Dead Things | Erin Schallmoser

It starts as a benign hobby. You tuck pebbles into your pockets, hold onto the abandoned hats of acorns, caress the outlines of fallen leaves. One day you find the crushed skeleton of a sparrow. You scoop it up, clutch it to your chest the whole way home, imagining/hoping that the rhythm of your heartbeat will somehow kickstart the bird’s, as well as unbend the damaged rib bones, unbreak the jaw, repopulate the ravaged wings. Once home, you slide the still dead bird into a shoebox and hide it under the basement stairs. 

Next, you find a snakeskin. It’s a spiral of honeycombed lace, waiting intently for something to happen to it once more. You look around, maybe to find the living creature that left the skin behind. You don’t know what you would do, were you to actually come across a live snake. There are things you want to change, but know you can’t, and so remnants of the natural world make you feel whole again. You fold the pearly white snakeskin gently into the canvas tote bag you’ve taken to carrying on your shoulder, for such times as this. 

You almost miss the mouse because most of it has been peeled away by whatever killed it in the first place. The tail is what you end up seeing, left intact due to its undesirable amount of meat. It leads up to the mangled body, twisted and gnawed on, a few whiskers left alone. You use a plastic bag to collect it, in a similar fashion that someone else might gather their beloved dog’s fresh shit. 

There are more birds, a squirrel, a flattened oozing slug, a cricket with shattered legs innards spilling out. You don’t think of it as collecting dead things, but rather as restoring dignity to what was once alive. People press flower petals in between book pages, and pin butterfly wings to bulletin boards, so what could be so wrong about what you do? Not much, you tell yourself, as the stack of shoeboxes rise. 

The wolf carcass brings you pause. You didn’t even know there were wolves nearby, and you know even less about what might kill a wolf and leave it whole, in plain sight. But you don’t think it’s strange that you keep finding the dead things, because you believe that a person finds what is person is looking for, and that’s that. You cover the carcass with leaves and twigs, hiding it from any passersby, though they are rare on this trail, especially during the rainy winter mornings. 

You go purchase a plastic tub from the hardware store, along with a bright purple sled. You come back. The wolf’s body is still warm to the touch, a stagnant mass, a mountain. You go into a deep squat, sliding your arms under its body. Its fur is coarse and brittle and pricks the skin of your bare hands. A spicy musk fills your nostrils as you lean in closer to the wolf. Steam rises from near its snout, but you believe it’s just your own breath. 

You tell yourself a story, one to get the adrenaline pumping. You imagine someone hunting you, chasing you, and that is how you manage to heave the wolf off the ground, just a few feet, just enough to dump it in the plastic tub. You drag the tub onto the bright purple sled, and then haul the sled down the hiking trail, back to your parked car. 

Hours later, the plastic tub securely positioned under the basement stairs, you wake from sleep to sit straight up in your bed, panting. Your shoulders and back are sore from your recent labors. It’s the witching hour and out your window you can see a crescent moon strung in the inky cloudless sky. You remember holding the wolf. How there was a whomping rhythm in its body, an earnest desire, something still sojourning on. Had you been too quick to label it a dead thing? What woke you, anyway? Was it the sound of your own heartbeat (a useless thing that you believed couldn’t bring the dead back to life)? Was it a wild rummaging, a scratching, a pawing? Was it a howl? 

Erin Schallmoser’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, Litro, The Hunger, (mac)ro(mic), and Second Chance Lit. She lives in Bellingham, WA, and if she’s not reading or writing, she’s probably listening to a podcast or delighting in moss, slugs, stones, wildflowers, or small birds. She is still figuring out Twitter @dialogofadream. You can read more at https://www.erinschallmoser.com/.