And

I got up at six because of the dogs and turned on the radio, which is my habit even before coffee and cigarette, and listened to the BBC talk with experts about fungi, which are the largest living things on the planet, and how they war with each other when competing for space and their fight sends special things into the air that can be measured, and I thought, Well, there’s the next horror novel, and then I remembered a dream I had last night about two elks dead in my backyard and how I feared the dogs would find them and turn feral and how long it would take such huge animals to disappear and how desperate my dogs would be to get at them and they lay dead in the same spot under the apple trees where a deer had died last winter, a creature I had come to think of as my deer, and how that animal was dismantled and eaten over the course of a week until not a scrap was left unused, which reminded me that I want to be sent to a body farm when I die and then I remembered the elks woke up, and Oh god, I thought, two great big elks, not threatening necessarily but certainly inconvenient, and as I locked my doors a big man I mistook for a farmer appeared saying he knew how to deal with the two big elks and I thought that meant a nice elk farm somewhere but it turned out later he chopped their heads off, presenting me with completely smooth bloodless stumps reminding me of chopped-down trees and I was stunned and sorry and then my red plastic timer went off although I hadn’t touched it, which didn’t alarm me as strange things happen in this house, and then I remembered sex again, because a student had said she first made love with her husband in a cottage across from a cemetery where there was a huge statue of an elk and now whenever she thought of sex she thought of the elk or maybe it was the other way around. So there were several things to mull over: that the fungi are what we most want to watch out for even though they are doomed to extinction before we find and label them all, and that death for me is a turning into something useful because not a scrap of the deer is left, and that perhaps “my deer” meant “my dear,” and that elks replaced my dear.

I opened the door where the sun was at last shining and found it was still cold, so I took a shower and put on an old black dress instead of thinking about the teaching aspect of a writing life, which I had meant to mull over this morning, expecting I would have looked up the root of “teach” by now but haven’t. I look at my bookcase, and there is the fossilized bag of marshmallows my grandson wanted to put on his mother’s birthday cake and I said yes.

Earlier I lay in bed thinking about how I’d been raised on superstition and despite having spent most of my life touching wood all had gone terribly wrong anyway and I now spurn and despise those rituals and then I wondered whether if I had been raised in a church or a synagogue or a mosque or a Buddhist monastery I would now be angry at a useless god, but never got out of bed to write it down and figure that out, but this morning I did start writing about the elk.

Why?

Death, it seems, death, which is always in the back of my mind because Rich was hit by a car and my daughter had cancer and my closest friend has a dying liver and other people I love have faced death and are again facing it although now death is in the room with them and how I used to be afraid of death just because it was death but now I am afraid to die in case my darlings need me.

Outside the dogs are howling.

And this is my most selfish thought, that if I lose the people I love what is left of my own life will consist only of grief.