I.          When people ask me what a raccoon tastes like, I always lie. Sometimes, I quip gamey or
             tough. I’ll say, Raccoon kind of tastes like your body in mid-July under North Carolina
             sunshine. Sweaty skin. Whatever I say, though, I know I am lying.

II.        Raccoons have many names. Ahrah-koon-em. Powhatan, meaning “he who scratches with
             the hands.” Mapachtli. Nahuatl. “He who takes everything in his hands.” With fingers like
             human children, they rummage their way through lifetimes of riverbank wading or trash
             raiding. Raccoons scratch to make sense.

III.       Darcy caught his first raccoon in November, a whisper before mating season, when the
             Carolina ground firms up and the air blows both warm and cold in a strip tease of
             seasonality. He found the trap’s claws snapped around the animal’s back paw. Clamp the
             fingers, a raccoon’s greatest asset, and you prevent it from picking itself out of the cold,
             stinging metal.

             Experienced trappers say it’s best practice to shoot a trapped animal point blank, execution
             style. But Darcy couldn’t store the proper gun, some regulatory guidelines I don’t quite
             understand, so he was forced to murder in the next best style: stuffing the air from the
             raccoon’s chest. Darcy struck the back of its skull––stunning it, flattened the season’s first
             kill against the frosted ground, and butterflied his birch brown work boots and 6’4” frame
             on its chest. Death by suffocation.

             Later that morning, I found him behind my house, painted with blood, skinning the animal
             on the trunk of his Ford Focus. He’d built a makeshift operating table, strewn sheets over
             the ground and car, lined up dissection tools like a surgeon’s kit. He pulled a
             thick-breasted knife between the pelt and rust-red muscles, his hands struggling to steady,
             and placed the fileted pieces into a Ziploc. Darcy told me the story of the kill: It was
             horrible. Took forever. My feet felt his last breath.

             My ethicality didn’t matter to the raccoon. It was afraid. And to it, I’m a monster.

             We roasted the animal a few days later and pried dry, stringy muscles from his tendons.
             The meat caught our teeth. I tasted him for days.

IV.        Before dams and cities and steamboats, raccoons foraged for food along riverbanks.
             Known as “opportunistic eaters,” they plucked thick-bellied amphibians from streams,
             wrapped bulbous earthworms around their fingers, and colored the fur around their mouth
             with ruby-red raspberries. I imagine that back then, the raccoon tasted juicy, plump. Fresh
             even.

             Then man came with his trash can. Forestscapes morphed into concrete jungles and the
             raccoon learned to pick out new foods: Pizza. Cheesecake. Chicken bones.

V.          I took Nolan, my boyfriend, foraging on one of our first dates. We ambled along a lakeside,
             and I picked up a few slick bunches of honey mushrooms from a lump of decay. He pulled
             me on top of him while we sat on the shore and he pointed to the birds flying by. Great
             blue heron. Double crested cormorant. We kissed until the blue sky bloomed orange, then
             drove to his house, where we sipped on raspberry wine and ate pasta soaked with butter              
             and the mushroom we’d gathered. I woke up at midnight, wrapped in his sheets with a              
             wrench in my stomach, clenching my jaw in pain. I was terrified that I poisoned him.

VI.       If you Google what raccoon tastes like, some people on the internet tell you it is like dark              
             meat at Thanksgiving, but greasier, more tender. They say use fragrant herbs, thyme and              
             oregano, to disguise the wild punch of raccoon sex.

VII.      Last week, my sister watched a raccoon emerge from our pool, its legs water-matted and             
             dripping with chlorine. Our Florida home backs up to a marsh, where anoles scurry,             
             passionfruit drops fertile like eggs from spring hens, and frogs swim and sing the soft tune             
             of summer. The marsh’s air is heavy with the aroma of Mother Nature’s bounty. And yet              
             the raccoon chose our sterile, screened-in hot tub as his wash bin.

IX.          During one of my only fights with my Nolan, I didn’t understand what wound him up. I              
                tried to coax words out of him. We sat six inches apart in his bed, silently, for hours before             
                he stammered that he was afraid of love, scared he’d shatter and I’d be collateral damage.

                I let my emotions settle slow as dust through the muggy silence, then wrenched my body
                away from his and left to walk home. As I shut his front door, I heard a clanging from
                across the porch. There was a raccoon, still as night, perched under the garbage can lid,
                juggling a pack of pre-shredded cheddar cheese in her hands. I froze, knowing that I
                already felt too feral, couldn’t risk rabies, and watched her. She caught my gaze. Dropped
                the trash cheese on the ground. Crawled away. She crept like waste, the swelling of the
                bottom of a cesspool.

