The Night Shepherd
It was three thirty-two a.m. when he dropped the box on my desk, spilling coffee all over my nightly crossword puzzle I’d always torn out from the newspaper. I leapt up, shaking coffee off the paper, all brown and black and white spaces now. Whatever was inside the box growled.
“Found this guy in my backyard dragging ‘round his back legs.”
Whatever was inside the box gave a nasal half-ribbit. I snapped on gloves. “This a raccoon?”
“Big one.”
The raccoon poked his snout through the top flap of the box, whiskers twitching. “Oh. I’m sorry, we don’t care for wildlife here. You can take him to the —”
“I’m not taking him anywhere else. I got to get back home.”
“Right, I understand, but we can’t —”
Raccoons are always feisty, even when sick. This guy poked his whole head out and sneered at me before collapsing. In the time it took for me to look down and then back up, the man was gone.
This wasn’t the first time someone dropped a wild animal on my desk in the middle of the night. People read “24 Hour Animal Hospital,” and think “yes this is the place for this rabies-infested creature,” and don’t want to hear that this particular animal, quite likely on the cusp of death, is not my problem.
I carried the box to the exam room and set it on the table. The raccoon quit growling. The box felt heavy in my arms, all the heft of a creature who has given in. The phrase “dead weight” is not a cliché in my world.
I don’t like dealing with racoons. They don’t cross over with the same dignity as domesticated animals. Dogs and cats move with elegance and joy into the spirit world, licking their ancestors on the forehead once reunited, wearing checkerboard neckerchiefs. Raccoons use those claws of theirs to cling hard before giving in and making a full and final exit to the spirit world. Their ghosts hang out and make a mess of the mid-life, the gossamer-thin partition separating the living world and the spirit one. They shred garbage bags and crap on the floor; when I shoo them away, they stand on their hind legs and give me the raccoon equivalent of an “up yours!” a snarl-chatter.
I am one of very few people with the job of shepherding dead animals from this life to the next. The usual technique is to lay the dead creature at the back door of the clinic when the night is at its deepest and will the ghosts of the animal’s ancestors to sniff them out, so they can take their ghosty paw in theirs and chaperone them to the spirit world. This I learned from the red book on the bottom shelf under my desk, dusty and yellow-smelling until I opened it four years ago.
People don’t know this is why night exists in the first place. It’s much easier to cross over without the distractions of the waking life.
I slid the box on its side and dumped the raccoon out, his eyelids bare slits, foam not yet dried on his jowls. This raccoon’s ghost flopped out of its body. Most ghosts do, clumsy like a fawn or giraffe after taking their first breath and stumbling around. He gave a wet-dog shake before scrambling around the clinic, jumping on the counter, ripping open a bag of cat food, lapping water from the sink. Like I said, raccoons do not go easy. They know how to straddle their time, shift between being nocturnal and diurnal. Hence why they are so comfy making a mess of the mid-life.
I opened the back door. Outside: silence. No crickets. No passing traffic. The moon new, offering only a fang of light. The raccoon lapped more water, his coat shining baby-ghost silver. “Come,” I said, hooking his furry butt with the T of my broom. He smiled and showed me his teeth, tiny sterling daggers. “Dude, I’m trying to help you.”
He pounced from the counter and snuck around my ankles, tripping me so I fell hard and smashed my chin against the stoop. I looked up. There was my father and grandmother. My cousin who’d drowned.
“Come,” the raccoon said, and took my hand in his.
Nikki Donadio is a writer of fiction and poetry and hold an MA in Creative and Critical Writing. Her work has appeared in Gertrude, Jellyfish Review, Ellipsis Zine, Yes, Poetry, and others.