Laura Ruby
AMONG THE WRECKAGE
1. Earth after the asteroid strikes, leaving the Chicxulub crater twelve miles deep.
2. The dinosaurs, after the fallout dusts them off the map.
3. A mammoth sinking in the La Brea Tar Pit.
4. Neanderthals.
5. Baby eels that used to travel upriver from the Chesapeake Bay and carried mussel larvae hitched to their heads. When they dammed the Susquehanna River, the migration stopped, and the larvae can’t hitchhike anymore.
6. Breasts that are sliced away and swapped with mounds of saline and polymer. One is higher than the other, but that’s to be expected.
7. Neanderthals were the first artists. They made beads from seashells, painted lines and patterns in red ochre on cave walls.
8. The skin after poison ivy paints its patterns with oily resin.
9. The man that hacks the hair from the nape of his neck and stitches it to his crown.
10. The mussel beds that dwindle and rivers that became ghost creeks; there are no mollusks to filter the water.
11. Water.
12. I feel sorry for the mammoth, even though it isn’t real.
13. The ghosts aren’t real either, but they won’t stop talking.
14. The cats that have knots tucked deep in their bushy winter coats. They dig at the knots with their saber teeth.
15. The man’s hair, when the wind claws it back.
16. The oak tree that gives up the ghost one limb at a time. It pitches a rotting arm at the pedestrians below, those murderers.
17. The delicate girl that donates her antibody-rich plasma against the advice of doctors. Just as the doctors said she would, she passes out—once, twice. She wakes bruised on her bathroom floor with no memory of how she’s gotten there, but that’s to be expected.
18. Sleep.
19. That there’s a book called How To Clone a Mammoth.
20. That the mammoth is real.
21. So are the dire wolves and the saber-toothed cats.
22. The DNA in our cells that degrades into soup after we die.
23. Soup.
24. That a man rapes a woman and brags about it.
25. The woman.
26. Another man that gathers the eels and the hitchhikers in a blue plastic tank, trucks them around the dams for 200 miles on Interstate 83. He releases his babies in a Pennsylvania creek and hopes for the best.
27. I will send my wolves to eat you, though none of us will brag about it.
28. The reckless planet that whirls through the void, pining for the crash that will break her new.
Laura Ruby is a novelist with eleven books published, including Bone Gap (HarperCollins, 2015) and Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All (HarperCollins, 2019), both National Book Award Finalists. Her short fiction has appeared in The Florida Review, The Beloit Fiction Journal, and Nimrod International, among others, and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Diode, Sugar House Review, The Dallas Review, The Nassau Review, Passengers Journal, and Clackamas Literary Review. She is on the faculty of Queens University’s MFA program and Hamline.
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