The Scientist

Toodle-loo, Kangaroo

The last known living slender crawfish died in a small pool (technically, a kitty litter box, but perfectly effective as a small pool) in an off-campus university laboratory in Sydney, New South Wales. A thin antenna released from the body and floated up, slowly turning on the surface of the water. An intern, who had been tasked with observing three female fat-tailed dunnarts implanted that morning with western grey kangaroo embryos, absent-mindedly touched the inside of her arm, where a cat scratch, similar to the antenna in length and color, was scabbing over. With a powerful push from her toes, the intern glided her wheeled stool across the lab, adding an extinction report to the to-do list on the whiteboard near the door.

The Intern Trains the New Intern

The intern stands with the new intern at a countertop where aquariums of female fat-tailed dunnarts are fitted glass to glass, no space between them. The smell is strong. The new intern’s hands are at his belly, his fingers stretched outward to suggest explosion, a visual supporting the question he has just asked. The intern finds her hands, in response to his question and its accompanying visual, have folded tightly over her own belly, and it strikes her, in just this moment, it strikes her, as she tries to explain to the new intern how the little, stinking dunnarts will naturally abort the implanted fetuses of the much larger kangaroos before anything can burst—it strikes her just then like a blow to the back of the head, like a blow to the back of the head walking the pathway home, the pathway she has never been afraid to walk, not even in near dark, not even at night, not even at night, just a little drunk, it strikes her like a blow to the back of the head walking the path (the path isn’t safe), a total shock, because she has walked the path so many times and never considered it anything but safe, never, not ever (the path isn’t safe) so first she feels the pureness of her shock, which is like feeling nothing, and then a new feeling like being drained, like everything inside her is all liquid, all rushing to escape through an opening just made—that she will never carry a child. In the intern’s moment of distraction, the new intern leans forward and raps sharply on an aquarium’s glass. The fat-tailed dunnarts vanish. They move so quickly that the rounds of their black-bead eyes leave streaks of black in the air. Though it is too late—a bell cannot be un-rung, a pane of glass un-rapped, a truth reversed—the intern grabs the new intern by the wrist. She whispers, “They’re in a fragile condition,” and then she feels very Victorian and very silly, but the world is dying, and it has been, and she knows that she will never be a mum, she will not, not ever, and she excuses herself to the loo to cry alone.

The Intern, Alone at Night

There are nights that feel like watching water rise, like watching water soak through the sandbags meant to slow its progress but failing, like watching water continue its steady climb toward higher ground. The intern cannot sleep then because she knows that if she sleeps, she will die. There are nights that feel like watching fire burn, like watching fire leap the ditch dug to break its blistering path but failing, like watching fire continue its steady razing of every house, and every tree, and every animal. The intern cannot sleep then, because she knows that if she sleeps, she will die.

The Scientist

The intern is not an intern anymore. She grew up. Honestly, she had not expected it—to live, but she has, and now she is a scientist of such renown that she receives invitations and death threats from all over the world. She has survived plague cycles, the loss of her mother to suicide, the extinction of the western grey kangaroo, young love with a senior scientist who considered himself a provocateur and was maddened by the attention her work received, the botched capture of the last cheetah in the wild, the death of the foul-tempered tabby cat that she called baby mine for eighteen years, the bushfire that ate her home and five thousand others, the bombing of her first laboratory, the bombing of her second laboratory. Nature is not healing, but neither is the world dead. For many years, the scientist, once one intern among many, labored to discover just how much cheetah would be needed in the genetic makeup of a human child to allow it to be less dependent on water, to re-hydrate by drinking its own urine in a pinch, but now she has transitioned her expertise from mammals to grains. Even the most successful of the engineered wheats—the strain that saved millions from starvation—refuses to flourish in a scorching, water-scarce world. But under the protective shade of solar panels, the scientist’s young interns are observing the early stages of an experimental wonder crop. Agrisolar. One of the simpler strategies among many. Adapt or die. Pushing back with her toes, the scientist glides her wheeled stool across the lab to the whiteboard near the door where she writes, every day, what she intends to be an encouraging message for the interns. She remembers what it was like, being young—the daily defeat, the daily terror. Today though, the data is all promising. Change, she writes, is only change. Try not to think of it as good or bad.