We’re out in a tiny beat-up truck and there are tiger orchids beside the road that we see in a blur, yellow and dappled wine-red petals swirling, and there are the island foxes the size of house cats but with no fear and more curiosity, and there are the invasive fennel stalks that turn the air sweet, and then there’s me and there’s my cousin and the ruts in the road that rattle our teeth and when we make it to our first location in the dark, there are the plastic plates of specimens to unscrew from the rock and collect while the waves crash close and hard and we collect and bag and collect and bag because this is our research.
The next day we’ve got machetes and rubber boots and we’re hiking down a creek to the sea for our next collection and we’re hacking through underbrush and splashing over rocks and when we finally make it to the beach, we set up camp and watch the sun dip into the Pacific and send a cascade of colors out across the sky and the water and we’re silent with each other because we can be and because the world is so startling we have lost the words to articulate it and because soon by moonlight, when the tide is low, we will collect again in the hope that these creatures are repopulating themselves, that the sea here remains the sea and not some new site of mourning.
Allison Field Bell is originally from northern California but has spent most of her adult life in the desert. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Prose at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Fiction from New Mexico State University. Her prose appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, New Orleans Review, West Branch, Epiphany, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Superstition Review, Palette Poetry, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.
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