Talking Tree Photo
The wild cannot be tamed neither the rednecks in it.
She saw a bloated dead beastie with boots on and said out loud “humans, we are weird”. She wanted to think that anyone would find this weird. When she told folk that she just didn’t like the flavour of meat, they told her she was being silly, it would be different if she tasted their barbecue. Maybe how it felt to be a lesbian being told you just hadn’t met the right guy. She was small, she had a desk job and an easy life, meat made her feel heavy inside. She looked at the boots, did they all four match?
In Spain there was some place with cobbled streets where folks ran with bulls and got all crazy, drunk, medieval, then did bullfighting with capes and spears. A bit like a rodeo only it was more dramatically about death. Her cousin who went to some big college in New England told about frat boys who got a cow up to the roof of a building and pushed it off. She had always thought that story was one of those urban myths. College people were too cosseted about animals to have dumb ideas like that running through them. City people paid their veterinarians a fortune to keep a sick dog alive. She’d been gone a long time, perhaps without realizing she’d become one of the city people.
The smell was rank, but all around the desert was as it had always been. She had found a kildeer nest nearby when she was a kid, and now she had found a bloated dead beastie wearing mens boots. ‘We are weird” she said again, as if she needed to be certain the dead beastie had heard her.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, Rachel Irving and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
