The Ecosystem

Julianne Peterman

The animals come for me in the dead of winter.
          I wake around 2 AM, alert, my senses hyper-tuned, on edge. My chest feels tight; I think I am experiencing some anxiety about work. I go into the kitchen for a late-night snack. I toast a piece of sourdough, lather on a thick pat of butter and a pinch of flaky sea salt, and turn on the TV, hoping it will provide some sort of comfort, and with my eyes attached to the screen, I lift the toast to my mouth.
          I feel him in my chest, like heartburn but lumpier, until he escapes from inside me, rocketing up and out of my throat, landing with a gentle pat of slime on my thigh. He’s alive—a spotted toad, brown and bulbous, contracting and expanding. You know how, before you saw your first birth, you imagined the baby would come out slowly, laboriously, as in the root of the word, but instead it slipped out, fast and desperate, as if upon relinquishing its control and resistance to departing from the womb, the baby suddenly insisting on being in the world?
          It is like that when the animals begin to emerge from my throat—they must have been growing. Waiting and reproducing and lingering there. And when they decide to escape, there is no going back, there is no stopping them.


I barely sleep at all the night the toad comes up, shifting restlessly, unable to get comfortable, convinced I can feel more toads rustling under my skin, croaking in the swamp of my stomach, but also, impossibly, beating alongside my heart, passing through my veins.
          I drift off to sleep sometime around 4 AM and wake around 6, telling myself it must have been a nightmare—a perfect one, really, like those where all your teeth fall out or you’re late on the first day of school and the building becomes an unnavigable fun house of mirrors, and when you wake up you can still taste the sticky copper in your mouth, smell the mildewed walls. But, of course, this time it is real.
          I try to eat again anyway, something different, a banana and a spoonful of peanut butter, though I know it is useless as the heartburn sets in. A rainbow trout flies out of me, its spiny fin scraping my esophagus. I freeze, watching it writhe violently there on the floor, its tiny mouth agape, the pink stripe across its mucousy skin twisting and catching the light like a ribbon in the sun.


The urgent care office is clean, but old, and it smells of stale coffee and the receptionist’s Victoria Secret perfume.
          “Erika?” the nurse calls me back through the hallway’s white, fluorescent lights and tall ceilings. I feel ashamed having already given name to my symptoms on the paperwork, and though that is something I know I cannot take back, I believe I still have the chance to turn around, leave the clinic, and disappear somewhere, as if getting treated for my condition will make it a condition, will cement it into reality.
          The nurse takes my blood pressure. I have always had low blood pressure. I beam, patiently awaiting his praise.
          “160 over 100.”
          He looks concerned.
          The doctor comes in and reads my chart, thoroughly, for a long time. He asks me some questions, repeats what I have written, and after a long silence, hands me a Jello cup and asks, “Can you show me?”
          This time it is a roadrunner. The doctor’s uneven breathing is the only sign he is disturbed as he takes great care to maintain his neutral expression. But his eyes do not leave the bird and he takes in the crest of feathers sticking straight up from its head, its beady, ringed eyes darting around the room, its long, hooked beak.
          “It’s real,” he whispers.
          “Yes!” I exclaim, astonished, thrilled, just to be believed. “Yes, it is.”


Alex and I have not been dating long when the animals arrive, and though he is unsure of how to interact with them, or with me, he does not seem to find them grotesque, or upsetting, or even intriguing. In fact, I notice him enter a strange sort of calm, an ineluctable peace in their presence.
          We had a normal early few months of dating before the animals, insatiable for one another, all physical. Most nights looked the same: four drinks deep at some dive bar, we’d scoot closer on our bar stools toward each other, knees knocking in anticipation. He’d pin me against his apartment door as soon as we got home, and we’d fuck against it, my skirt pulled up, my boots still on. He would choke me, sometimes, during sex, and I liked it, the feeling of his fingers pressing into the malleable parts of my throat. At first, I wondered how he knew when to stop, when the pressure crossed that murky border into a little too much, and then I wondered in distress if he knew when to stop, and if I was, perhaps, just lucky. In the mornings, we’d eat flaky croissants between sips of strong coffee in the pale gray mid-morning light outside his neighborhood bakery, hungover and raw and sleep deprived and, we thought, happy.
          It has become easy for him to slip into the role of caretaker—he lays out blankets and tea, rubs my feet, scrapes his nails in gentle rows along my scalp. I am grateful; I say thank you, thank you, thank you. He is impossibly gentle. Still, something is not right. I tell myself it is only that I am not used to being cared for in this way. I crave his calm, like the eerie silence of the ocean before the violence of a large swell. I try to emulate it. I lay on his gray knit couch and stare at the ceiling where it bows. I imagine my body as a hermit crab shell, abandoned on the beach, a vessel for whatever is to come next. What I had once thought of as a whole, functioning system, blood and bones and muscles and organs, is in fact, fragile and hollow and breakable as glass.
          On the best days I try to tell myself I’m just sick, something like period cramps or the flu, when I sit on the floor between his legs, one of his hands weaving through my hair, the other twirling pad thai around a fork. Comforting.
          But the animals have begun to seem anxious, begun to startle in my gut, the feral cats curling behind the tender film of my liver for protection, even the hyenas darting between my vertebrae, wary and on edge.
          I am restless, unable to sleep. I lay awake at night, the nocturnal creatures—owls, moths, foxes, bats—hunting for the worms and vermin beneath my skin.
          I try to settle them, take melatonin and valerian root each evening before bed. It doesn’t work, anyway. They will not settle. What do they know that I don’t?


