gnawing.

I always wonder where the animals go in these things. When snipers and bombs and fires take the land and the houses and the families. I think about the Discovery channel show Life After People that I used to watch after school on Tuesdays. An episode about pets. How long it will take the dogs to break the windows – how most of them have been trained not to damage things and so will die inside living rooms and kitchens just because they know too well how to be good.

I wonder how long the girl in today’s video has been without windows. Has been without a home. Someone else broke her windows. Someone else tore down the walls. She is too good. She could never do that kind of damage.

She looks tired in a way a child shouldn’t be able to be tired. She clutches the orange kitten in her lap as if he is keeping her awake. As if, so long as she holds onto him, they will both continue to exist. His eyes are saucers, and it’s not hard to feel his distress and hers as one thing. His back feet kick out behind him. His tail flicks. He wants away. He hates being bound. He doesn’t understand survival here – or maybe he understands it far better than we can.

[10 days after the people have gone, defrosting freezers provide a temporary water supply to the pets still indoors. But there are no more boxes of kibble and tuna delivered on autoship. No more leftovers in take-out boxes or chicken bones in the garbage. No more debris at all. Just emptiness and empty stomachs.]

“We are both hungry,” this girl tells us. She and her cat. She and her father who she waits for. She and everyone around her. They eat oil and bread. It is not enough. She longs for better, for familiar things.

She longs for chicken.

[2 weeks, and the wolves and wild animals are moving in. The domestics are bound, though. They rely on the memory of their humans. They die because of it.]

The cat is gone from her lap in the next frame. It’s difficult to imagine that she let him go of her own volition. The despair is right on the surface of her, in the space between her knees and her chest where the cat had been. In the hollows of her eyes and her ribs. I wonder without wanting to if the cat will return. If he knows the comfort he provides. If some little part of his wild brain knows that not all humans drop bombs and set fires and shoot guns.

Or maybe his survival instincts are really just so superior to ours, and he’ll run as fast as his little kitten feet can carry him to burrow down someplace only he can reach to wait this out.

[In 25 years, only the feral and wild beasts are left.]

It’s too hot, she tells us. There’s no electricity. No light. No food. She waits outside, where she’s not designed to live. Not any more. Not like this. Never like this. But she can’t run like the cat can. She can’t escape the nature of this like he might.

There are thousands of holes in the ground, but none of them are safe.

[150 years after the people have gone, there is no such thing as a home, no such thing as domestication. There is only the Earth and the air and the ground and the craters. The animals revert to their ancestors. The dogs to the wolves. The cats to themselves. It turns out they’ve retained the instinct to survive even with all our inbreeding. Even with our training and scolding and praise. They run, and they adapt, and they live despite everything that came before.

They hunt.

They survive in spite of, not because of, us.]

_____________________

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Read more from mypoetmuse and project creator, Matt Cantor @Gaza_Closed_Captions