After Personal Rorschach #2 & #3
She is kneeling on the beach. It is brisk and the wind nips at her dress, the hemmed ends snapping like the pedipalps of some insect. Next to her is a five gallon bucket, sitting askew in the wet sand. She thrusts her fingers into the small pebbled stones, the wet grime, the spume obscuring her appendages. She is digging, huffing the sea brine. She is in pursuit of horseshoe crabs.
A man is coming up the beach down along the waterline. He holds a metal detector, long proboscis, angular probe. His labrador splashes in the foam, trailing behind him. They move steadily nearer the woman.
She digs faster. A horseshoe crab unearthed, ancient and unchanged. Its legs clamor, no longer tethered to the ever shifting ocean. She tosses it into the bucket and continues digging, all the while keeping an eye on the man who swings the contraption low in the oceans froth.
[The crab, blue plastic bucket, gills amazed at the air. Carbon, it is the woman who kneels, it is the man who swings, it is the labrador who frolics]
A boy sits in the slivered shade of a ponderosa. Daisy in hand, copper coated BB’s rumbling in a cloth pocket. The talus field yawns before him, quartzite conglomerated granite scree. And below that, a lake.
On the far side, two figures. A young couple, they slide in the muck. They are chasing the toads who escape one by one, plunking into the smooth crystal water.
The boy, attentive eyes, heart fissured in two by heat, by pressure. He flicks a grasshopper on his knee, sends it careening, spiraling into space, down in-between the rocks.
And suddenly a small movement. A pika raises its head from a crevice burrow. It has sensed safety from silence.
The boy now. He takes a slow breath and holds it in his lungs, waiting.
[The pika prepares for prolonged attrition. Thin oxygen of elevation, blue heat of the sky. It gathers grasses nibbled by locusts, navigates worn labyrinths, peeks its head over perilous vantages]
An old man in a faded beach chair. He sits next to the swimming pool in his backyard. The pool is a kidney, made of pink plaster. It is reminiscent of flesh. The man watches everything. The pool. The woods. The chicken coop.
The refraction of light undulates on the bottom of the pool, cascading down like stalactites. A caterpillar is inching along grey concrete, searching for a dollop of green. A bull lows in the distance, it’s noise mixing with the chitter of the chickens.
The man waits for this moment. A red fox, snout a plague doctor mask but bringing death, emerges from some brush. It inches further into the yard, to the edge of the pool. It laps at the ripples. The water surges and splatters off the tongue, a decorative fountain.
The fox, now aware of the man’s observation, looks at him. They sit, knowing of the beating heart within the other, and of the warm chickens roosting for the night.
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Myles Varga is an MFA candidate for fiction at New Mexico State University, where he teaches and serves as the Managing Editor for Puerto Del Sol. He has won first place for the 2024 Kevin Mcilvoy Creative Writing Endowed Fellowship. His work has appeared in Poets for Science and Folded Treasures, a project from Small Packages Press.