Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever (2 page)

Cancer is caused by poor diet.

It’s the result of living in a polluted environment, an accumulation of toxins.

It’s a lack of antioxidants, too much sun,
the
body’s inability to cope with stress.

It all comes down to an unwise choice of genes before birth.

Cancer is a condition of age; everyone who lives long enough is going to get it.

In a second and a half of blurred, unsteady camerawork, an animal moves across a tiny YouTube insert. The caption is
Mystery Creature — Thylacine??
and
you wonder if this could be the one. If this could be the one image of a ghost — a real film of a live thylacine in colour –- or if it’s yet another theory of cancer.
Meditation, a high-fibre diet, sun-screen before leaving the house.

Comments on the YouTube page claim the animal is a lioness, a zebra dog, a wolf — a fake.

Comments on the YouTube page say of course it's a thylacine: they were cloned years ago so the animal wouldn't go totally extinct.

The Internet is a maze but you follow the clues, turning left at every junction. In 1866, a thylacine joey was preserved in a bottle. There’s a close-up photo of it, and it makes you think of a newborn puppy, so innocent. Paws tucked under its chin, soft fur around its muzzle and its nose just millimetres from air. Preserved in alcohol instead of formaldehyde, the joey still contains intact DNA and, for a little while, back just before the turn of the century, it did seem possible that it might be cloned.
That every home could have its own newly un-extinct pet running around the backyard.

There are all sorts of theories about thylacines. Four thousand sightings since that last one died in the Hobart Zoo in 1936.
They were brought to the mainland,
you read.
A colony of them established in Gippsland.
There are parts of the mainland where they never became extinct.
A pocket of them in South Australia, still surviving.

You wonder how people can believe such a thing in this day and age. There is no physical evidence of thylacines. No footprints or scat mark their passing; there are no middens of wallaby bones decorated in the scrimshaw of thylacine toothmarks. Nobody has found the remains of a thylacine deceased in the wild, or taken a potshot at one raiding the chookhouse. When every bushwalker, hiker, tourist and adventurer has a digital camera with a zoom lens and a mobile phone with at least a 2-mega-pixel camera, bluetooth and 3G roaming, and a personal page on Twitter and YouTube and Facebook, the thylacine’s existence remains a grey area.

ZettaFLOP computers construct themselves, reveal the secrets of the human brain,
solve
global warming. Their processors are cool and silent. Keyboards have been replaced by a thought-activated interface, the screen has been superseded by the self-actualising unit: 3D visuals, surround sound, haptic response. One of these days you’ll upgrade. Your enthusiasm for technology faded when it failed Jase.

You photographed him all the time after the diagnosis.
Moments of hope as he endured the treatment.
The transience of normality: eating breakfast, resting on the sofa, playing with the dog. You took care to frame each shot, avoiding the bruises on his arms, hiding his new bald patches from view, adjusting light against the pale of his face. You were not stealing his
soul,
you were preserving it on a 4GB flashcard. It’s still inside the camera. You never uploaded those last images.

Videos of ghosts collect in odd corners of the Internet. Orbs drift on unfelt winds, tiny white lights buzz in spirals like the sparkle in his eyes on that summer day. A door opens,
a chair moves
, a dog watches as curtains are slowly drawn. There is no apparent reason for the behaviour of ghosts. Cold spots and compass deviations have no connection. Ectoplasm has gone out of fashion; there is no residue of ghosts. You sometimes think there is a sensible, natural explanation for hauntings: odd sounds that are really rats in the walls, the ringing doorbell that just needs its battery replaced,
faces
that are random patterns resolved into lost loved ones by the yearning mind of the survivor. Haunted houses retain memories of past inhabitants only because the present inhabitants hold them there.

You wish Jase would haunt you. You just want the evidence, to know that something has lasted beyond those final days of morphine nightmare. You know that he would come if he could. You wonder how much of his soul fills the nodes and connections of Internet computers. Thoughts of him pass between you and your new computer and he gazes at you from that summer. You wonder how many ghosts drift in and out of the self-actualising fields in empty rooms. It isn’t fair and you know it’s stupid, but you are angry at Jase for getting sick. You feel betrayed by his death. Why didn’t he stay? You wanted him to stay.

Do thylacines run like dogs or leap with their kangaroo legs? Does the
yip yip yip
of their call echo through quiet cities uncommented on, not because it isn’t heard, but because no one actually remembers what a thylacine sounds like?

Awkward, hand-held ghosts inhabit the dark corners of offices, trap themselves in spider webs,
knock
against the walls. Ambiguous images in light and shade fade from the windows of empty buildings, “Like” stuff on Facebook, place themselves in news updates.

YottaFLOP computers appear spontaneously on every desktop in the world. You look up to find the new machine staring back at you.

Constructed of light and silver, supported by a platform of belief in the fantastic, the thylacine turns from her cellulose railway and steps through the self-actualising field into your room, ears forward and
yip yip yipping
in excitement.

There’s a collection of stationery that hasn’t been touched for months. The thylacine’s foot brushes it as she steps over and out the window. You watch in open-mouthed amazement as her black and taupe stripes blend with the light and shadow of life. There’s a stationery avalanche. Unopened letters and bills slide away to reveal your camera, battery now flat, memory card of Jase still there inside it.

