Out of Curiosity and Hunger

By Amanda M. Blake

Languishing in a dying urban landscape, photographer Willa Dearborn struggles to find something that excites her the same way that capturing images of animals in their wilder natural habitat did for years.

 

Then she stumbles upon a strange creature that she's never seen before and can't identify, roaming an abandoned industrial park.

 

Without hesitation, she seizes the opportunity to finally achieve something amazing right there in the city she hates by thoroughly documenting the life and growth of this unknown creature—and its prodigious appetite.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amanda M. Blake
• Release date: Jun 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215829493

Book preview

1

Metal, glass, brick, and mortar jutted into a gray-haze sky. Old telephone poles strung a wire canopy along concrete paths before plunging a tangle into the ground. Cars rushed rapids of sound and smoke like a fine fog, thick in the nose as petrichor.

People crowded from place to place, a series of acceptable lines, industrious mindlessness feeding into towering architectural mounds, where they spat out waste to bring food back to their domiciles. A grind as chemical as it was mechanical—mimicry of the biological in the effort to detach from it.

Humans thought they were innovative, superior to the natural world—so much that they didn’t consider themselves part of it. They didn’t see that all they’d done was what everything else had done before them—on a gargantuan, unsustainable scale, but nothing particularly new. Ant and termite colonies engaged in the same busy industry. Slime molds navigated with chilling efficiency without neural pathways. Birds wove ever more elaborate nests with any items they could find. Beavers halted rivers in their tracks.

When Willa walked the streets of the derelict city, she saw just another jungle, exhaling exhaust instead of rain clouds.

She’d once emerged from a river covered in leeches, had battled leishmaniasis from being bitten all over by sand fleas. She’d somehow stumbled back to a host’s home after finding only minimal cover during a sandstorm. She’d saved the equipment, but when she’d caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror, she’d looked like a terracotta statue.

Yet here she was, with regular access to clean water and bathroom facilities, in clothes she hadn’t worn fourteen days in a row, and only now she felt dirty.

***

For twelve years, Willa had done anything and everything to get the perfect wildlife shot, while her boyfriend worked weekends, repaired trailer septic lines, and traveled the country on diner fuel to sell her photographic prints at craft fairs all over the country. Then, after a cardiac scare far too young, Brandon had been given a strict prescription of planting himself in one place and eating more than one leaf every new moon.

When Willa had returned home from her stint in India, Brandon had poured her a glass of merlot and sat her down for an ultimatum. He was proud as hell of her, but he had dreams of his own, and he couldn’t achieve them if he died of a heart attack before forty while hustling for hers. And she’d promised him a family. She needed to decide what she wanted, but he knew what he needed.

He’d moved to a city on life support, because rent was cheap while he finished school.

And she’d moved with him.

There were pockets of thrive to fiddle while Rome burned. She didn’t doubt that coma patients made miraculous recoveries, but she wasn’t interested in defibrillating something already dead. Even if they’d chosen a livelier city, though, this wasn’t living. This wasn’t life.

But she’d made the effort, because she’d promised Brandon that she would.

To her, the city was an anti-jungle—as an antihero was still a hero—so that was how she approached it as an artist, finding where wildlife broke through the foothold cracks where people tried their best to eliminate them.

And that had held her for more than a year, culminating in an exhibition pitting her original wildlife photography, with its vivid rainbow of colors, against the urban wildlife scrapping through the shadows of the city—wild patches of proliferating weeds, coyote dens, peregrine falcon boxes, long-suffering opossum mothers with their young, rat nests, clusters of cockroaches behind dumpsters, bats nestled in concrete corners.

She photographed abandoned buildings, too, for their commercial value, but her brand wasn’t where wildlife had reclaimed human architecture, which wasn’t inherently toxic or treacherous to them. Reclamation was a dime a dozen. She was more interested in the wild that existed alongside humans, wading in the same poison, not just creeping, lean and shy, on the outskirts.

Birds that lined their nests with plastic; rats with trappings of human discards like a homeless man with his mobile hoard; stray cats both dirty and hungry and those taken care of by sympathetic locals; wild dog packs that eyed her with distrust but with the confidence of those who knew humans were not to be feared, unlike the squinting wariness of coyotes; pheasants, with their unusually lovely plumage, among the iridescent-winged pigeons; an opossum hissing at her, its paws in an oil slick; a rat snake curled around rusted pipes for the warmth of the steam.

Photographs of animals in a chosen habitat rather than one they’d barely adjusted to had critics raining superlatives, calling her a modern Upton Sinclair in showing not only how far the city had come but how much farther it had yet to go. The same publisher that had distributed her other two wildlife photography books had requested right of first refusal for the Urban Ethology collection.

