Emmie Writes

I smell weed.

Earthy and green and damp. Damp as sweat on skin, underneath armpits, collecting on an upper lip, slipping down groin and onto the damp earth.

Sweet. Humans always smelled a little sweet. I didn’t smell humans too often, and when I did they were always sweating.

I am always sweating. My fur used to catch it. What’s left of it hangs matted like fleshy piebald on my legs, all the way up to my chest.

I itch.

I stink.

I’m about to move on when I hear them. The humans, two of them.

I can smell the difference much clearer once I draw closer. One is more… metallic. A hum of something else other than weed is dancing in his blood.

I scent it, and it fills my maw with the memory of Blood.

One of them is bleeding.

Not a lot. A scratch. A thumb that got tangled with the barb of a fishhook. The metallic man. I smell his clumsiness.

The other, he is bigger, he throws off more smell.

He started the fire.

I can scent the flint in his pocket, the residue left in his hand that dilutes from condensation off of his beer bottle.

I see them now.

Through the saw palmetto I see the men, hunched next to a fire with their arms bare. They are passing the weed between them, a joint. Small. Barely lit, but its smoke joins the smoke from the fire and creates thunder in my nose.

Their voices are loud, but not booming. Not booming like mine used to be. My voice carried me miles over sawgrass, through mangrove roots and with the ash of sugar cane.

I itch.

My claw snags a tender piece of flesh, pulling more hair out of my blistered skin and I groan. The men grow still when they hear me. They are pale, like two smudges of white in the darkness.

The men I often see are brown. Brown like the Earth.

Brown like clay, and like brackish water, and when they speak it sounds like rain. The men I often see do not see me but I know they speak of me.

There are other men who are quiet. Quiet boats, quiet steps. Small packages wrapped in cellophane that carry the smell of weed. Sometimes that smell of metal.

Square groupers, they call them. They’ve left enough of them tangled in the mangroves, I will always know what they smell like.

The land will always know.

One laughs, shaking his shaggy head and stamping the glowing ember of the joint into the ground. Dark blond, I see his legs and they are covered in hair bleached white by the sun. My skin cracks under the sun, my hair doesn’t turn pale. It peels off of my body in strips like bark.

I am sick. Sick in a way I don’t know can be healed.

I used to walk on two feet. The glades trembled and waved before my visage. I ate bass and redfish, mussels and snails, saw palmetto berries and the aphids that cling to leaf and stick.

My language was not groans and moans as I itch myself on whatever tree I can find.

I think of cracking their skulls. I wonder if I could find the same pleasure that I used to, cracking through the shell of a turtle to find glistening pink sweetness inside.

I growl.

I itch.

I stink.

The men go silent once more and I feel the familiar sensation, the humming through the air that turns it shimmering. The feeling of a hot night gone cold. Fear. These men fear me. In the firelight, they must see me. I shake my massive head, open my sore maw, and they scream.

They scramble.

Rushing, they lurch forward on hand and knees and I smell fresh blood, hands and knees scraped on kudzu and thorn. The beer bottle is tipped over and it glugs lazily into the earth. I feel the lust of hunt, the loveliness of being a predator to prey, but then my skin feels like it is on fire again and I stop.

I itch.

I grunt.

I am miles away before they come back. I am never not moving now. But I smell them.

I smell their fear on the wind and I catch it in what’s left of my fur, and one day I’ll leave it behind in sticky, dead, black asphalt. One day I will see lights and they will not be painful to bear and I will not groan or itch or stink. I will not feel millions of feet crawling over my body and into my skin, chewing me and making me burn.

One day, the land will remember me. And it will bring me home.