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Fiction Archive
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by Elizabeth Eslami | ns 71-72
After having enough of the world, of parties and taxes and automobiles, of parents and work and airplanes, the guy and the girl decided to hibernate. They were in love, which meant sometimes they wanted to chew each other's fingernails and eat each other's flesh, and it was hard to find time to do those things in the world, and harder still to do those things around other people, with their eyeglasses and dune buggies and business hours.
So they dug a hole.
The girl was a feminist, so she did most of the digging. Halfway through, she decided her ideas were making the ground too hard, so she fell back against the mound of loose earth, her red hair falling across the dirt like a pillowcase, while the guy took the shovel. "Now you're gonna see some dirt fly," he said, slicing into the ground. He hoped the woman would admire his demonstration of strength and find it proof of his health and virility. A third of the way down, the guy decided that tools were unnecessary and had led to the general laziness of mankind, and so he abandoned his shovel, and clawed at the ground with his hands.
"What shall we do when we get down there?" the girl wondered.
"Anything we like," the guy answered. What he meant was that they would be free from all expectations, and that they could create their own world, underground. What he thought was that their love would bloom in the dark like the birth of a mole rat.
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ns 73-74 | Fall 2009/Spring 2010
 The "Feral Issue" presents work by a range of people, from those who have been doing animal studies all along to those newly exploring the field. If it has a leaning, it is to build a cultural materialist account of animals in our world. We hope that the writing here will give our readers a sense of what animal studies is and where it's going, and also add some new voices to its course.
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