HBM105: Beautiful Stories about Dead Animals (part 1)

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters Podcast

Science, Society & Culture, Social Sciences, Personal Journals, Documentary

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2018

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Before Kryssanne Adams was old enough to understand death, she found a dead mouse and carried it around with her in a plastic Easter egg shell. She talked to it and gave it water.

Content Note:
Descriptions of death/dismemberment, language.

This is a special two-part episode, in which Kryssanne describes the many times where she’s seen death or inflicted it upon animals. Soon, this will turn into a book, which will be available to purchase in our store.

Kryssanne is a writer in Bellingham, Washington, where she also helps run the Bellingham Alternative Library, sings in a Threshold Choir, and works at a museum.

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

👉 Listen to Part 2 👈

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, this is Here Be Monsters.
0:07.0	This is Here Be Monsters.
0:09.0	This is a special two-part episode that comes from a recording I made on my last trip back to the West Coast.
0:18.0	I was in my college town of Bellingham, Washington, and I was with an old friend of mine, Chris Ann Adams.
0:25.2	She's a writer who's seen and handled a lot of dead animals.
0:29.7	Now, late one night, when I was in town, we walked up a hill to an old building where she works.
0:35.9	It's a tall, whitewashed building from the late 1800s.
0:40.0	First it was a Presbyterian church, and then it was a karate studio, and now it's a library for hard to find books and scenes.
0:48.0	And so we went into the side room, and there we built this makeshift recording studio out of foam floor tiles and blankets.
0:55.6	And she laid there in the dark and I sat on the couch where I just asked her to tell me beautiful
1:01.4	personal stories about dead animals.
1:04.8	And that's what these episodes are.
1:08.2	We're also turning this project into a short book, which will release soon on our website. But I'll tell you a little bit more about
1:15.2	that after the show. I think I'm two or three and I'm hanging out in a little patch of sun on the linoleum in my kitchen and I crawl over toward the fridge and I see a mouse
1:48.0	just sitting right in front of the fridge so I pick it up. It's about as big as my palms. It's not really moving at all or responding.
1:59.9	And I used to watch a lot of Tom and Jerry and so I opened the fridge and I tried to feed it American
2:06.8	cheese because that's all we've got and this mouse doesn't try to eat anything.
2:13.6	And so I'd take it to the bathroom. I walk it down the hallway.
2:18.5	I put it in half of an Easter egg to help me kind of lift it to the sink and I turn on the sink really gently to like a really low water pressure or like a low flow and I try to get the mouse to drink and it just it
2:37.2	won't move I sit with the mouse on the bathroom floor in my hands and I just look at it and it's not moving at all and I talk to it.
2:47.4	I talk to it the whole time and I ask it what it wants and I try to figure it out.
3:09.0	I really care for it and I really want to take care of it. I want it to eat and I want it to drink and I want it to be okay, but still it's just limp, unmoving.
	...

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