in spite of sitting on the edge of her seat half the time, her hands on her knees like an eager child in school.
“I think I’m going to head to bed, Mrs. Rudrüd.”
She looked relieved, herself. “Alright. But you need to let me know tomorrow what else shows up.”
He saw her to the door and turned on the porch light.
On the threshold she turned back around. “You don’t think it’s the climate thingy, do you? The animals”—she gestured toward the kitchen—“do you think they know something we don’t?”
Her eyes were wide again, and sad.
“People can’t change a whole planet,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, “I suppose that’s ridiculous.” She descended the steps. “Goodnight, Ashley. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” From the darkness, she called out, “They say on TV it’s a hoax the Chinese are playing on us, you know.” She waved her hand and disappeared around the corner of his trailer.
He watched from his window until he saw her go into her place, then returned to his chair in the kitchen. Why were the animals leaving? It wasn’t the climate thing, but something big must be happening to make them act so strange.
He remembered one time when he was a kid out on the farm in Middle Ridge, his dad getting up in the night to shoot a raccoon stumbling around on their front porch. Rabid, his dad had said, but Ashley didn’t believe it. The animal looked harmless, even as its paws twitched with the onset of death. Years later Ashley learned that sometimes raccoons get drunk on wild grapes fermenting on the vine. Maybe they had just been misjudging nature—what it was doing and what it could withstand—all this time.
Although the wooden kitchen chair was hard and his legs were getting numb, Ashley couldn’t seem to make himself go to bed. He drank brandy and turned and turned the questions over in his mind. Around daybreak, he decided that the only way to find out would be to go himself.
Getting to the floor was not easy. He got splinters in the side of his hand as he used the edges of the broken cabinet to lower himself. He swiveled on the linoleum until his right leg was on the edge of the hole. Only then did it occur to him that if the hole had been widened by the violence of the deer, the floor beneath him might be weaker now, too. Maybe it would give way under his weight, in which case, his choice was already made for him. The thought horrified and thrilled him.
As Ashley let his leg drop over the edge, an enormous raccoon flew out, knocking him onto his side. It chittered at him, pulling his hair with its hands.
“Ow. What—why are you—” He tried to protect his head but the animal had a tight grip. It was clear that the raccoon was pulling in one direction: away from the hole.
“OK, OK.” He sat up and this seemed to assuage the creature.
The raccoon growled once, showing its teeth, then dropped back down the hole.
Ashley pushed himself back from the edge, scraping across the floor to the kitchen table. He hauled himself into a chair and studied the wreck of his house: the torn curtain and shattered window, the filthy carpet, his demolished kitchen counter. The air was ripe with deer musk and the spray of wild cats. The sink, supported now only by a thin sheet of plywood, was leaning toward the hole. It was going to cost him a pretty penny to put things right.
It occurred to him then that he wouldn’t fix it—he wouldn’t close up the hole. The animals had chosen him, his trailer, for their doorway for some reason, but he didn’t need to understand the reason in order to respect it.
He felt a sense of duty stir in his chest and a rightness in this decision that he rarely experienced. He tried to recall another moment like it. Maybe the time he told the other guys at work to stop picking on Elias, who everybody called faggot behind the kid’s back. Or the time he turned in a wad of bills he found outside the grocery store, even though he had half a mind to keep it. There was a solidness about those moments, moments when his feet were truly planted on the ground.
His thoughts were broken by a sound from the hole. The raccoon was reemerging, pushing something in front of it. It was the carafe from his coffeemaker, unbroken in spite of what must have been quite a fall. It was dirty, slathered in mud, yet he reached for it once the animal quit nudging it across the floor.
He wiped away some of the mud from the glass with his sleeve then popped open the lid. Inside was a terrarium of sorts, like he made once in 4th grade. At the bottom was a layer of smooth stones like the ones the crow had brought, topped by dark dirt, then moss and a few small plants. A tiny, translucent spider was working up a web across the tops of the seedlings, an egg sac stuck to her back.
There was a pause in which the raccoon seemed to be considering the spider. The animal reached for the carafe but Ashley pulled it close to his chest and shut the lid.
“She can stay here,” Ashley said. “I’ll show her where you are if she wants to follow you.”
It’s not that the raccoon understood his words. It couldn’t be that. But the creature did seem almost to nod at him before turning and dropping back down through the hole.
Fire & Water: Stories from the Athropocene is also available for purchase on Bookshop.org
