| |
A helmet in a war zone, the turtle straddles the yellow line, the narrow safe center of the dangerous world into which it has scrabbled, amphibious detail invading from the pond’s black depths the flat black surface of impenetrable tar. Submersion is impossible no matter how it wills itself to disappear beneath the mapped globe of its own back.
Where could it possibly be going? As my mother used to say when a squirrel dashed out right in front of the screaming tires, “Why doesn’t it stay where it belongs?” A nation of naturally enfranchised creatures uncivilly disobedient to the law of who must go where when, none of them have figured out yet that their world is not only shrinking, it's considered by most of the ruthlessly territorial species thundering by to be expendable.
Tree huggers, we pull over, hearts bleeding. I grab a cardboard box from the trunk of the car, step out and wave it at the maniac barreling at me in her late-model tank. She doesn’t even swerve. The under-carriage passes right over the turtle, whose head lifts.
The next car stops, and then another. But before I can airlift it, the turtle hares off much faster than the legend says, zigzagging under a weedy chain-link fence where I swear I see it panting.
Do I lock eyes with it? I don’t know, I don’t really think so, and yet somehow I read in the challenge of the elevated head, elongated neck bright with racing stripes, the blind confidence of the young foot soldier, the grunt, who thinks that once I have been appeased by the appearance of cowardice, or wisdom, he will finally be able to slip behind the enemy line to invade the seductive land lying so nearby just dying to be conquered.
|
