Alina Kroll
I Am Woman, Not Coyote
I am woman, not coyote, although I am sometimes mistaken for one. “Animal eyes,” a gas station cashier mutters, and I know he means I am wild and dark, shifty and untrustworthy. He should not be worried about his ability to trust me. It’s him I must worry about. I grab a jar of peanut butter from the shelf and dip my fingers into it while he stares. As I walk out, I hear him shouting after me.
My two-day-old shoes take me walking tiptoe sidestep down a cobbled road. It is too much of an effort to walk in a straight line. Forget correctness. Let me crawl sideways, let my hands and knees scrape the ground. My purse will hang from my neck or not at all.
I creep my way down a street lit with flickering lights. Pale yellow light to almost black and back to yellow again. Light, darkness, light. Cars every so often, red and black and white and blue. I can see them when my eyes are open. Sometimes they are closed, but I can still see.
Upright, I waltz down the freshly polished aisle of a grocery store, spinning in the circles of a mop’s dew. I forget to look the cashier in the face while paying. A day-old turkey sandwich—discounted! 25% off!—and a soda cost $9.50 here. Fuck. My hand bends backwards, and fingers pry open a half-healed sore on my back. I never let things heal. I can’t help but to open them again and again.
Then I am outside in the flickering lights again and I remember how my father taught me to dance. Not by placing my feet atop his like in the movies, but by grasping my legs, pushing my feet into the correct positions. Music blared in the background. The tap-tap-stomp of our feet on a tiled floor. By the end, both of us panting for breath. It was several weeks and many rings of bruises circling my ankles before I could dance. My feet blaze with pain from walking all day. I massage them carefully with scented oil. I would never be as rough on myself as he was.
My father’s inheritance runs low now, and I must search for work. Instead, I find myself gurgling in the water of a park fountain. It is a fountain for birds, but they do not mind sharing. I am spitting water at an unsuspecting pigeon, getting some feathers wet. I am laughing.
My boss needs me to count money, but I do not. Which one is worth five cents and which one is worth ten has always confused me. Do I count up to 100 or down from it? What is 87 minus 29? And why am I expected to know?
I spend an afternoon counting. Five pennies is five cents, five nickels is twenty five cents, five dimes is fifty cents, five quarters is one hundred and twenty five cents. When I can count them all without pausing, I move up to sixes.
Work is at 9, so I get ready at 6 and leave at 7. Enough time to wash the grease from my hair, braid it, and sweep color over my cheeks and eyelids. Enough time to walk slowly if I want to. Sunlight hits the river running along my path, and the water glints a million times over. The sun can make anything look shiny if it wants to. Waves of course, but also silver candy wrappers, coins, soda cans. Even the cigarette butts are illuminated. White faded to gray. Orange filters dug deep into damp gravel.
My head becomes cluttered with images of customers after I begin to work: their eyes open or squinted, the way their lips pull up halfway at my walk, the look some of the men get when I smile. I had just started smiling again, but I learn to stop.
It is fall then winter before I take a breath. I am a new age once again. Oh, a birthday. Oh, yes, I do exist now, and I have existed for all of my years.
The next four months are nothing particularly interesting, and I cannot remember them except when I am not trying to. Memories come back to me in flashes: how I once dropped my purse while crawling home from work. The way everything fluttered out. Receipts drowning in puddles, three red pills of ibuprofen bouncing on the pavement, my keys clattering.
I remember now I went on a first date, the first in many years. He held the door open and we ate great bowls of noodles in spicy broth. I remember laughing. But later, he pressed his lips to mine without warning, and I forgot how to breathe, my hands clenched and unmoving by my sides. He pulled back, and I ran without warning. The prickly feeling of his beard still lingers, and I scratch at my skin until it dissipates.
I drive a car for the first time in April. I buy my own in July. Driving is different from crawling or walking, smoother, less animal. If only the gas station worker could see me now. Teeth white and shiny, red nails tapping my thigh as I drive one-handed. I turn up the music and open the windows, and my hair whips my face.
There’s almost no coyote left in me until: a flash of brown, a thunk, and a smear of red against black. The car stalls or maybe I stop it. My throat closes at the sight of a housecat dead by my hands. I squat and inhale the warmth of her body, the sharpness of her blood. Too slow to react, too slow to stop. She is a mess of blood and fur and bone. I watch as cars race by, 70 in a 55. Hours pass and crimson turns to black by the rhythm of a thousand tires. I close my eyes, but I can feel her dead nose nuzzling into me.
Alina Kroll is an Oregon-based writer and editor. She is a recent graduate from Oregon State University, where she studied creative writing and English. Her works are typically defined by deeply introspective narrators who are drawn towards the morbid and unsettling circumstances that surround their lives. Alina is particularly interested in making atypical experiences feel familiar by creating characters who, although strange, feel entirely vivid and tangible. Her published poetry and prose can be found in Eunoia Review, Deep Overstock, Prism, and KBVR’s Lyrical Lounge.