I am losing weight, rapidly. I go to the doctor every day for as much testing as they feel is ethically and physically possible: blood draws, scans, hours of questioning from public health and social workers flown in, and perhaps most importantly, the IV.
          The IV helps, but the animals absorb most of the fluid. I don’t mind, I want them to have the nutrients. Still, it keeps me alive.
          I watch the nurse move the marker down the scale, the numbers shrinking, and I feel a surge of strange excitement. I tell her I’m concerned about the weight loss too, treat it like the medical mystery it is. But I like feeling the edges of my bones, sharper, closer to the surface, each time I run my hands down my body. I like feeling small and frail and weak. Or maybe, the truth is, I just like being treated that way.


The questioning at the clinic lasts so long I lose any sense of time. Some questions are obvious—what did you eat in the days and weeks leading up to the toad? How big was he? Describe the precise feeling in your chest again; a dull or a sharp pain? A burn?—but some I can’t make sense of, and I choose not to press—where were your maternal grandparents born? Have you ever purchased anything from a thrift store? Is there anyone out there who might want to hurt you?
          One day, the doctor turns to me, takes off his reading glasses and asks me the only question I’ve been asking myself. “Why do you think they came for you?”
          “I don’t know. Maybe they needed a home?”
          “But they’re all wild,” he insists, pleading. “Even the cats and dogs are feral. They don’t need a home.”
          “A place to inhabit, then?” I try. He sighs deeply and rolls his stool away, as if to say, stop asking the wrong questions.


Alex buys a dozen raw oysters. He thinks if I don’t have to chew, if I could simply let their oily, briny bodies slide down my throat, I might get some nutrients. I want to be grateful, but I’m angry. Oysters are not animals, they don’t have brain stems or nerve endings. They don’t belong in my body anymore.
          At his kitchen counter, he poses a chef’s knife at the oyster’s shell, its mottled, grainy edge against the thick of his palm, and I feel the lightning urge to correct him, to rip the knife out of his hand and replace it with the proper oyster knife I know is rattling around in a drawer somewhere, and as I open my mouth to say something, I feel the push and know my cause is hopeless. A small, yellow lizard launches itself up and out of my throat, the force of its tiny body ricocheting against a painting on the wall and sending it clattering to the ground. In a frenzy, Alex drops the knife and the oyster and we spend the next hour trying to coax the lizard, who has scared himself, out from under the couch.
          It is only when we get him safely inside a shoebox, pen-poked with air holes, and I can take a breath that I realize with terror that this time I was not attempting to eat, but to speak.


They start breeding. There are more of them inside me and only so much room, so more of them have started escaping, too, and though I don’t want to admit it, as is the case in any natural environment, in any ecosystem, they are dying inside of me too, their bodies eaten by the others or decomposing, reabsorbing.
          They start coming up more frequently. Doves, turtles, pheasants. Giraffes, lampreys, beetles. These are not animals that live together, like this, in one home, anywhere on earth. My body is not an ecosystem that makes sense, it holds no logic. I am afraid of what else may come out of me. And as they are born, live, fuck, die inside of me, whatever other life was there before is beginning to die too, or perhaps, to be replaced.
          It is as effortless to stop speaking as it was to stop eating. What I had once thought a primal urge—to speak and be heard—I have so easily surrendered. It is freeing to lose the possibility of speaking, the choice so fraught before, not really a choice at all. This freedom isn’t radical, not in the way I’d hoped for. But if this is it, if this is what has been given to me, I’ll take it, this bit of ease, this bit of peace.


