The Meadow 15 Have You Come Here for Forgivness? A.M. Potter As a small girl, Alannah Walsh thought her most important chore was to rescue bugs found in their upside down, end-of-life agonies. When she was four, her father had waited patiently for her to flip an uncooperative hermit flower beetle onto its spiky legs. Then he had gently chided her for interfering with the insect’s life cycle. From then on, Alannah let death run its course, but made it her business to ease the suffering of the doomed by shifting their tiny bodies from sunlight to shade or building minute death houses out of leaves. Twenty years later, Alannah was still watching the ground for flailing legs, still building tombs for her smallest neighbors. But it wasn’t a beetle that caught her eye on this dawn ramble around the property. She’d spotted the beginning of a blood trail and knew she’d spend part of her day burying a half-eaten something, most likely a goose or rock chuck. They were too far south for bears, but mountain lions came down from the red dirt hills to hunt. The sky was full of hawks, vultures, and eagles and, earlier that week, a pack of feral dogs had grabbed a local farmer’s pregnant ewe. This abundance of predators was one of the reasons Alannah was so diligent about making rounds before the gates were opened to visitors. Those bringing flowers to a dead lover shouldn’t be confronted with an eviscerated marmot. There were places where the blood had poured and thickened into viscous strings, but mostly it had dribbled slowly from its donor. Alannah always enjoyed the pattern of blood drops on pennywort. Circle on circle, rust on emerald, the effect was carnivalesque, like a trail of miniature whirly pops that had fallen from a child’s Halloween bag. She followed the blood drops as they meandered under the watchful eyes of two owlets and over top of the town’s latest skateboarding death. Taking a sharp left, the lollipop trail led past seven members of the
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