Scavenging Delirium
by Sophie Dubber
When I was propped up in bed one night, I saw the silhouette of a cat-sized hulking mass limping across my balcony. The shape of a raccoon is very distinct. Their backs are perfectly rounded, and their snouts are pointed, and their little paws are little.
Raccoons are phenomenally dexterous. They have opposable thumbs, and that’s how they started getting in. They would lift up the garbage can lid as easily as I could, and claw open the trash bags with their little hands and hold the trash to their pointed snouts in both hands, and eat it methodically, like a child eats an orange. Balancing on the edge of garbage cans, they could have been praying.
Seeing my garbage spilled out like that—every minute I spent cleaning it up, I became more enraged.
The first nights I taped the lid shut with duct tape, and every time, they ripped it open and feasted.
After that, I used ropes with hooks on the ends to fasten the lid shut; they unhooked the ropes with their human hands and feasted. I could hear them rustling outside while they did it.
So, I taped the lid shut with duct tape, and used ropes with hooks on the ends, and covered it all with a tarp. I found an old shot gun that I didn’t remember I had and put it on the table with the barrel facing where the garbage can is, and I tried to stay up for a while. But I fell asleep, and when I woke up the tape was ripped, the ropes were unhooked, and the sheet was completely gone. It was nowhere to be found, and I don’t know how.
I had to kill them, and I had to keep them away. I had been underestimating them. They were smarter than me and they were laughing at me. They were all going to sleep with raccoon bellies full of my garbage and laughing to themselves because of how I am not as smart as they are.
They started ripping open and unhooking my mind and infiltrating my dreams. One night, I was walking, but I couldn’t move and then the carpet was one big stampede of raccoons running in a big tight group under my feet and I tried to step on their little necks, but they were running too fast and I couldn’t move. I wished that would happen in my room because then I could shut the door and they’d all be inside my room instead of outside, laughing at me to themselves.
I realized they learned about the garbage can because it is adjacent to the tree in my backyard and they all must live in that tree and sleep there. One day I realized, how stupid am I? I could just move the garbage can so it’s underneath the back porch and then you can’t lift up the lid at all because it hits the bottom of the porch.
Sliding it under, I could feel a layer of skin grow over my heart. I felt safe because I thought it would work.
I went to sleep and when I woke up there was no mess. The garbage can had little handprints scratching at the lid, and I knew they had tried last night and even though they are smarter than me, I won—and they lost. The paw prints were so frantic. They had all tried so hard, but I had won, and my garbage was in my garbage can instead of their stomachs.
Throughout the day, the layer of skin around my heart got tighter and tighter. It was constricting my heart and I could feel it. My collar bones got heavy and I kept having to go look back at the garbage can to see if they were inside, even though it was the daytime. The garbage wasn’t feeding my garbage can. It wasn’t being absorbed into its walls and giving it energy, but the raccoons were up in the tree and watching me in my house because they couldn’t sleep because they were hungry.
Maybe this night, because I know they are hungry, I could come outside and pick them off one by one with my shotgun as they come out of the tree.
I couldn’t eat a thing, and the sun was getting lower and lower in the sky. I wanted to scream, but that would scare the raccoons. The skin around my heart was getting thicker and heavier and my legs were getting thinner and lighter, so I went outside to check the garbage can just before it got dark.
Looking at it under the porch, out of the raccoons’ reach didn’t make my heart shed the skin. It made the skin rough, and it started to hurt so bad I got a rash all over my chest. I seized the garbage can and dragged it back out, adjacent to the tree. Then the skin dissolved into my bloodstream, so I turned around and went back inside, and I was so happy for the raccoons I couldn’t sleep.
I heard rustling in the night, and I just knew they were feasting. When the sun came, I went to check, and they had eaten most of my trash and there was trash all over the ground.
I cleaned up all the trash and went to my room. I used my duct tape to hang all my blankets from the wall, over the windows, so the sun couldn’t get in because I decided I needed to become nocturnal for the raccoons, and so I did. I started going to sleep when the sun was high in the sky and waking up when it was dark, so I didn’t miss the raccoons.
The raccoons would come every night and I stopped eating so much all for myself so the raccoons could have more trash.
Sometimes, when I slept, one of the heavier blankets would fall and I’d wake up naked and blinded by a sudden outpouring of painful sunlight. Every evening I would take down the blankets so I could see if a raccoon came by.
I was so happy to watch the raccoons from the inside. They would wake up and I would get to wake up and listen to them outside. There had to be hundreds of them because they make so much noise.
I stopped cleaning up their garbage when it was everywhere because they might come back and want some and if they did, it would need to be there.
Every night I became more passionate about the raccoons and I wanted to see them and watch them come by my window. It became very difficult to sit by while they were right outside, because I was missing everything.
I once sat on the back porch to be closer to them while they feasted. But after only a few minutes, they hadn’t come out already and I started to asphyxiate and cry because I thought I was stopping them from coming out, so I went back inside.
