Fur Baby Death Quotes

A mother's body remembers her babies--the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has its own entreaties to body and soul. It's the last one, though, that overtakes you. I can't dare say I loved the others less, but my first three were all babies at once, and motherhood dismayed me entirely. . . . That's how it is with the firstborn, no matter what kind of mother you are--rich, poor, frazzled half to death or sweetly content. A first child is your own best food forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that's love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down.

Nothing is forgotten, all is permitted. In a stinking cave, muttering babies scream and scratch, furs undulate in copulation. In one corner, bright-eyed first marks are daubed on a wall. They are marks to function, marks of place, of time. They are marks to draw results and persist beyond one human lifetime. Instinct has arisen, snake-like, coiling itself into intuition and suggesting the very power of suggestion. No one noted down from a book this process, it grew from watching the elements, closeness to life-sources, death-forces that modern persons are divorced from. On this damp stone there is a curve, it is land, horizon, ejaculation, movement.

Now let me tell you something. I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multicoloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers. I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously. I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor, the smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten. I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends. I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating Fur seals as they sang to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the Rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the Bat and the belling roar of the Red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard Wolves baying at a winter’s moon, Red howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr and grunt of a hundred multi-coloured reef fishes. I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen Spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen Whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched Tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry Raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of Dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things. But— All this I did without you. This was my loss. All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain. All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever-surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.

What You Pray Toward “The orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.” —Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966 I. Hubbie 1 used to get wholly pissed when I made myself come. I’m right here!, he’d sputter, blood popping to the surface of his fuzzed cheeks, goddamn it, I’m right here! By that time, I was in no mood to discuss the myriad merits of my pointer, or to jam the brakes on the express train slicing through my blood, It was easier to suffer the practiced professorial huff, the hissed invectives and the cold old shoulder, liver-dotted, quaking with rage. Shall we pause to bless professors and codgers and their bellowed, unquestioned ownership of things? I was sneaking time with my own body. I know I signed something over, but it wasn’t that. II. No matter how I angle this history, it’s weird, so let’s just say Bringing Up Baby was on the telly and suddenly my lips pressing against the couch cushions felt spectacular and I thought wow this is strange, what the hell, I’m 30 years old, am I dying down there is this the feel, does the cunt go to heaven first, ooh, snapped river, ooh shimmy I had never had it never knew, oh i clamored and lurched beneath my little succession of boys I cried writhed hissed, ooh wee, suffered their flat lapping and machine-gun diddling their insistent c’mon girl c’mon until I memorized the blueprint for drawing blood from their shoulders, until there was nothing left but the self-satisfied liquidy snore of he who has rocked she, he who has made she weep with script. But this, oh Cary, gee Katherine, hallelujah Baby, the fur do fly, all gush and kaboom on the wind. III. Don’t hate me because I am multiple, hurtling. As long as there is still skin on the pad of my finger, as long as I’m awake, as long as my (new) husband’s mouth holds out, I am the spinner, the unbridled, the bellowing freak. When I have emptied him, he leans back, coos, edges me along, keeps wondering count. He falls to his knees in front of it, marvels at my yelps and carousing spine, stares unflinching as I bleed spittle unto the pillows. He has married a witness. My body bucks, slave to its selfish engine, and love is the dim miracle of these little deaths, fracturing, speeding for the surface. IV. We know the record. As it taunts us, we have giggled, considered stopwatches, little laboratories. Somewhere beneath the suffering clean, swathed in eyes and silver, she came 134 times in one hour. I imagine wires holding her tight, her throat a rattling window. Searching scrubbed places for her name, I find only reams of numbers. I ask the quietest of them: V. Are we God?