The Ecological Impacts of Resurrection: A Field Study, by Corey Farrenkopf

SUMMER 2024, SHORT STORY, 3700 WORDS

Few species other than humans bury their dead. A number of mammals undertake death rituals or practice forms of postmortem grieving, but few will place a body in the ground with intent. Elephants stand watch over their deceased for days. Chimpanzees have been known to carry their infant dead for months after they pass. Even dolphins and giraffes practice varied forms of mourning, but most don’t inter the bodies. Which was why the otters in the forested backwoods of Hubbardston, Massachusetts were so important to my father’s studies.

Sitting in a hunter’s blind with their dad by the side of a marshy river for twelve-hour days was not how most girls wanted to spend the summer before freshman year of college, but there I was, swatting blackflies off my bare arms.

The scent of damp rot wafted off the river as our polyethylene tenting shivered with the breeze. We had nestled the collapsible structure into a copse of birches three days before. The shade was not enough to fight the August heat. Sweat clung to the backs of my knees and beneath my bra. Dad sat beside me, squinting through a pair of binoculars, jotting messy notes into his journal as I drew cartoon variations of the otters attending a Victorian tea party.

My father was a professor of Ethology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, focusing on the study of death rituals and burial behavior in mammals and their intersections with human traditions. He said he was going to write his next paper on the otters, maybe even his next book.

Judging by the nearly incomprehensible notes and the large collection of question marks, it looked like he would struggle to fill the pages.

Nothing had happened since we arrived. Just a few families of cute brown river otters swimming into view, then out of view, occasionally playing in the mud on the river bank, which was adorable, occasionally eating a small fish or frog, which was less so.

At no point did they break out the shovels and start unearthing a crypt, much to my father’s dismay.

Two weeks before, Aunt Claire left a voicemail on our home answering machine.

…two little otter paws sticking out of the ground just like my neighbor said, praying to the sky. The rest of the body was buried, otter prints all around. They must be burying their dead. I told Bill to keep quiet until you could come take a look. I know how competitive your research is. Sorry I haven’t been in touch lately. It’s just hard, you know?

I did know. Mom had been dead for thirteen years. I could barely remember her face or the sound of her voice. Dad always tried to remind me about her. The blonde hair I didn’t inherit. The floral mist that seemed to follow her around. Her dark humor and artistic tendencies that allegedly mirrored my own.

I often asked myself if that’s why my father’s career shifted, every choice in his life tracing back to her death.

Before the accident he studied the foraging behaviors of wild pigs, teasing out connections to the truffle trade in Italy. But now the only buried things he obsessed over were bodies and their implications. If animals care for the dead, it could mean they also believe in the hereafter… An animal kingdom variation of heaven? Who knows what they might actually know… I’d sat in on his lectures, listening to rambles on potential elephant gods and crow hell, as if it all held a clue to his own personal mystery, a hidden path back to Mom.

His desire was blatant in every word, even if his students couldn’t hear it.

As each year passed, his hypothesis grew more extreme and improbable.

Just because other mammals actively dealt with death, it didn’t mean they believed in God or ghosts or eternal salvation, but I never brought it up. Dad paid the bills with his macabre theories and professor evals.

Kids loved hearing about spooky dogs sleeping on the graves of their masters and how horses hold viewings for their dead.

He always got high ratings.

“Can we head back to Aunt Claire’s?” I asked once the last of the otters disappeared into the current.

“Jeany, weren’t you listening this morning?” he replied without dropping his binoculars.

“I thought so, why?”

“We’re staying the night. If the otters aren’t burying their dead during the daytime, maybe it has to do with the phases of the moon. I saw some roadkill on the way in. It’s not like they have an excuse not to.”

The marshy, chest-deep river was bisected at several points by a rural highway. Two lanes, no divider, forty-five-mile-an-hour speed limits. On the drive in, I’d seen a singular dead otter spread out on the beer can-littered shoulder. I’d read reports about their untimely deaths along the roadway, how they just weren’t quick enough to avoid squealing tires. I scanned every accident report for the area and was honestly surprised we didn’t see more woodland casualties, raccoons and foxes and deer. It was a high fatality three-point-five miles for any animal. The surrounding forest of moss-draped trees pressed up to the asphalt in some places, visibility low.

This was all information I gathered for my father’s potential book.

He needed all the filler he could get to meet the appropriate page requirement.

We’d dig wherever we could.

