Biometri s

28 Short Story

The figure emerged from the rock, the top of which was blocked from Frank’s place on the leafy ground. He couldn’t see it, but he felt it—a shadowy presence unlike any he’d ever encountered. It didn’t feel spectral in a dark sense; it actually made him remember the beams of early summertime and rolling in the wildflowers that made his nose itch and his hope soar. His mother’s voice rang in his mind—“come in, come in, Frank!”—and his eyes opened back to the color of reality. It was gold, the reality of all-encompassing gold, but the rich color was not the focal point of Frank’s scene. The figure of light, as he had begun to call the being in his mind, was a fluffy and prismatic squirrel.

No longer startled, Frank stood, leaving his deer rifle on the bed of spongey leaves where it would spend a lonely and purposeless eternity. Now that the depth of the rock was visible, Frank looked deep into the shimmering pool of liquid gray ore and saw shapes—watery antlers with algaeic moss covering the points, the enormous paw of a diamond-spotted leopard with the claws retracted. The squirrel of light and vacillating color fully emerged from the stone and tested out the ground beneath him, which began to wobble under the pressure of the tiny foot. One of the squirrel’s claws lacerated a fallen sprig of leaf and the shimmering from the stone began to invade the forest. The other animals began charging out of the stone, creatures who wouldn’t fit through the rock’s sides burst out in pairs, filling the forest with watery light refracting from each stony being.

Frank was enchanted to find that the ground beneath him, waving and glowing as it was, held his weight. His lungs, too, were not ineffective, wheezing lumps within the dry cavern of his chest, but the moist breathing of the creatures filled the air, humidifying Frank’s body once more. He looked down at the yellow paper cemented over bone and muscle, cracked and grimy with old, decaying foliage and flesh—but the hands were tender again, and he could feel the cool air flow around his body. The squirrel lifted his head and clicked, clicked, clicked a sound that sounded like a sound that sounded like Frank’s memories. All of his life clicked in the squirrel’s hymn, and the forest came alive, singing the life back into the wasted body of Frank. A shot filled the air and the animals scattered like the smoke Frank had instantly known they were not. A single blink restored the world to an acrid and dry state, and Frank fell to the ground once more, joining his rifle. His outcry had long dissipated when his sons found him, next to the mossy stone. One son knelt next to Frank’s face while the other sat on the stone, his tears the only water now present in the forest. In their rush to the body, they had thrown their hunting gear down next to the pile of Frank’s, all now resigned to the same time without end. There was no music. There were no creatures. There was only a body and its two children.

In the tree above the misery, an ordinary squirrel perched, thin from the longer-than-expected winter. It was not watching the grief, for the squirrel did not ponder that which it had no desire to know. The squirrel instead clicked, clicked, clicked—and remembered Frank’s song.