Lately, when I’ve been walking the dog at night or speeding through a neighborhood on bike, I keep thinking that inanimate objects are animal carcasses: every crushed plastic bag a sunken bird, every bean pod crackling beneath my feet a roach, every stray branch a grotesquely elongated rat, somehow...everything seems dead except for the humans. The worst is when a plastic bag flutters in the wind, and I think oh god, that poor road-pizza raccoon is still alive, someone should put a stop to it.

One time, way before this novel pandemic, an alerted scuffling came from the mouse trap in the pantry. When my dad pulled tt out, the mouse was still alive with its jaw trapped under the plastic wedge, forcing its mouth open. It didn’t look very wide to me, but I bet it felt like choking on a Jawbreaker. A tiny starburst of blood painted the floor of the trap, and the mouse, dangling by its broken jaw, spun its beady black eyes around the kitchen. My dad let it out the back door and put the trap by the sink to get cleaned off. I thought I should’ve just decapitated the mouse with a knife and cutting board; they were right there, and the mouse had already been in pain for god knows how long. Then again, I wouldn’t have known what to do with all the stuff that comes out of a mouse’s severed neck, and I would’ve had to scrub every last speck of blood out of the board, which is scarred with eye-of-needle-thin white cracks from countless peppers and apples. I still don’t know which is crueler: chopping the head off of a suffering mammal and then promptly vomiting, or letting said mammal drag itself into the wintry cold, hastening the congealing on its jaw as it waits instead of runs—a fox will be there soon. That’s what my dad said, that the mouse wouldn’t last long, anyway. I shouldn’t make a mess. Still, it hung there by its jaw while he was carrying it outside, and I hope I never have to know that feeling.

Well, for all of my fretting over thinking I’ve seen dead animals, I actually almost did a few weeks back (I think that’s when it was, it’s hard to keep track of time beyond a cluster of hours these days), also on the dog walk with Rango, who doesn’t really go after small animals like most dogs do. That time, I actually thought hoagie, so it got tossed out the window. It was a snake—and it was not actually dead. Right in the middle of the road, balanced between the pavement and the manhole, a snake (smaller than the one by the pond that we worried my grandparents’ dog Clyde would go after) lay split open, swerving its head left and right. Like it was dancing to fill the time between cars just missing it, after that first one landed just wrong. I’d been taught in elementary school that reptiles have yellow blood or green blood or something, but this snake was scabbing over in slick red and scarlet. I couldn’t tell if the white underneath all the blood was the spine or eggs or something else I didn’t understand. I was with my dad then, too, and he told me then, too, to leave it be so that something else—another car, today—could finish the job. That time, I knew he was right: to die in the grass next to the sidewalk might smell nicer than the hot, tire-skidded pavement, but that raw inevitability would slow down to last until dawn, maybe longer.

I think it was after that that I really started seeing dead animals, or the specters of them, at the very least, in the form of litter from plants and humans alike. I wonder if the cycle stopped yesterday, though, when I was out biking, and I actually glimpsed a dead falcon tucked next to the curb in a neighboring town, its head buried deep into its tan and brown ruffled breast. Anonymous, small. I couldn’t really tell then what kind of a bird it was. I wanted to give it a proper burial of sorts, but I was on bike and really trying not to get sick in any way, so I left it, and didn’t even pump the brakes to take a good, long look at whoever this bird had been. I wonder now if we humans get some pleasure out of dead animals, like we get to take care of them now that they’re gone because we trashed their homes when we were here: plowing them over with rubber and metal, choking them with our chip bags, letting our electric wires fray and drape until they catch fire...

Around this time in 2019, my cousins were visiting for Memorial Day, and we found a thin snake, just slightly flattened, tossed to the side of the road. So we named him Geoffrey (yes, spelled funny), Geoffrey Snak, and we buried him in the motherly roots of a tree just outside of our fence, where the dogs wouldn’t find him, because Clyde has been known to wear snakes like long, wispy mustaches. Suddenly, Snak was a soul, who had a fun life that my sister and I could briefly salute on the way to the back porch after school every day.

What marvelous salute would the falcon deserve? Twenty-one shots? A stoic song or two? A cross made out of popsicle sticks with a conjured, silly name scribbled on it in fickle graphite, as my friends and I once did for a rotting sparrow that we found when we were seven, still too young to understand the curled lip with which our culture faces death? Before we saw the dead crow in the treehouse, its eye socket swirling with tiny green maggots only visible by their hurried, washing machine cycle motion, as the rest of the team dove up and down amid the black feathers?

It must have been that same year, first grade, that my teacher had us talk about birds. She said that if we ever saw a sick or injured one, people would tell us not to touch it, but we should gently pick it up and get a nice shoebox with some grass in it. I’m not sure if she was even supposed to tell us that in a public school, but it stuck with me, and I believed it until I looked that crow in its nonexistent eye, replaced by insects so vigorous I should’ve heard a hum or applause for their own hard work. We were supposed to treat the world with kindness, all creatures; we were supposed to respect nature, and therefore maybe we’d catch the hint about respecting our peers (we didn’t).

Do we respect dead animals, though? We “ew” at roadkill, an instinctive reaction to our sadness the bigger and fuzzier the creature ironed into the freeway is. We bury castaway birds in shallow graves next to the pansies, marking them so that we know where to keep the family pets from—or is it the destiny of prey to be eventually consumed, rather than turn to carrion mush beneath the soil and be watered, expected to push up tiny daisies? Either way, we’re human, so we bury animals in a downsized parallel of how we bury our own (our own do come first, after all). It makes us feel better, maybe like someone will care and even chuckle a little bit at our own funerals. Death remains funny and ritualistic as long as we’re emotionally distant from it, as long as we’re not made to gawk into the coffins of our family and friends.

They’ve shat on our cars, scared our children, and eaten every garden project we’ve so much as dreamt of—they give almost as good as they get (almost). We, though—in burying the dead of another species, we are clearing our communities of an annoyance that these animals can offer us even after death, and we’re making ourselves and each other feel useful, creative, and reassured while we’re at it.

Perhaps we should be heroes for getting out the shoebox full of grass, even if it’s too late to call animal control for an emergency bird surgery. Our animal burials echo our human burials, and perhaps we are doing the creatures a service by shielding them from our twisted inventions from here on out. We are acknowledging that humankind killed this animal (most of the time) and that we should thus be responsible for its burial. That we should be mindful of its lingering presence. That the animal will live on in our minds as we wonder what its very non-human life was like before that torn beer can, student driver, or someone’s bored cat showed up.

Most important is that we do not throw the animal into the trash, suffocating it with plastic before sending it off to be incinerated in some distant wasteland stinking of mildew and barely-expired food. No, we offer this animal what we know as human beings, and we start to notice its cousins in the trees and under our boots. Dead animals, when they’re not being consumed, present humans with a complex set of tools, each of which has an evil twin of sorts: express disgust, or sympathy. Offer a burial in the dirt, or the garbage. Think about the possibilities of disease, or a past, an experience, that lies beyond our human comprehension.