“But I didn’t bring a sleeping bag,” I said, stowing my drawings beneath my beach chair.

“You have to make sacrifices for science,” he replied with a smile.

Dad still believed I wanted to follow in his footsteps and become an ethologist. Yes, I was interested in science, in helping others understand the world around them, but I preferred hybridizing my interests. Medical illustration. Wildlife illustration. Botanical illustration. Almost anything blankety-blank-science-related-illustration would do.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I replied, pulling a pair of sunglasses from my backpack, shading my eyes. “If that’s the case, then I’m taking a nap. Wake me up when they start the burial procession.”

“They don’t do that, Jeany. You know…”

But I’d already stopped listening. If I wanted to avoid a migraine, I needed to get a little sleep.

The chimpanzees always got me. The thought of carrying your dead child around for weeks on end sounded like a nightmare. Continuing to groom them, pretending to teach them behavioral skills to survive. Whenever Dad talked about the behavior during his lectures, I imagined him carrying Mom’s body around, combing her hair, performing disquieting ventriloquism whenever we went out for dinner.

Even if Mom’s body wasn’t actually present at every meal, leaning against Dad’s shoulder for stability, she was there in spirit, speaking through my father’s lips whenever he stood at the front of the lecture hall, going on about dolphins guarding their dead to make sure they arrived at the great beyond undisturbed.

Every decision he’d made since the accident thirteen years ago was aimed at an unattainable outcome.

He was still guarding her body the only way he knew how.

“What the hell.”

I startled awake, my father leaning forward in his chair, squinting into the dark.

“Dad, what…” I began before he shushed me, raising a silencing finger.

My eyes were still fuzzed with sleep, vision through the open tent slit blurred. Fog drifted off the water. The landscape was more fitting for a cheap vampire movie than an ecological study. I squinted, wiping at my eyes until things came into focus.

I wished they hadn’t.

Standing in the river was something akin to a man, bare to the waist, a pair of tattered black pants covering his lower half. Thinning silver hair fell to his shoulders, water-slick as if he’d just swum up from the depths. The issue with classification lay in his skin, or rather on it. Visible stretches of his chest and arms were crosshatched with what looked like strips of moss and animal hide, tufts of rabbit fur sewn here, what appeared to be a swath of a coyote’s pelt stitched there.

I searched frantically around the blind for a weapon of any sort, eyes roving for protection, trying to not let my plastic beach chair whine beneath me. There was the shovel we used to unearth the first otter grave, my slightly sharpened pencils, and the cooler holding the leftovers from lunch. Nothing to strike from a distance.

My father’s hand fell to my knee, gripping, establishing stillness.

“He hasn’t seen us,” my father whispered, leaning as close as he could to the blind’s opening without sticking his head through. “Watch.”

My heart convulsed in my throat. Everything about the sewn man told me to run, fight or flight reduced to a single option, but I fought to hold my breath. Dad had weird ideas about the afterlife, but in most things besides my mother, he was pure logic. If he didn’t want us to move, I had to trust him.

The sewn man stepped from the river and climbed the muddy embankment, dropping into a squat over a flat section of earth. I hadn’t noticed before, but he had something cradled in his arms. A tuft of fur, the white gleam of bone. I originally thought the otter had been another pelt comprising the man’s skin, but when he stood the little creature up on its hind legs, there was no denying it wasn’t part of him.

There was something clearly wrong with the otter. Its back leg dragged while it walked, head drooping as if its neck was broken. Ridges of stitching coursed over its fur, small knobs of bone peering through the handiwork.

“That thing has to be…” I began.

“Dead. I know,” my father replied. “Don’t ruin this. Get your sketchbook.”

I fished the papers from beneath my seat and began to draft the scene, the injured otter hobbling forward before it began to dig, the sewn man lingering in the background. The undead creature made quick work of the trench, hollowing out a hole big enough for its body. Then it lowered itself down into the earth, pawing at dirt piles left around the tomb’s edge. The otter managed to cover itself completely until only its paws remained above the soil, twin boney antennae pointed toward the heavens.

The sewn man knelt at the water’s edge and made a number of odd motions with his hands before stepping back into the river.

“Soon. Soon,” he said, before submerging fully, silver hair disappearing into the fog. Only the kick of his feet against the water marked his passage.

My father and I sat in silence, as if waiting for a camera crew to emerge from the opposite shore, some B-list actor calling through a megaphone, letting us know we’d been punked. But the stillness was total, all-consuming. Only the brush of the current against the shore stirred the reeds.

