Quark - by Marcy Elder

 It was a common occurrence that fall to check the barn each evening to see if he was there. And that Thanksgiving, he was.

Two big, beady eyes glinted back at my eleven-year-old self from the hole in the hay loft floor. I knelt down, my palms sweating. I knew to leave him alone if I saw him again, that he’d be wild.

All summer the scraggly baby raccoon had trailed at my heels as a child follows his mother. He climbed trees with me,

napped in my bed,

and rode in the pouch of my overalls on my bike, wind whipping his fur and my pig tails. 

But they are wild. Born wild and meant to return to it. 

I reached my hand out, my breath fogging in the chill November air. Quark squirmed out of the whole, his fat, corn-fed belly scraping the sides and he wriggled out. He stopped and sniffed the air, watching. 

I held my breath, afraid to spook him and suddenly fearing I’d been incredibly stupid to coax out this huge, wild raccoon. 
“Quark?” I said, my voice trembling. 
My mother had warned me. She said, “He’s been gone for months on his own, if you see him again, he won’t be friendly anymore.” I knew that, but I went anyway. We’d raised raccoons before and they never came back, except to harass the chickens. But he was mine like no other had been, nor would be again. Every night since August when he’d left to the woods, I crept to the barn, hoping to hear his trilling sounds, even just to glimpse him and know he was well. 
He came closer, his thick, winter coat rustling with the movement, so like a bear’s gait. I reached and prayed, my heart hammering. 

“He’s huge!” My mother exclaimed as I held him in the kitchen, both arms wrapped tightly around his middle. I scratched the back of his neck through his coarse, healthy coat and he purred, the sound like a small motor in his pleasure. 

In the winter, I checked again, just to see. Sometimes there were five-fingered tracks in the dust and the cat food was gone, sometimes it wasn’t. I didn’t hope in earnest to find him again, knowing he’d probably wander off, find a new and wild life. There is a magic in some nights, when the wind blows with a taste of warmth in the midst of the cold season. Fuzzy-cold, my mother called it. Nights where chance and change are tangible things and anything seems possible. It was a magic I knew came only once, one moment in my arms, the next a bushy tail, trundling off into the darkness.

by Marcy Elder