Dawn in the arid zone, color scale gray to amber, everything looks like something else. A boulder is a mountain lion. A rock is a rabbit. A shadow is the tunnel to the underworld. A stump may be Demeter herself, turning the earth to stone.
A couple feet away, a rock moved. I stopped. The rock breathed. My eyes adjusted. It was one of the million rabbits out here, the coyote kibble that hops. But something was off about this one in a million.
Its front leg stuck out from its body, parallel to the ground. It had no fur, it was perfectly smooth, and its end was rounded like a dead branch sculpted by wind. It looked like a conductor frozen before the fanfare, or a batter squared around to bunt.
Had the poor thing survived a scrape or was it dying right now? My impulse was to help it, to choose this one that had chanced across my path and provoked my pity.
Of course I would have done more harm than good, and it wouldn’t have let me anyway, unless it was too far gone to resist.
It was watching me as I watched it. I stepped to the left, it moved to the right. It took a breath, then bolted across the path and into the shrub, the shrub that bears its name: rabbitbrush. Ericameria bloomeri.
It was lithe and agile. It carried that anomaly, that burden, that consequence of a crush or a bite from a bigger beast, with the dignity of one without resentment or sorrow. Laden with what the other lacked, and limited by a brain a fathom farther from the ground, I cheered it.
Maybe it had made a weapon of its wound. Maybe in a moment, when the man is gone and the hungry comes hunting, it sticks its stump out from the brush and feels something like delight as the coyote sees nothing but rock and twig and passes by.
If you liked this, you might like some longer-form pieces like ‘70s Marriage, ‘80s Divorce: a Musical Breakdown, or The Great Anti-LA Country Song.
The myth of Demeter and Persephone is retold as a myth of Hera and Proserpina in this wonderful song by Martha Wainwright, written by her mother, the late great Kate McGarrigle.
California Plein Air Painting 2 by Greg Newbold