“So, is that going in the paper?” I asked once the moment stretched too long.

“That is going in the book,” my father replied. “But I think it’s also more than that. Let me see the drawing.”

I handed it over.

“Maybe that will be the cover,” he said, smiling.

When most animals are caught burying their dead, it’s often a journalistic mistake, completely unrelated to an animal’s belief in the afterlife. A number of years ago, a video went around the internet of a dog burying another dog. It was shared endlessly, people captioning the clip with big-hearted comments about how they must have been best friends, that the living must mourn the dead. Many read like bad plots to Hallmark movies, or a sad intro for a Pixar flick, but the truth was, dogs instinctively bury meat and bones.

The dog was most likely putting a meal aside, not honoring the dead, but that doesn’t get many likes on social media.

People ignored the facts, blocking the few scientists who entered the fray trying to correct the script. Dad wrote an article on the phenomenon and the connection to his studies for Nature, but they never ran it. Too esoteric, they wrote back. This won’t pass peer review.

When something didn’t fit into a narrative, it got swallowed.

I didn’t know what narrative the sewn man fit into, but I doubted anyone besides the Weekly World News was going to be interested.

Aunt Claire lived a few towns over in Fitchburg, in the same three-bedroom ranch she and my mother grew up in. She’d kept all the old photographs, smiling faces of my mother as a bespeckled blonde child, then a teenager with ill-advised bangs, peering out from behind faded glass. My father asked her to hang them in her guest room.

The bureau at the foot of the first twin mattress was a shrine to Mom, so many repeating faces staring out at you whenever you went to bed, all slowly aging toward the inevitable. I wanted to ask Aunt Claire if maybe she could tone it down, strip the memorial to its barest form, but somehow the shrine gave my father comfort, so I never voiced my complaint.

He stood before the array of photographs as I adjusted my sheets in the neighboring bed, pulling them up to my neck to ward off the chill from the A/C humming in the window.

“Dad, if you’re going back tomorrow, which is a terrible idea, you really need your sleep,” I whispered.

“You’re not coming with me, Jeany? After a discovery like this?” His voice was distant as he ran a finger along the edge of the nearest photograph.

“You do you, but there’s no way I’m going back out there.”

“But this is the turning point in my career. Your mother would want you there with me.”

“You can’t put words in the mouths of the dead,” I said, turning to face the wall, praying sleep would come quickly.

After a while, my father must have assumed I was out cold.

He began to whisper to my mother’s portraits.

We’ll be like the crows, watching their dead. Just you wait…

He went on for what felt like forever, reciting pieces of old lectures, as if trying to reason through something, repeating statistics as if they were incantations. He spoke of plans I couldn’t quite understand, logic not following from one word to the next. When I could no longer take his macabre monologue, I yawned, rolling over in my bed. The movement was enough to get him to stop talking, enough to bring back the quiet I so desperately needed.

My father muttered a quick goodnight before slipping into his bed.

I knew his words weren’t meant for me, only the photographs lining the bureau. My mother’s ghost was never far off.

“Do you remember that game you used to play with her?” my father asked, sitting inside the blind, the orange glow of sunset an hour past. The sky had settled into darkness. I told myself I wasn’t going to come, that my father was on his own, but when eight o’clock rolled around and he hadn’t replied to any of my texts, I took Aunt Claire’s keys and drove through the neighboring towns to search for him.

I found my father in the same spot as yesterday, peering through binoculars into the dark, notebook closed as if he’d forgotten a pen.

“That doesn’t really matter right now. We’re leaving before that weirdo shows up,” I said, standing just inside the blind’s open entrance.

“Please, think back. This is important. You’ll see. What game did you and your mother play?” my father asked again, lowering his binoculars, eyes refusing to meet my own. He looked beyond me, as if I weren’t there.

“I don’t know, like tag or something?”

“She used to call it ‘Baby Possum.’ You’d cling to her back as she jostled around the yard. It was your favorite.”

I tried to remember the feeling of her body beneath mine, the way my fingers must have gripped her jacket as she halfheartedly attempted to shake me off, but nothing came. Our time together was a void, an unalterable emptiness. Nothing my father could say was going to bring her back for me.

“Honestly, I don’t think I remember.”

