SmokeLong Quarterly

Mom fed dried apricots to the family of raccoons under our house. Sometimes I crawled under the foundation, lay starfished in the wheatgrass, and waited for them to bite. They never did. Mom dragged me out, and I emerged with a spider in my hair, or a milk snake coiled around my ankle, beetles squashed onto my dress. “Do you want rabies?” she said. When she was young, her brother got rabies and took a bite out of her wrist. He stayed with us for Christmas last year. He showed up with a giant baguette and she slammed the door in his face and left him on the porch. She locked herself in the bedroom. Moles splattered his forehead. Overbite. Noodly hair. He resembled my brother and that scared me. We spoke through the window. “Are you thirsty?” I said. He said no, and he ate a fistful of snow. “Are you hungry?” I said. He waved the baguette like a magic wand. The next morning he was gone, and that’s when the raccoons showed up. “Call the exterminators,” my brother said. But Mom said the raccoons would nourish the soil and cement the foundation. A month later, when a hurricane flattened the neighbor’s house, she thanked the raccoons for protecting us. She offered them blackberries and my frog plushie which they butchered. She mothered the raccoons more than me. I crawled under the house more often, hoping to become a raccoon. Perhaps in the darkness, in the mud, I’d grow fur and a bushy tail. Maybe I’d get rabies and bite her, scar her. Mom showed everyone the bite marks from her brother. She never let us forget. Every night, my brother massaged coconut oil on the scar—still inflamed, mountained on her wrist. She poked the scar, dug her fingernails into the flesh to keep the wound ripe. I once saw her hold a lighter to her wrist. “He doesn’t remember biting me,” she said.