                Sometimes, when I feel most alone, I press my nose against a mirror and watch my sewer
                eyes churn. That night, the moon was nearly round but not quite full, and the moonbeams
                thrashed against the black, bare dirt around the garbage can. Through the chalk-strewn
                night, I saw myself in that raccoon, the way my sadness moves like ooze.

                That night it felt like Nolan was skinning me. Roasting my body over hot coals. But since
                then, he’s held me so tenderly, so intently, like cradling an egg.

X.           Raccoons only dip their food in water when they’re captive.

                I once watched a YouTube video of zookeepers feeding raccoons cotton candy. The
                animals, recognizing the pink blob as a treat, gingerly dipped it in a small, black reflective
                pool. Immediately, the spun sugar dissolved. Their hands swatted and swatted and swatted
                at the water, water running clear through their frantic fingers. Finally, they ambled
                offscreen, heads bowed.

XI.         The city of Toronto spent $31 million on raccoon-proof garbage cans. The effort lasted
               three days. “There’s No Stopping Toronto’s ‘Uber-Raccoon’” – NPR

XII.        When my Grandma Murrell was on her deathbed, her hospital cot looked like a coffin.
                She was a Texan woman, fierce and whipsmart, who’d earned a degree in aerospace
                engineering in the 1940s but whose real skill was commanding our frenzied family. The
                last time she went to the hospital, she’d been puking up her own shit.

                My mom flew from Florida to North Carolina to bid our collective goodbyes, but by the
                time she’d parked her borrowed car in the hospital parking lot, my grandma was faded.
                Pneumonia clouded her lungs, and her digestive tract was muddled. Our matriarch was
                dying, weak as knees.

                Moments before she uttered a last gasp, my mom cradled her hand, its skin as brittle and
                cold and mottled as used tissue paper, and told my grandmother we loved her. Grandma
                was paralyzed and speechless but she pulsed her hand in my mom’s.

XIII.       I thought about grandma as I watched Darcy skin the raccoon. Brain dead patients
                sometimes raise their hands to God, a movement called the Lazarus reflex. It is
                near-dead’s ill-fated, desperate attempt at living. As the knife grazed its muscles, I
                saw its joints twitch. The head was still intact, its eyes reflecting silver against the
                car’s chromatica. His pupils, I think, flickered up at me.

                The second trapping went quicker; Darcy said its breath slid out in twenty seconds,
                smooth as the January breeze. But the suffocation tugged at him. When you kill
                something, you are forced to stare the harsh realities of life in the eyes.

                In an Instant Pot, we sauteed onions, carrots, and celery, then added three scarlet
                thighs and cranked the pressure up. Mirepoix raton laveur. With another friend, we
                sipped cheap, bitter red wine and discussed our new and fading new love affairs and
                smelled the air grow thick with musk. Next year, I realized, we’d ride ourselves
                across the globe, cleaving our bodies from each other and our lovers and other
                Important People. I felt heavy, but drank until the meat emerged like butter, falling
                off the bone before we could tong it out of the pot.

                Darcy said mating season imbued the meat with a tang from perfume intended to
                attract sows. Metallic turkey. Burnt venison. Basketball socks.

XV.         The New York skyline contains a thousand suns that never set. I realized The City is
                the nocturnal creature’s enemy a few weeks ago while my boyfriend and I wandered
                around Prospect Park during a love-rushed sunset, a few days before we collapsed
                onto trains to separate cities. We walked along golden hour flushed sidewalks, and
                stumbled upon the Camperdown elm, a knobbly, gnarled tree with branches so
                dense they had to be propped up by metal scaffolding. As the sun sank gently below
                the broad-bodied elm, at once the lampposts ignited, the skyline erupting with that
                pointed, stunning light that only LEDs know how to glow.

                Holding hands and bumping bodies, Nolan and I passed under a bridge. A raccoon
                scurried above us, and all three of us stopped. Hands gripping to the rafters, he
                peeked his masked face over the railing and locked my gaze. Behind him, the
                bridge’s black, lampless underbelly was speckled with constellations built by grime:
                chewed bubble gum big dippers, sprayed graffiti Orion, a sludge-dappled asteroid
                belt.

                I know that miles above the bridge, the sky must have shined, but light pollution and
                smog obscured any semblance of a natural starscape. So, this underbridge wasteland
                was the raccoon’s place of perpetual night. He broke my gaze and rustled to his
                I-beam bedroom.

                I bit my lip and gripped my boyfriend’s hand. Wrapped my fingers harder, tighter.
                Clenched my jaw, tasted blood.

                When people ask how raccoon tastes, I want to ask, Have you ever tasted despair?