life as a roadkill rpg.

i've always had a fascination with roadkill. i've always had a lot of empathy for animals, but as long as it was already dead (and not an animal that i had in my own home like a cat or dog), why not appreciate its body? its bones, its sinews, its fur, its flesh?

country kids, farm kids especially, learn anatomy and biology and death early on. no bullshit, cut to the chase. this is how a bull gets a heifer pregnant so she can start producing milk. this is how the calf is born. this is how we butcher chickens when they stop giving us eggs or when we end up with too many cockerels. a quarter for every rat you clubbed on the head around the barns and grain silos. 

i didn't grow up on a farm, and only spent weekends in the country where i would visit a neighbor on her family's dairy farm. we'd play in the cattle barns and in the pastures, sometimes with barn boots on, sometimes without, sometimes barefoot. slip-sliding in wet, hot cow shit while we ran around. we'd find brand new litters of barn kittens in the hay loft or the calf stalls, name them, watch them grow, bring our favorites inside the trailer home and feed them raw cow milk in a saucer in an attempt to tame them. sometimes it worked.

a lot of kittens died. starvation, malnutrition, disease, predators, crushed by machinery, run over by cars, stepped on by cows or horses or people. you learned not to get too attached. you got attached to some anyway.

my first memory of poking at roadkill was during one of my visits with this friend. i would have been anywhere from 8 to 12, likely on the lower end. it was a groundhog, i think. something brown and furry. i don't remember now what state of decomp it was in. i don't remember if it was one experience, or if i visited the carcass over a period of days or weeks or months. we'd prodded it with sticks, moved it around, flipped it over. i don't remember if there were maggots or flies. i vaguely remember the smell. sweet, sour rot. a disgusting assault on the senses, however weak.

i took a tooth, or several teeth, from one of its mandibles. i think the other one was... missing, or damaged, or maybe i just chose the one that was easily accessible.

i felt dirty, physically, for doing that. i felt the germs make a mad dash to my hand from the body. i felt them infest the pocket of my jeans. i felt them crawling up my hand and arm. they bred rapidly as they went. i'd breathed them in. they were in my nose, my mouth, my lungs. they were in my saliva and as i swallowed my saliva they bred in my stomach and intestines. i probably spat several times, not that it mattered, and i'd have known it didn't matter. still. obsession, compulsion.

the level of anxiety borders on psychosis. i believe (but can't confirm by memory) that i struggled with feeling dirty for taking those teeth (or did i take the whole mandible?) in more ways than physically. i can't remember what i did with them in the end, or how long i kept them. maybe i fought with myself during the walk back to the farm, tossed them into the field after winning, losing, whatever internal struggle i was having. maybe, secretly, i held onto one and hid it away from myself and everyone else and made myself forget that i owned part of an animal that lie dead on the side of a country road.

i don't feel any shame for my interest in roadkill anymore. when appropriate, i collect bones. i never take more than my share— i have the skull of a young white tail buck that was killed by a vehicle on my road, the vertebra of a different white tail found in the woods, various tiny rodent bones from around the property, among others. i do still feel the germs. i still spit them out, not that it matters.

anyway, here's something to consider. maybe you came for this. roadkill, strange and dark rpg style.