my neighbor has a bug zapper, and it stays on blue all night long. I turn on my fan and my humidifier to drown out the sound of insects constantly being drawn into its siren song and annihilated.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For two summers I have stood at my window and listened to it sing in triumph as it claims another life. I can\u2019t imagine how many each night. sometimes the sound lasts a long time, and I think it must be a sphinx moth, or even a bat, following prey into the light. it sounds so electric for so long. like wings stuck to a searing grate, convulsing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wonder what it looks like in the morning underneath the light. and I wonder that the sound of the dead and dying doesn\u2019t trouble their sleep. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve stared through a rifle sight and delivered a killing blow to a baby pig. But I find this machine barbaric. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today I saw a chipmunk sit in the middle of the road, eating the remains of a ground squirrel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every night when I undress in front of the window, looking out into the blue dot in the blackness, listening to the sounds of it, I wonder why I don\u2019t sneak out at five in the morning, unplug it, and smash it upon their front lawn. Or secret it away and hide it in a black plastic trash bag until suspicion has passed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Same reason I don\u2019t drive to deliver diapers to the captive children in Arizona. same reason I fiddle with the radio dial at the freeway offramp, where a gray old man, the same gray old man, cowers in the heat. Same reason I buy fried chicken and bacon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Same reason i kept driving the afternoon i watched the truck rend apart the doe, its legs kicking, belly cleaved from its chest cavity. Same reason I skirt around the drenched wings of a hawk moth, its magic powder drowned and draining. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I always let the wolf spiders I find in the sink free. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One morning I found two\u2014one large, one small. The small one was missing several limbs, which were scattered onto the white porcelain in the bluedawn light. I imagined the night that had just passed, and I scooped the small one up in a quarter pint mason jar, the kind i drink whiskey out of most nights, and let him free at the front of the house. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The larger one I let out at the back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
my neighbor has a bug zapper, and it stays on blue all night long. I turn on my fan and my humidifier to drown out the sound of insects constantly being drawn into its siren song and annihilated.\u00a0 For two summers I have stood at my window and listened to it sing in triumph as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bullshit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copperandcoal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copperandcoal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copperandcoal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copperandcoal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copperandcoal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.copperandcoal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180,"href":"https:\/\/www.copperandcoal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions\/180"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copperandcoal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copperandcoal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copperandcoal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copperandcoal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}