That’s what she was supposed to be working on, and she only had maybe half a book of photographs so far, with no advance.

She still received online orders through social media exposure, but without in-person sales, print income had dwindled. To allow Brandon to focus on his internship, she was expected to step up in making the kind of money that was guaranteed. That meant commercial photography rather than art, more time on the computer working on the business side rather than with a camera in her hand.

Brandon had suggested teaching workshops and wedding photography.

***

The heavily homeless population in the Quarter didn’t particularly like a Jersey girl poking around with a camera, but the ones who knew her better had been reassured that she wasn’t there to exploit them, although she’d take pictures if people were willing, especially if they kept animals of their own or knew where she could find a good wildlife opportunity. She always came stocked with singles and travel-size pharmacy supplies to exchange.

The people there tidied their own spaces, although tidy was as relative a term as trash. It was where no one congregated, however, where what even the homeless people didn’t want piled up—where brown leaves, bits of plastic, paper bags, fast-food wrappers, ripped fabric, and Styrofoam went to die—that she preferred to explore.

Brandon and his friends all thought she was reckless for putting herself right in the thick of the most dangerous place in the city, but Brandon at least somewhat understood that danger didn’t deter her. And the Quarter wasn’t actually any more dangerous than walking the more thriving streets. Most of the people just wanted to be left alone, and she either obliged or compensated them for their time.

She was at greatest risk near the drug dens and trap houses, where someone might see her shiny camera and consider it money, but she had cat ears on her key ring, a Taser in her purse, and a switchblade stiletto in her pocket.

She had walked tiger territories. They weren’t afraid of cat ears or Tasers, and their primary canines were longer than her stiletto. Desperate people didn’t scare her. Humans on an individual level didn’t intimidate her nearly as much as a skunk turning its back or a cobra spreading its hood. As a species, people were the most dangerous animal on the planet, but on an individual basis, people were weak, scared, confused, oblivious beasts.

Willa didn’t exclude herself from that assessment; she just considered herself marginally more self-aware.

In the city, she wore the same clothes she’d wear in the field—things she didn’t mind getting dirty as hell. Flannel in the winter and chambray or double-layer breathable cotton in the summer, and an all-weather jacket when she didn’t need a coat, even during summer, to protect from the sun and other elements. She often shopped in the men’s section for her pants—either jeans or work khakis, because they had good pockets and could be tucked into her boots. Combat boots—real ones, not from any department-store women’s section—were hardy and could hold up against whatever she stepped in, whether six inches of mud or someone’s blood-flecked vomit. She had no time to look good for everyone else, and Brandon didn’t mind what she came into the apartment wearing, as long as she looked good when she took it off.

Even so, she was careful where she stepped. Just because she could clean her clothes didn’t mean she wanted to. It was hard to explain to a cab driver why half her shirt was covered in shit that might or might not be human, and she certainly didn’t want to bring that shit into her own car. There wasn’t enough bleach in the world to keep her from smelling it for weeks.

She wound through the alleys of the industrial park in disrepair, now used primarily by squatters, addicts, and the animals that lived off their waste and what it attracted. Not five blocks down from the Quarter were newly refurbished apartments, townhouses, and restaurants, but most of the people driving the streets she walked now were merely passing through. It was its own wilderness, a veritable desert but for the plenty that it provided to those who needed nothing more than foundational shelter.

Willa had wandered through these alleys and buildings before, but months had passed since her last visit, and she couldn’t remember taking this turn to the dead-end chain-link fence before.

Patience was something she’d learned in the field. It wasn’t necessarily something she could afford now, but there were only so many pictures of dilapidated brick and industrially geometric intersections of electric wires and rooftops that she could take before they felt like cheap shots with her expensive camera. Dirtier than crawling her elbows into lion shit.

Taking pictures for money. She’d never had to do that before. She’d taken pictures, and the money had come. She’d chosen what she wanted to shoot, then went there to shoot it or nearly died trying; she’d let Brandon think about how he could afford to go from town to town and how she could afford to travel.

But people wanted pictures of things they didn’t have. Despite her critical success, they didn’t have any real interest in buying photographic prints of urban vermin to hang in their living rooms and bedrooms next to Live, Laugh, Love etchings. Restaurants and hotels weren’t clamoring for evidence of human pollution and waste. A photography book was going to be her best bet—for socially conscious people to put on their coffee tables to show other people that they were, in fact, socially conscious. It wasn’t what she did this for, but it was what allowed her to do it at all.

Except the problem was that she didn’t want to be doing this, either. This was her compromise, except it was a compromise that left her desperately searching and struggling for wild in the middle of a city she had no desire to be in, to help her boyfriend achieve his dream of becoming a doctor and having a family, because the time of her own dreams was done.