Your fingernail digs out the flashcard and flicks it onto the flat of your palm. You offer it to the computer.

~~~

Amanda le Bas de Plumetot
is an award-winning writer of poetry and short stories, and also a performance poet. She has been published in books, trains, websites, zines, school readers, collections, magazines and TV commercials. She is a graduate/survivor of Clarion South 2009 and is awestruck by the wonderful people she met there. She lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her kids have moved out, so she and her beloved hubby share the place with lots of pets. She likes cats, robots, movies, camembert and
frankie
magazine. She gets paid to sell movie tickets. She would like to be more organised when she grows up.

Website:
http://amandale.net

Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/featherfour

Michael didn’t understand her loss. Even she didn’t realize how deep it ran, until a saber-tooth cat helped to heal the past and point her toward a future she didn’t know she needed most.

PAST SURVIVORS

by
Sarah Adams

It’s odd to think LA might be one of the sacred places of the world. But here, in the dreaming hills that hem in the vast puddle of concrete that is the city, there is no clear past or future, only an eternal present. Pockets of time — past, present and future — overlap and spill into one another in the breathing silence that fills the canyons and valleys.

It was the silence that drew me into the hills. I had hiked miles up a deer run, letting the rhythm of my feet wipe away everything else. Now, I sat in the shade of a sage bush, on a sunset-facing slope, asking the silence to hold me together. I held myself still — still enough almost to stop the blood in my veins. I trained my eyes on the sun, holding down the thought of my own blood trickling into the dusty earth, becoming part of the hills. The mountains breathed all around me. A lizard flashed across my foot. Knees drawn up to my chest, I tried to breathe with the hills, to be still like them.

But a mule
deer,
flanks lathered in sweat, crashed across the ridge behind me. It landed on the trail, stumbled, and went to its knees. Its eyes rolled white in its head. Froth bubbled at its mouth.
As the deer flailed to its feet, a massive cat, too big for a mountain lion, sailed straight over my head.
It landed on the deer’s back, mouth already clamped on the animal’s neck, even as its weight sent them both crashing to the ground. They landed in a heap of flailing hooves and a sickening thump. The deer jerked, blood bubbling from its nostrils, but the cat’s impossibly long canines were buried in the deer’s jugular. The cat squeezed, holding shut the windpipe until the deer’s head hung limp.

Our eyes met across the carcass.

I, still as a sage bush, crouched on the ground with my knees up with my chin, arms wrapped around my shins.
The cat, bloody-muzzled, panting, stood with one paw still on the deer’s windpipe.
Later I would wonder why I felt no fear, not even a dim, intellectual awareness that I should have been afraid. But I felt only the quiet of the hills pressing down around the sharp beat of my own heart.

Massive, angular shoulders tapered back to narrow hips. Dusty brown ripples ran over deeper golden shades, almost a broken tabby pattern, darker over the head and shoulders, shading into the pale beige of fallen leaves on its hindquarters. Fangs like ivory daggers curved back toward its body.

My hand crept over my heart, not to still the pounding, but to feel it, to know that my heart could still beat aloud. At the motion, the saber-tooth stretched its jaw wide, wove its head back and forth as if brandishing its weapons. Blood drops flew from the fangs, spattered the dusty ground. Its absurd stump of bobtail lashed at me.

I blinked and the cat was still there.

Eyes still fixed on
mine,
it lowered its head and seized the deer’s limp neck, dragging the carcass with it as it backed away from me below the lip of the hill. I waited, immobile until the little sounds in the brush resumed: the
terrrrrrr-whit!
of
a quail, the rustle of lizards at the roots of the scrub. Vultures dipped over the canyon, stooping toward the carcass. I got to my feet, quietly, as though I were in a cathedral, and hiked back to my car.

~~~

“You’re awfully quiet.
Something wrong?”
Michael, my boyfriend, said over dinner that night.

“No. Sorry.” I twirled my fork in the spinach fettuccine. It made spirals in the golden-green olive oil on the plate.
“Thinking about my hike.”

He tore another slice off the garlic loaf I had made. “You shouldn’t go up there by yourself,” he said for the thousandth time.

“I know. You could come with me.”

“You could fall and break your leg,” he went on. “Gangs use those hills to dump bodies and do drug deals. Not to mention the kids
that go
up there to drag race and drink.” He was mopping up olive oil with the bread.

“I know,” I said again. “But it helps me. I need to—” My voice caught and I clenched my hand around my napkin. Forcing my voice to be even, I said, “It helps me. I promise I’ll be careful.”

“That’s good.” He gave me a smile as I started to clear the table, piling my half-full plate on top of the other dishes. I yanked the breadbasket away from him, blinking hard and forcing a smile until I could get into the kitchen.

As I ran water over the china plates, I thought about the ivory and scarlet of the cat’s fangs, the way its shoulders heaved under its pelt. Even in its stillness it had been all motion.

“You’re still going golfing next weekend at Palm Springs, aren’t you?” I called over the running water.

“What?” he shouted from the living room. “Honey, I’m trying to watch the Masters.”

“Sorry.”

~~~

I made camp by an abandoned firefighting helipad three miles up the trail from where I had seen the saber-tooth. My car was pulled as far off the road as possible into a little dry gulch where a tangle of Christmas berry would shield it from casual roadside view. Hiking is legal up here, but overnight camping is not. Fires are anathema. One spark can set the entire range ablaze, even in the spring.

Before, I had felt nothing, too immersed in the calm under the sky to fear. But this time fear had me. My fingers ached with stress as I laid out my ground cloth and slid the tension rods into the tent’s loops. Fear-sweat soaked my armpits and ran trickles down my spine, but I hurried down the trail with only a can of hiker’s mace and a cell phone in my pockets.

It has rained a few days before. At a low point in the trail, preserved in dried mud, were three perfect cat’s paw prints and my heart leaped. But they were only the size of my palm. Mountain lion prints, too small to be left by the saber-tooth I had seen. I hurried on.