As the months or days went by, I started to look different. My skin was pale. My veins were periwinkle and they showed through, even on my face, my forehead. When I looked in the mirror, the veins moved like tree branches in the wind and were very blue and started to weave out of my skin and root themselves under my eyelids.
One day I decided I had never touched a raccoon. Thus far, I had shown such restraint, but now I was someone who had never felt what a raccoon felt like.
I went out in the backyard and put my hand flat on the tree, and then the tree asked me to climb into it and so I did. I climbed up into the tree and sat in it. The tree’s branches were curious about me. They lifted up my toes and it tickled, and they looked under my ear and that tickled, too.
The tree was in love with me and I with it, so it wrapped its branches around me. I let them embrace me and rock me and I was like an insect in a cocoon.
The tree loved me so much and it was cuddling me and it had its branches around me. But then it went on for too long and I realized it was trying to kill me.
It would keep me there forever and I’d decompose in the tree and the raccoons would laugh and eat my skin like children eating an orange. I tried to move my shoulders, but the branches were so tight around me. They started pressing against my temples and it was the most painful thing I’d ever experienced. The tree squeezed me and squeezed me, and my veins tried to slither out of my head, and my fingers turned blue because it was squeezing my hands and then I woke up on the ground and the sun was up.
I crawled back inside and took a shower and I noticed there were hundreds of marks and scratches from when the tree hit me.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew that when I was getting killed by the tree, all the hundreds of raccoons were up in the leaves looking down at me and they were probably moderately concerned, but overall complacent.
It was a betrayal of the highest order. I had done so much for the raccoons and they knew I did, because I told them, and then they let the tree try to kill me.
I realized the raccoons never liked me and I was stupid all along. The rustling, the little raccoon noises, they were speaking to me. They were speaking about me. They were telling me I was so stupid because they were getting in, and I wasn’t allowed in and I was inside all along.
They respected me when I won, because they thought I was smart, but when I let them win, they thought I was losing, and I was just so stupid, and I didn’t notice. I did notice! I gave them the gift of my garbage and they thought it was an accident! All the raccoons, at any time—at any time—could have walked right up to my door, and I was waiting for them. They could have walked right up to my door and they could have asked me to come join them. They could have asked me; they knew I was there. They knew I was inside waiting, but they didn’t because they didn’t understand.
It would take me years to peel the garbage in the backyard up from the ground. But I still had the shotgun on the dining room table.
So, I tucked the hanging veins behind my ears and took the shotgun and I stood, waiting, outside the back door. Sure enough, with nightfall, the raccoons all came to the garbage can. I stepped outside and they didn’t run away back to the tree. They looked at me and then kept eating. I took my shotgun and I walked as close to them as I could, and I shot a raccoon in its skull, and all the other raccoons screamed and jumped and ran away into the field, but the dead raccoon stayed.
The dead raccoon fell off the garbage can, and its face was a big bloody cave.
I was smiling so big it hurt my cheeks and I dropped the shotgun and ran out to the raccoon and bent down and put my hand in its face.
I picked up the raccoon and threw it against the back door. It slammed against it with a dull thud and fell down to the ground. I picked it up by the tail, thin underneath the fluff, and, smiling, smashed it against the porch a few times.
Dear God, the raccoon is dead. I killed the raccoon because it’s dead because I killed it, oh dear god. The raccoon is bloody but so are my hands because it’s dead. The dead raccoon looked up at me slowly with its brutalized face and told me it was my mother. I killed my mother, and my mother was a raccoon. My mother, the dead raccoon limped over to my feet and I started stroking the fur on its head. It wasn’t very soft.
Half of My mother’s eye was hanging by a little thread, and the hole was pink and bloody, but a section of her snout was so intact that little tiny teeth showed through if you pried open her mouth with your fingers. The little hands were limp, and they had tough little black pads on the bottom.
I knew what I had done, and that I was in big trouble for it, but now I got to feel this dead raccoon that I loved, and from which I was born, in my hands.
I held my mother in my hands for some moments longer and then, after placing her down on the doormat, tentatively stepped into the back yard.
I was going to go touch the tree and feel that it loved me, because the bark was vibrating, but I stopped walking when I heard the feet. Thousands of little feet stampeding toward me from the field. The raccoons had coordinated out in the field, and they were deciding what to do about me.
I lay down flat on the ground and felt the garbage against my bare back. I tried to close my eyes and be at peace, but I was too afraid, so I stared up into the sky and smiled. My mother was dead on the porch and I was waiting to join her.
But when the stampede engulfed me, when all I could feel was those little black toes on my skin, I didn’t feel death. I felt nativity.
The raccoons took off my skin and cut off my legs and my arms and used my fingers and toes and arms to fashion me four little legs and twenty little claws. They painted me grey and black and sculpted my face and ripped out my hair and ripped out little tufts of their own fur to cover me. They flipped me over and gave me a tail and then I got to my feet and scurried with them all around and I got to eat my garbage and I got to be inside, and I got to laugh, and I got to huddle with them in a big ball and sleep. And I showed them how to sleep under the porch because I can’t sleep in the tree and we all are in love with each other.