Small Predators, page 8
“Jesus, Fox, what the fuck.” Badger sprints toward me. I’m slouched sleepily against the pedestal in the field that is soon to be a suburb.
“What?” I mutter back.
He crouches down in front of me and wipes the sleeve of his coat over my face. Scratchy. He pulls the sleeve away and it is covered in rusty blood.
“Oh, shit, right.” It occurs to me that I’ve walked two hours through the suburbs with blood running out of my mouth, smeared over my forehead, soaking my shirt, staining my sneakers. Badger pulls water from his bag and hands it to me. I pour it over my face and wipe my face on my bloody shirt.
“I went to see Mink,” I say, handing the bottle back.
“Do you consider that explaining yourself? You’ve made it way worse. Take off your shirt.”
I take off my shirt and put on Badger’s coat and he wets the blood-free back half of my shirt and uses it to wipe my face and then we sit down in the dead grass and he looks at me and I snicker and he scowls and that makes me really laugh and then we both laugh until our lungs hurt and we’re tipping over and it’s really not a great way to handle the situation but what are we supposed to say.
When we’ve caught our breath, Badger asks, “So, you finally went?”
I look away from Badger and up at the sky. “I like being here. It’s so open and vulnerable.”
Badger looks at me quietly, brow furrowed. From across the field, across the highway, I see Lynx walking toward us with Raven and Heron.
“I think I fucked up.”
“What’d you do?”
“I told Mink she’s an asshole.”
Badger laughs. “Did it help?”
“I dunno. We’ll see, I guess. Do you think a person can be angry and forgiving at the same time?”
“Sure. You don’t have to feel a certain way about the truth, you just have to accept it as the truth. That’s forgiveness.”
He pulls a small carving from his pocket and hands it to me. It’s a little sparrow. He’s sanded it smooth and varnished it too. It has this perfect, chemically processed wood smell. I smile at Badger and put it in my pocket. We settle down in the dirt with our backs to the pedestal. The horizon is suspended in ineffable dark, the same dark brimming between my shivering atoms.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Foremost I’d like to thank ARP for taking a chance on a book so thoroughly preoccupied with scat. I have been blessed by the thoughtful editing and artistic mentorship of Irene Bindi, Todd Besant, Kathleen Olmstead, and Chandra Mayor. Thank you to Kenneth Lavallee for the exquisite cover art—I am in awe. I owe the early musings that became this story to the works of theorists Timothy Morton and Sianne Ngai, and extend deep gratitude to them for their ideas. To my thesis committee, George Toles, Hee-Jung Serenity Joo, and David Camfield, for their guidance on the early drafts of this work: thank you, thank you, thank you! And thanks to the Manitoba Arts Council for their generous contribution to this project.
I am deeply grateful for the love and support of my family, particularly my mother, brother, and sister; my good friends, Allison and Rachel, for investing love and labour in me; and my partner, Steven, for his gentle and patient care. My love, as well, to the beautiful people with whom I’ve studied and procrastinated, with particular thanks to Katelyn Dykstra Dykerman, Niall Harney, and Ashley Penner; and to Ana Vialard Hart, for giving me the flood. To the activists I’ve worked with at the University of Manitoba, you cannot know the myriad ways in which you’ve saved my life. I am grateful for it all—our love, our labour, and our conflict.
And for teaching me so much and calling me on my shit, forever, forever, my heart to my first loves: Bilan Arte, Seran Gee, and the Free Radicals.
JENNIFER ILSE BLACK is a third-generation Hungarian settler living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, traditional lands of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene Peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation. She has her B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Manitoba, and was a student at the Cartae Open School 2016-17, where she studied healing and meaning-making through the ritual and labour of textile artistry.
Black is a queer woman, a femme, an artist, a writer, a witch, and an activist. She can’t tell if she’s a communist or an anarchist but thinks the distinction probably doesn’t matter. Her spiritual practice is forgiveness and she takes her coffee black.
Jennifer Ilse Black, Small Predators
