The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals Read Online Free

that held us together as humans, but when you separated yourself from animals you separated yourself also from your own skin, and forgot what it was you, as a person, were supposed to do, or be. You made a fake face or gassed your young and instead of spelling stories you spread silence, which was
outside the alphabet.
I cannot say much more than this. All around me in those woods were alphabets, from the croaking of the frogs to the high hummings of the dragonflies to the callings of coyotes, as night neared, and the pond water darkened, and reflected back to me the stone in the sky.
    July crept on, the whole earth, it seemed, baking in the heavy heat, and the animals of the forest grew drowsy, snakes sunning themselves on rotted logs. I found snake skins on the ground, amazed by their intricate patterns, which I started to sketch in a book I bought with my allowance money. I’d put the sketchbook in my bike basket and bring it down the private way with me and sketch the spiders I saw, the plants I saw, observing how they changed shape when water was near. At home I checked more and more books out of the library, my knowledge deepening even as my answers floated away. At nine, I didn’t mind the floating feeling, and if there is anything I wish I could hang on to from that time it is this: the ability to stay suspended in space, living the liminal, in a place where there was no such thing as stink. I often thought of her holding my shirt, bringing it up to her nose, and then tossing it into the wash the way she did. Animals can attack you but they will never, ever revile you. Only humans can do that.
    As the forest grew around me and inside me, my own home began to fall away. It was as if the walls were coming down, one by one. The crying fights at night turned into screaming, my mother screaming in the hall, her hands clenched.
What is ON you?
she sometimes asked me, prodding at me with her sharply shaped fingernail. She aimed her eye on me much more than on my siblings, who either faded from her view or grew as proportionally precious to her as I was wrong. All wrong. Sometimes she sunk her nails into my skin and I dreamt they went right through me, her hands entering my entrails, pulling them out, string by string. At home, I began to be scared all the time. My older sister whispered to me that my mother was ill and would soon be going to a hospital. What at the age of nine did I know about mental illness and the genetic liability she passed on? I believed I’d found an escape. I had no inkling that over time my mother’s grief would become mine, and that eventually, years hence, I’d lose the capacity for comfort only to find it again, when I was a mother myself.
    I learned partly by book, partly by eyes alone. Snakes with printed skins, their bodies cool to the touch. Deer prints looked like this, coyote prints like that. Down here was the scat of a brown bear. Chipmunks lived in that old stone wall, six of them, shy no matter how softly you sang. Squirrels, however, had harder hearts and would come for an acorn if you sat still enough, day after day after day. Moles ran by, blinded. Wrens sang just so. Starlings were harder to hear but prettier to the ears. I filled the basket of my bike with my sketching notebook and wrinkled raisins and curled cashews taken from the mirrored bar where their liquor bottles were. My mother drank the liquor, pouring a clear scorching liquid over crackling ice, lifting the glass to her lips and tossing it back. Sometimes, then, she sang, the sound not pretty. We listened to her lying in our beds, and then the song would stop and she’d start to talk;
you
, she’d say,
shed in the sheets; you
, she’d say,
put the keys in the hanging closet.
Sometimes my father was there but other times he wasn’t, and she went on anyway, talking to the walls, the window, the world itself, her first finger flexed and pointed, accusingly, at the moon.
    I largely forgot about her in the forest, or