“This is unsustainable,” the doctor says to me one day, gently but unintentionally, as if it
had been a mantra or a prayer running through his head, finally making it out of his mouth. As he moves the ultrasound wand across my abdomen, his eyes trace the image on the screen. I keep mine on my vitals on the monitor, the lines loping up mountains and down valleys.
          Even if I could respond, I wouldn’t have anything to say.
          I’m not sure what he means by it, if he intends for me to stop coming to the clinic, or if he feels his own sort of shame in his inability to figure out my ailment and my body, this broken vessel. I leave the exam room, the weight of my bag slapping against my thigh, and I pass the reception desk without making another appointment.
          Later, when I see the clinic’s number light up on my screen, I think they’re calling to ask me to come in again tomorrow, but it’s just the receptionist collecting payment.


I can’t get comfortable at Alex’s. I try to keep utterly still now, like moving through an
MRI scanner, because there are so many of them now, their claws slivering my rib bones, their razor teeth millimeters from the thin, tender chambers of my heart.
          We are watching some action movie. I shift on my left side, then my right, kick my feet out from under the blanket, get my toes caught between the dark, shedding knits and purls. All the while, the animals protest. On screen, the climactic battle begins. Knees and elbows and knives meet eyeballs and groins, blood squelching and dripping from tender body parts. Alex pulls his gaze away to watch my restless movement.
          “Are you okay?” he asks.
          I nod.
          “Okay. You’re okay.” He pats the bones of my shins as reassurance.
          I think of how he used to pin my wrists above me, pulling and trapping strands of hair on the pillow, and how when his grip loosened, I would lift my wrists gently, so subtly we could pretend I hadn’t even moved, to remind him to keep the pressure there.
          I can’t name it, can’t find it in anything he’s said or done tonight, but I know it now, that he is willing me to be still. How much fucking quieter could I possibly get? I want to scream, but I can feel the papery crackle of snakeskins beneath my breastplate, their wriggling reptilian bodies ready to make their break for it if I open my throat. They are getting to know me better.
          Alex never asked if he could choke me. It had just happened early on, and since I liked it, I thought maybe he had an intuition about it, maybe he knew what girls like me wanted.
          I have been telling myself his contentment comes from being in proximity to the animals. But as the violence on screen persists, as a knife is dragged down a man’s spine, flaying his skin, as Alex’s face remains expressionless through it all, it becomes clear to me now that he likes what the animals have done to me. It’s not even that he enjoys caring for me. He likes me like this, I think.
          There is so little left of me, unable to speak, unable to eat, too weak to stand for long periods of time, so little left for him to resist. And yet he has found it, the thing he can resist, and he will always be looking for it, the slight tremor of my leg, the discomfort, whatever it is he can will to be silent and still. I am barely here and I can feel him wishing there were even less of me.
          I rise from the couch without a word. The animals do not maim me even with all this movement, as if they know. I wrap my scarf around my neck, place my arms inside my puffy down jacket, and as Alex asks, “Where are you going?” over and over again, coming toward me in fear and shock and confusion, I pull my beanie over my ears in an effort to muffle him, and reach for the doorknob. His hand lands on mine, frantically attempting to stop me from twisting it.
          “What did I do?” he begs. “What did I do?”
          I can barely hear him now over the sounds of the animals, the dissonant pitch of their rustle, the flap of their wings, the cry of their mating calls, the gnashing of their teeth. The heat of thrill and fear blossoms in my chest, as I jerk the door open with a violent swing and sprint down flights and flights of stairs. My body is moving, fast, but I can hear them now, I want to laugh, to scream with joy, I feel more in tune with them than I ever have, I am no longer ignoring them, I am listening, intently, and I can feel them all, their wants, their desires, their rhythms. I don’t know if Alex chases after me, but he is not there by the time I reach the lobby. I emerge onto the busy street, wind crackling at my cheeks, ice crystals forming inside my nostrils.
          The city noise stops me in my tracks, tires whipping dirty sleet into the air, the wind awakening the trash bags lying on the sidewalk, their thin plastic film snapping back and forth like ghost arms, the ambulance sirens and the deafening chatter of people, shoes tapping against the concrete, voices in every pitch and register clattering in the air, hundreds of cymbals crashing into each other at once. And yet it is nothing compared to the resistance inside me, the animals protesting, squawking, sprinting along the ropes of muscle. I turn inward. I listen. They tell me where to go.

Julianne Peterman is a writer and teacher living in Portland, Oregon. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from University of New Mexico, where she received the Rudolfo Anaya Fellowship. This is her first publication.

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