The Story of The Skunk
Don't get excited, people, there is no deeper meaning
Early morning. My dog and I have already fallen into a rhythm. Me: footfalls slow and steady. Him: pulling a little too hard on the leash. He knows this run well; we’ve been doing it all summer. No early morning light warms the horizon, our first sign that summer is ending. Instead, pools of light from the streetlights spill onto the sidewalks, half obscured by the maple trees that line the boulevard. My eyes struggle to adjust between the change in light and the dark feels so much darker.
I slow down in those dark spots, my feet fall into nothingness and for a second I wonder if the sidewalk will catch me, but it does, and my feet slap the ground, one after the other. I move into another pool of light and I see something moving on the sidewalk in front of us. It’s steadily moving towards us and I think at first someone’s dog escaped, one where the tail curls up over its back. A shih tzu or a shiba inu. But then the lights catch it or my eyes finally adjust and I see the black and white markings, the tail up over its back.
Terror, its own unique stink, washes over me. I immediately move to cross the street, tugging on my dog’s leash to get him to follow, while envisioning the mess that being sprayed by a skunk would cause. In the middle of the silent road I see that the skunk has the same idea as me and we both stop, staring each other down. We have a silent conversation, while my dog, weirdly, calmly waits. Which way are you going, the skunk wordlessly asks, I will go the other way. By way of agreement, I move back onto the sidewalk, my dog still calmly following, and the skunk finishes crossing the road and disappears into a neighbor’s yard.
The skunk has been a strange companion this summer and now fall. It is 100% because of my change in work schedule, which then changed when I work out (early as fuck) which means I am up in the queazy time when the sun is soon to rise and the skunks are finishing up their night foraging and heading back to bed for the day. There is no special sign that I keep seeing them, mostly on sidewalks, hurrying somewhere, nor do I think that they could be my own version of the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, though I have yet to see any of them carrying a watch and muttering “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late for a very important date.” It is just that time of day. No other reason unless I choose to read into it more.
Over the years I’ve written events like this down, as a writing exercise, trying to capture exactly what happened, how it happened, what lead me there, colors, sounds, textures and then I ruin it all by trying to find meaning. Meaning is superfluous. Meaning is like trying to wring water out of a dry towel or as Hilary Duff says in her iconic early aughts movie, A Cinderella Story, “waiting for [meaning] is like waiting for the rain in this drought. Useless and disappointing.” Or something like that. These moments are like snow globes, dozens of them folded into the pages of a notebook, frozen in time and I flip it upside down, turn it this way and that. What does this mean? Why did I say or do that? I end up following the skunk down the burrow hole and curious objects begin floating past me. I drink and eat things that make me navel gaze even more.
I finished reading Annie Erneaux’s A Girl’s Life this weekend. She writes autofiction, a way of writing in which I am very unfamiliar. She writes about herself with this remove that I find interesting. She refers to her past self in the third person and somehow draws a line from her adolescence to her writing life:
“The memory of what I have written is already fading. I do not know what this piece of writing is. Even the thing I was pursuing by writing this book has dissolved. Among my papers I found a sort of note of intent:
Explore the gulf between the stupefying reality of things that happen, at the moment they happen, and, years later, the strange unreality in which the things that happened are enveloped.”
Suddenly I am not Alice in Wonderland and the moment with the skunk is just a moment. A slightly strange moment. I swear we came to a mutual understanding. And I doubt I will look back at this moment years later and say this is it, this is the moment I decided to become a skunk whisperer. But I feel as a writer I must come to a meaningful conclusion. Draw some takeaway for the reader to feel like they’ve spent their time well with this writer. But sometimes I just want to tell a story. And I have to trust the reader to take what they want from the story. Maybe there is some deep meaning here and I am missing an opportunity. Maybe there isn’t and a story can be just a story.
Anyway, I once ran into a skunk and it didn’t spray me.