She owed him that much, especially since the window on family was closing for her. He hadn’t said that in so many words, but it was a simple fact. For twelve years, they’d pursued her dream at the expense of his, and it wasn’t fair to continue that indefinitely when it wasn’t good for him.

Willa still didn’t feel like she should have to settle for this, staying in one place for a whole year, not a single healthy breath to be found without an air purifier. Sometimes, she considered leaving the house in a gas mask.

Brandon had once joked that she should and do some self-portraits, too. So she had. But there were only so many of those she could take, no matter how lurid once she’d included Brandon in the photo shoot.

God, she’d been trying. And she was proud of Brandon. Proud of him for finishing school, using the gym, making the changes he needed to get healthy again—including convincing her to stay home rather than gallivant elsewhere, damn the consequences.

She owed him. She had promises to keep.

But she didn’t know how much longer she could stand an urban jungle, with humans the pretender to a king’s throne. Maybe after Brandon completed his residency, he could find himself a nice rural practice, surrounded on all four sides by God’s green earth. But that was years away, and they didn’t have the money for her to go traipsing somewhere that wasn’t related to selling her wares or expertise. Honestly, wedding photography might be the closest she could get to greenery, if her clients chose venues outside the city.

Willa considered climbing the dead-end chain link to see what was on the other side, but she decided to take the next turn instead.

The alleys were all lined with dumpsters, which were no longer emptied because the businesses were no longer in business, but people still put trash in them, usually to avoid putting inconvenient trash in their own cans or paying bulk fees. Chairs and couch cushions were swiped pretty quickly, even when merch was broken or slashed in the theory that the homeless wouldn’t be able to use them anymore—a practice which never made sense to her, because it wasn’t like the ones throwing away the chairs were going to use them or sell them, nor did the homeless have the means to buy them. So the chairs were literally of no use to anyone but the homeless and the rats, mice, and birds who used the stuffing and fabric for their nests. And she was pretty sure the businesses that didn’t want the homeless using the chairs wouldn’t be thrilled about supporting a burgeoning rodent population, either.

Plastic bottle caps, polyester stuffing, foam peanuts, potato chip bags, a stray leather shoe—everything got reused in the end.

She’d been places that hadn’t had so much as a scrap of stray paper caught in the bushes, and once she’d found an aluminum can in desert sand in the middle of nowhere. But real desolation was the crowded concrete canyon she stepped between, with fluttering like birds’ wings all around her from the wind through the breezeway of buildings. If she closed her eyes, she could almost convince herself that she wasn’t there.

She turned another corner. To the left, in the distance, were furtive glances from the hollow sockets of the kind of people she usually tried to avoid—ghost-walkers who preferred nothing to the world they were in. Willa was too intent on highs in the real world to seek oblivion from it, but she understood the impulse. She didn’t want to interfere.

She went straight, then turned right at the next alley intersection. A certain amount of confidence rather than sneakiness made her motions more fluid, less likely to draw an eye looking for people hiding or running away. She knew how to make herself less noticeable to predators of all kinds, and with people, she didn’t have to worry about being downwind, just out of sight and out of mind.

The hazy sky had turned cloudy, the scuds threatening rain and the air close and still when she wasn’t in a breezeway. Sweat broke out in a thin layer under her clothes, although it wasn’t warm.

Most people muffled their quiet, filled it the way they filled their corners and crevices with trash and the spaces between their cities with chain restaurants. But there were whole stretches of time when she was in the apartment working that she didn’t watch TV or listen to music, radio, or podcasts. In the field, she couldn’t afford to block her ears for the sake of alleviating boredom. Her ears were just as important as her eyes in protecting her and just as important for her work, because so much of what she ended up shooting were things that people rarely saw or got the opportunity to see, either because they weren’t looking or because they weren’t listening. Her ears had led her to a litter of feral kittens, a coyote pup, rat pinkies, places where bats liked to roost, a massive beehive.

And her ears gave her time to hide when she heard a car coming or people talking about finding a trespasser, a saboteur, a spy, even though she was rarely any of those things, except trespasser now and then. Property was a loose concept at best where she wandered, since she trod the line between easement and private property, what people owned and what people couldn’t own, what belonged to people and what belonged to nothing at all, but none of those facts would serve to endear her to dealers, gangs, or police alike.

Willa stopped in the middle of the alley, turning her head to catch the murmur of male voices carried on wind rippling through on both sides of her alley. But where she was, the air was dense and silent, as though she’d passed through an invisible force field and nothing could reach her.

She backed against one of the brick walls, a dumpster blocking most of her on one side and giving her cover to peer at the alley entrance. On her other side, a fence had been draped with burlap and some kind of fabric, as though for shelter or privacy. Its links bent back at the bottom corner.

The voices