Nature Cam / Trophy
by Luke Larkin
Nature Cam
While watching a livestream of a bear paw at salmon in a river it occurs to me that nothing ends anymore. This time last year I watched the same bear in the same river. Next year I may watch a different bear, but I won't be able to tell the difference. If a bear falls in the forest and I'm not tuned in to see, does it only transmute into another bear? My mom has been reading the same crime novel for four years. The cover changes, but a woman is always murdered, then her body repurposed for the next go-around. I ask Mom if this is just something that happens when you get older, that things don't stop happening. "It's always happened this way," she says, and witnesses another murder. A bear dips her nose into a river and retrieves a body by its nape. A bear dips its paw into a river and swats out a salmon. That night, both the body and the salmon are on the news. The bear is not a suspect, but the salmon has been questioned. The bear is on livestream while a news anchor explains the correlation between depleted salmon populations and bodies in rivers. A reporter wades into the river to interview the bear. Without looking up from the water, the bear says, "Nothing ends anymore," and the salmon in her mouth adds, "Nothing ever has." The reporter is underwater. The reporter is a mile downstream. The camera did not catch his fall.
Trophy
In the small hours of the night I find myself wanting a gun, though I don't hunt and I'm not particularly concerned for my safety, but let's not worry about that second bit. It's only that I'd like to acquaint myself with something like a mortal punctuation mark. I'd like to aim down sights and contemplate ending a goddamn sentence for once, the plot lost long ago between two antlers, rattling around in a skull like the ball-bearing clapper of a bell that'll shatter its calcified dome and ring clear like the telephone my father answers when I call to not tell him anything more about me than what he already knows and also that I think I want a gun. "That's good," he says. I think of riding high on his shoulders back when he knew all there was to know. "You should carry." And the buck agrees, while I aim. "You should carry," it says. "Carry and weigh me against a feather." The buck is lighter. I am heavier than the buck. The feather is heavier than the bell. I fire. It rings. "Sorry," I say, and mean it. "Confession is a weighty thing," the buck says, as I tag him. “And lighter than you can imagine.” I cannot tell if he means it, but still I hoist him onto my shoulders. Still I carry him. But please remember that I don't hunt. It’s just that I want a gun, sometimes, to hold myself. To add weight.
Luke Larkin is an MFA candidate at the University of Montana. His work has appeared in HAD, Popshot, Firewords, Barren Magazine, and others. He also lends a hand to the publications CutBank, Unstamatic, and Visual Verse.
