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Dedication

For the animals

Epigraphs

In the dark times

Will there be singing?

There will be singing.

Of the dark times.

—Bertolt Brecht, The Svendborg Poems

“People come up to me and ask, ‘Why are the llamas humming?’” he said. “And I’ll say, ‘Because they don’t know the words.’”

—Jennifer A. Kingson, “The Llama Is In,” The New York Times, July 3, 2013

THE FIVE BURROWS

1.

The city is an island and an island is a ship that never sails.

The city is a vessel for animals.

A long time ago, before the island was a city, it was a crumb of land bobbing in an ocean tea. But even then, it was jammed with plants and animals. The island has always teemed with life, moored as it is at a powerful juncture of rivers, the ocean, greater islands, and a whole roiling continent. It is hard now to picture the island of before, in its green state crisscrossed by streams and edged by marshes, as it has been changed so thoroughly by wave after wave of arrival and violence, construction and reconstruction. But before or after, this place was ever vital. This was never just any old island; it has always been a planet in miniature, a bubble of disordered life.

When the outsiders came they came in messy herds. Foreign birds arrived in flocks, and multitudes climbed from rough wooden crafts, all knees and heaves over the silty rocks.

Once grounded, some lay for a long time, crying for beloved friends lost at sea. Others put their grief aside and got straight to business. Whatever the attitude, all newcomers carried some memory, potent or cloudy, of the homes they’d left behind. They hoisted various flags and commenced the same battles that had driven them from their old lands in the first place.

More, then more arrived. You’ve never seen such a multitude. Everyone squeezed in and then did it again. So tight did it become that the ground in some areas disappeared beneath the crush of living creatures. The island swayed and creaked but did not sink because this was a ship of bedrock.

Native gulls turned above flocks of European starlings strategizing in trees.

The creatures from away brought with them panic. Gruesome histories trailed like a putrid smell. They had firm notions of how life should be lived, and they intended to impose them.

The island trembled.

Somebody cobbled a street where a soft path had been. Somebody drew a map. Somebody carried out a massacre.