The Death of Small Creatures by Trisha Cull Page A

We drink a lot and get high sometimes. Kay’s face is angular, thin and freckled. She looks like a young Meryl Streep with red hair. “Holy shit, I think I felt it kick,” she says. I’m sort of in love with Kay in a non-sexual way. She isn’t traditionally pretty, but I love her hair and slender body, and her studded leather belts and choice of T-shirts, for being the cool, unaffected girl I’ve always wanted to be. Maybe I even love the baby inside her. You have to go the mainland to get an abortion this far along. “Can you feel it?” she says.
    Her flesh feels thick and hot in the sunlight, and it occurs to me I’ve never touched a woman like this before, never been so intimate. “No,” I say. “I don’t feel anything.”
    Later that night, we sit on my mom’s porch overlooking the park. In the distance, the lake gleams in moonlight. Willows sway on the shore. I hear ducks paddling across the surface, and every so often the squeak of wings followed by a long threshing as a duck skids across the surface and halts to a landing. Then a quack or two, then nothing as its feet find rhythm under water. “It’s not too late to change your mind,” I say. The sky is black and starry but glows white above the far side of the lake where the shopping mall parking lot begins, and beyond that is a faint reddish glow from the neon cross on the spire of the church adjacent to the mall.
    â€œI know,” she says, and a mother raccoon and three babies scurry across the yard.

    â€œYou’ve lost weight,” Fiona says. “How extraordinary.” She is careful with her semantics, a skill honed from years of clinical practice.
    â€œI no longer eat meat,” I say.
    â€œOh?” she says.
    â€œI think I’m feeling better.”
    I have no explanation for what comes next except to say that inevitably change happens this way. After seven years of perpetual hangovers, I wake up one morning and say, “Leigh, I’m never going to drink again,” and even though this is the millionth time I’ve said it, this time I stop. For now anyway.
    I start taking my pills one at a time, eat breakfast every day and even take up Bikram yoga: hot yoga.
    At my first yoga class the teacher, Wendy, walks me into the studio where they all lie flat on their backs in the Savasana position, everyone’s feet facing the same direction—this is yoga etiquette; it is considered an insult to point your feet at the teacher. She leads me to a vacant space, unfolds my mat, whispers, “Did you bring a towel?”
    â€œYes,” I say, my voice booming. “Yes,” I whisper. But mine is a hand towel, and everyone else is lying on full-size bath towels. I lay my tiny white towel on my blue mat; it floats in the middle of the thin foam like an upside-down stamp floating in a blue sea.
    â€œYou’ll need something bigger,” Wendy smiles. “You’re going to sweat…a lot.”
    Damn
, I think. The impulse to berate myself surges, then subsides.
But it’s okay. These blips in my judgment are part of my charm. I can forgive myself for this.
    We begin by breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth, using our throats as a valve so the air moves slowly and deliberately in counts of six. We flex and arch and reach for the sky, moulding our bodies into half-moons and eagles and trees. In between each posture, Wendy tells us to relax in Savasana, the dead body pose—palms up, mouth slack—to let our feet fall open as our heels touch, to just breathe, to just be.

    My sister Sandy and I sit in her backyard. The apple tree has begun to blossom. Every so often we hear the Tally-Ho horse carriage full of tourists dawdling along the next street over: the horse’s hooves clopping on asphalt and a man’s voice on a microphone fading as the trolley turns into Beacon Hill Park.
    â€œDo you still polish each