Trembling With Fear 02/13/2022

Specimen by Ashley B. Davis

The only plausible explanation was they had left him. They had been here, making the noises of men eating, shitting, shouting, and then, he could only hear the wind through the dense flora. Notes and ink in hand, he broke through the trees to a vacant shore. The sky, divided by the outline of mast and sail not an hour before, was infinite now, as though the S. S. Finch had never been.  

He sat on the beach, probing the gravity of the situation as he might poke at a cavity. He could only pull his thoughts from the purpose of his mission for so long before they returned to circle his hypothesis like vultures: the call of the potoo (genus: nyctibius, species: N. griseus) had brought him here. Specifically, their declining use of their call and the gradual decrease in the size of their vocal organ, the syrinx. He aimed to prove their means of communication were changing. Though his mind was back with his samples, waiting to be tagged, recorded, and gathered, night would soon fall, and all he had were his books, recording tools, and the clothes on his back.

He looked back at the twilit foliage. This island, which provided perfect isolation for the purest results of his work, had excited him at first glance from the galloping bow of the ship. Looking at it now, he felt a cold, slithering uncertainty.

He turned back to the horizon, waiting for the crew to remember him and turn back. Eventually, he fell to reviewing his notes, eyes steadily straining until the ink was no longer distinguishable from the darkness. He was a warm-blooded creature, and so, knew he would need to build a fire. Mostly, he wanted the light to continue evaluating his notes. 

Unfortunately, he was an educated, civilized man, pale and weak and wholly unskilled at building a fire. 

Did not your ancestors ignite the element of the gods with a flick of a twig? It could have been a whisper on the wind. The air was so wet and heavy, any hint of a breeze would immediately die.

After gathering kindling, he found a flint that had been left by the charred remains of the fire the crew had built only the night before. Sometime later, with the passable campfire hissing and popping, he hid his burned fingers from the heat. He sat in the circle of light with the pelt of darkness pressing in. 

#

He knew he was hungry. Not because the pangs in his body made him yearn for the spectacular roast mutton and potatoes made by his landlady. But rather, the inconvenient ache sent a signal to his brain that he did not have much time. Begrudgingly, he thought of the stale bread crusts and slivers of salted meat they came down to when the wind had stalled on their journey here, and the ship sat creaking for days. The men had become vicious, calling the journey an omen. 

He knew he was thirsty. He’d only been able to gather a meager supply of water during the last tempest. Because entire days often passed him over while he was lost in the galaxies of a dew droplet on one of the wide fronds, it had taken him the better part of a week, sick with hunger, to finally catch one of the pale fish that came closest to the beach.

God, how long had it been since the crew had forgotten him? He had been marking the days at the corner of his notes. As his ink supply dwindled, he stopped in favor of continuing his records of the potoo. 

#

He was certainly starving. He could feel his ribs and the sharp angle of his mandible. And yet, he sat under a wide frond during a storm to observe a family with their new chick. The mother had hatched the snowy chick in a branch, hollowed by rot from all of this damnable water. 

During the hurricanes, the darkness was only penetrated by momentary respites of lightning or the dim gray cast by the silvery clouds off the coast. He watched, not daring to take his eyes from the inclined head of the camouflaged female protector, for fear that he would lose her in the deluge. 

When she did, eventually, flit off so quickly his diurnal eyes could not follow her into the shadows, he supposed she would finally procure food for her hatchling. He turned back to the stump in which the chick nested, shifting beneath his coverage to keep the rain from bleeding his ink. The rain could have filled the stump, dislodged the nest, or perhaps the chick moved, but the hatchling fell, thirteen feet to the underbrush, a few steps away from where he sat. It was still. He reached forward and picked it up, rain sluicing them both. He pressed into its down tuft, feeling with dumb, shaking fingers for any life. 

The mother returned and resumed her perch, turning her head back to its regal posture. When the rain stopped, he carried the hatchling back to his camp, aquiver with the break this new data would afford. 

#

The potoo had observed his collection of specimens before he had hidden them under a sheaf of bark. They could not know that he had not laid them out in cold, detachment, but reverently, like ancient civilizations handled totems of their idols. 

That night, voices had risen in a chorus around him. He, a scientist, attributed the auditory hallucinations to stress, refusing to correlate the vehement choir with the line of bodies.

#

He used to be enamored with the rough-edged camouflage of the potoos’ plumage, by their rare song interrupting the night. Now he could not stand their cries. Sometimes they sounded like alarms, repetitive, boring into his ears. Sometimes they sounded like babies. Human infants. The sound gnawed at his core. He had seen a baby once. His University fellow had invited him to his home for a visit. Old Crawley had taken him up the stairs to the nursery with the mischievous smile of school boys undertaking a prank. Crawley entered the room and took his child from the wet nurse, reverently staring down at it. It had made him ghastly uncomfortable. The infant’s pink skin reminded him of the pig fetus in a jar of preservative at his home. 

But, even more horrible than their cries was the smothering silence. In this silence, his mind leapt to all the potential ways in which the potoo could be communicating now.

No. There was nothing on this island capable of speech besides himself. I’m anthropomorphizing, he thought. But that didn’t explain the voice that woke him from deep sleep some weeks after all the breadfruit was gone, after the potoo had driven the fish away by diving anytime they dared to swim the clear, shallow waters of the beach. You do not belong here, the voice said. The men who left on their ship knew they did not belong here.

 He knew his mind could be working against him, but that did not change the trend of the data he’d collected.

They were marooned just like he was, and they were evolving. 

#

The days passed over his ineffectual body, supine throughout the temperamental weather, notes weakly clutched to his chest. 

The potoo watched him. They gathered closer to the edges of their branches, approaching and retreating. Standard behavior when mobbing a predator. They should have been calling out for more of their ilk, but they were silent, the glaring orbs of their eyes reflecting the light of the moon. 

If the crew came back for him–if anyone came back for him, would there be anything left? Or would there be too many bits of him in the bellies of the potoo? An earlobe, the tip of his nose, the soft, tender flesh at the center of his foot?

Would there be scrawlings in the beach sand? Or would their message be whispered directly into the heads of the next explorers?

Perhaps, they merely wanted to study the specimen of his corpse as he had done their kin. He could have gathered his implements or fashioned something hasty with which to defend himself–surely he had some dregs of vitality left for that. He chose to observe instead.