Burrow Through Plastic

My chin punches through little clouds of steam that lace into swirls around my neck as I hike up a muddy creek with no breathtaking view. A giving one instead. Offering itself through branches that bend over and tickle the back of your neck. It’s not original, my search for a trail barely shared by others like me, seeking false escape from the city with too-expensive equipment and propane in my pack. But it’s original enough that I’ve been alone since the three hours I started. Six when including the trip down a highway pasted onto the landscape, without fading edges or branching paths. Just a route to a trailhead, violently laid, the true one whirring by at sixty miles per hour.

I stop to rest at a soft angled bank, where the current is thinned to a riffle and the afternoon sun bounces off of glistening limestone. It’s cold, but I’m warm enough to ignore my good sense and take off my shoes, then socks, and let the water run frothed races through my toes. A blurred little submarine blinks past in the shade of a willow tree. It’s a juvenile crayfish, with small delicate claws and a soft sectioned tail that pulls back her body into the silt at my approach. A crayfish in winter is a strange thing to see, though maybe less so than before. I can see the bubbles burp out of the mouth of the tunnel and then I see her small still eyes poking out from her den. How many centuries of morphing, now her predators are gone. All blocked up and confused by instinct that no longer knows what season it is.

César Felipe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

But I know it’s winter, and yet somehow as warm as the day my brother and I caught her Texan cousin on an evening by the creek near our childhood home. A small patch of nature left unscathed inside my suburban block. Saved by zoning laws and regulations I did not understand. The animal was bigger and older than the creeks usual kind, with long pronged feelers and big dumb eyes too stupid to understand that two gods of death not many years older, eyes just as simple and wide, had come bearing heavenly justice. Ordained by the fact that we would one day be men. We kept him in a small plastic pool filled with buckets of water, dumped in algae from the neighbors bird bath, named him Chuck, and watched him swim. It was days later when we remembered again to change his water - let him breath - and found him floating belly up. Eyeballs popped out and flies feeding on his bloating corpse. We buried him next to a headless legoman, shot to pieces with a plastic gun.

She’s crawled out her cove now, and I think - no I know - that she knows me through telepathy of instinct only creatures this small can evolve. She wants vengeance, I’m sure, her claws are now growing, and they’ve tripled in size and stalked eyes snake out too. I’m kneeling in water, shriveled up by the cold — please I’m not here to hurt you I just want to come home. But I blink and she’s gone in a puff of red clay and the water is warmer around me. She know’s I won’t harm her because I’m trapped inside plastic, an invisible hand grips me and I’m choking on carbon. Eating myself with any drug I can find and there’s dust in my nostrils, pressed death in my gut. Maybe one day I’ll bite off my own hand to satiate hunger while those who are smaller feast on my flesh, until we are all faced up floating in a pool of remains.

Burrow through plastic, I tell her, don’t stop; ’til your claws are in shreds and there’s blood in your eyes, as we try to escape what we’ve not evolved to break through. Beautiful tails meant for perfect propulsion, with spades shaped by rock and our species of prey. Cruel things to be given and then plucked out and tossed in, to the corner-less plastic enclosure we’ve made.