“Surprising. You asked her to play every day. I just keep thinking about what life would have been if she hadn’t died. Opossums play dead, but it’s never permanent.”

“Is that going in your book too?”

“I’m not worried about the book anymore,” my father replied as the sounds of feet sloshing through mud came from the riverbank.

The sewn man stepped from the water, the orange fur of a fox clutched to his chest, matted with blood, yards and yards of stitching coursing over its small body. Moonrise cast the river in a shifting skin of silver. Shadowed reflections of reeds and pale trees washed against the shore, the man a rotting silhouette of ink against the opaque backdrop. Like before, he knelt in the mud, helping the dead fox find its footing. Unlike the otter, the animal struggled to move, dragging itself more than walking.

“It’s a short way, my friend. I’ll be back soon,” the man whispered to the fox, placing his hands underneath its front shoulders, easing the weight off its paws. Something clicked as it moved, bone grinding against bone.

“Dad, we need to…” I began to say, before he pushed past me, out of the blind. I stumbled after him, straight into the birches, arms grasping a branch woven with brambles. Thorns cut into my flesh as I struggled to get untangled.

I swore, pulling myself free as my father snuck toward the sewn man’s blind side, empty handed, as if he were going to try to catch him like Steve Irwin in one of the old episodes of The Crocodile Hunter we used to watch. He was almost to the sewn man when my father stepped on a rotting branch.

The sewn man looked up, turning as the fox continued to crawl along the shore, belly marking a snail trail in the mud. The sewn man tensed as if ready to lunge into the water, but he hesitated, eyes going wide, a closed-lip smile crossing his face. His gaze swiveled from my father to the blind, catching my eye in the copse of birch.

He had known we were there, had known we’d return.

My heart seized. A cold drip slipped down my spine.

My father circled, positioning himself between the man and the water, cutting off any escape route. He extended his arms, palms out, as if to show he meant no harm. Then he knelt, bowing in supplication.

The sewn man’s lips parted, unveiling a number of mismatched teeth, molars and canines borrowed from other mouths. No words came out. Instead, he laughed, each huff like leaves rustling in the wind. He extended a patchwork hand, stroking my father’s shoulder, almost lovingly.

I couldn’t wait any longer.

I sprinted from where I stood in the trees, each heartbeat a heavy throb in my ear. My legs churned, the distance so much farther than it seemed. Time distorted, stretched to breaking. My father’s words from the night before resurfaced: promises to my mother, promises of rebirth, of the next steps he needed to take.

I was beginning to realize what those next steps entailed.

As the revelation blossomed in my mind, my feet went out from under me, heels slipping through mud, the view of the river shifting to a view of the sky as I fell. Mud suctioned onto my back and legs, dampening my clothes, weaving into my hair. I’d almost made it. The fox was beside me, beginning to dig its own grave. The creature, unfazed by my sudden collapse, continued to excavate the earth with its broken forepaws, bones clicking together with each motion.

I fought to get up, but only made it to my knees. They were so close, but so far away, as if inhabiting a world removed from my own. The sewn man released my father’s shoulder and walked to the river’s edge, stepping in, beckoning him with an outstretched hand.

“Dad, don’t. Mom’s gone,” I said, beginning to cry. “But I’m still here.”

Without replying, he waded into the river.

“Dad…” I screamed, but he only shook his head, following the sewn man as he moved into the current, sinking up to his chest.

There was a moment when my father froze, looking at me over his shoulder. Both his head and the sewn man’s head were just above the waterline, floating like twin buoys in the river. I was expecting a final goodbye, some well-wish or even an apology, but he said nothing, only turning back to the man leading him farther downstream. Then he began to paddle hard, legs kicking to keep up with his guide.

In the years since, I’ve seen my father swim away from me again and again, the memory stuck on a loop, choosing the possibility of his dead wife over the reality of his living daughter. I was frozen in that moment, clothes slick with muck and my own blood, the truth of what lay before me incomprehensible, dream logic refusing to align. I couldn’t take my eyes off the river, off the dwindling dot that was the back of my father’s head.

Then I heard the click of bone, the strain of broken paws tunneling beside me. I couldn’t remember a single one of my father’s lectures that contained a fox. Their burial practices were foreign to me, but so was everything else in that moment. I didn’t know if it was shock, or detachment, but I dug my fingers into the cool mud, assisting the fox in unearthing its tomb as the moon climbed the sky, the river lapping at our backs, the kick of my father’s feet fading into the night.

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