A Promiscous Pit of Dead Bodies

[Image description: three photographs of a redhead wearing a large, multicolored coat. The coat is in autumnal colors, and is made of diamond shaped patches.

In the first photo, the person is running away with the coat trailing behind. In the second, the person is posed facing forward. The third is a closeup of the back of the coat.

End description.]

Okay so technically I finished the Autumn Coat a couple of months or so ago, but I didn't want to show it off without some really nice photographs of it. Thanks to my sister for taking them!

This project took me about a year and a half, and I'd fucking do it again. I'm terrified of having to wash it, I don't think it'd survive. So for now I'm very careful about where I wear it

Edit: just realized that it may not be clear, but yes I knitted this

it's 1pm at the marsh! come on down, we've got

Some AAVE speakers pluralize 'child' as 'childrens'. People get racist about this ("It's already plural!"), but 'children' actually comes from Middle English speakers doing the same thing: slapping their plural marker on word already pluralized by an extinct plural marker.

To oversimplify: in Old English, 'childer' ('ċildra') was the plural of 'child' ('ċild'). Middle English developed an '-en' plural marker, which we see in 'oxen'. Instead of updating to 'childen', people slapped their preferred '-en' onto the end of 'childer' - so now we have 'child-er-en'. AAVE carries on this tradition with 'child-er-en-s'.

"Pure" language is just impurity obscured by the passage of time.

[DUMPLINGS: STIMBOARD]

CREDIT:

Wound: what did you think would happen?

Me: I don't know. I didn't know. I wanted to find out.

Wound: well, this is what happens. You hurt and my work is done a little less.

Me: what work? Bleeding?

Wound: no, not-bleeding. You seem to misunderstand. I am not the violence. The violence is no longer in the body. My job is to be a wound - so that you won't bleed out on me - and then a scar, so that you can go on with your doing. I am not smooth skin, sure, but I am not the violence.

Me, suspicious: but you come from the violence. I remember. Perhaps if I dig in a little I will find the thing, the secret thing to pull out to heal all at once and to not even have the memory of violence, which is what you are.

Wound: what you'll find inside is just tired old flesh. There is nothing here but you. Even I is you. That's why you are the one hurt when you pick at my scabs. I am not telling you anything you do not know.

Me: but the knowing doesn't help.

Wound: yes.

Me: I am still unhappy with having a wound as opposed to not having a wound, even though I know that isn't the choice in front of me.

Wound: yes. You will just have to wait.

Me: for you to heal?

Wound: maybe, if I am a wound that heals all the way. I do not know. Perhaps you have to wait for my work to be as done as it gets and for the itch to stop. The itch, at the very least, will subside with time.

Me: okay.

Me: that sucks but, okay.

Me:

Me:

Me:

Me, picking at my wound: ow

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

THE LOVERS Poster by Ami Thompson