‘Flehmen Grimace’ by EC Dorgan

He’s there and then he isn’t, and sometimes I’m not sure if he’s a buffalo or something older. This is oil country. Dinosaurs are in our bones. The calcium and phosphorous lining our skulls comes from the spines of Tyrannosaurus baptized in holy black crude. 

This buffalo, he watches me. Flicking his tail and chewing scrubby weeds. He’s dark brown, and his beard is so long it brushes the ground. 

At first, I wondered what he was doing in my backyard. I live in the city centre. The buffalo live farther east, under the shadow of refineries.

There’s something else about this buffalo. I can see the grass and the back shed right through him. 

The first time I see him, I mean really see him, he’s standing there, nostrils flaring, breathing puffs of air in the frigid late spring day. He must be two thousand pounds. I lift my upper lip but don’t smell a thing. I inhale, and accidentally breathe in ghost.

There’s a piece of that ghost that sticks in me. It makes me want to thunder down the prairie. I’m not made for it. My stomach turns, and I barely make it to the toilet bowl. My vomit is black crude.

Spring turns to summer. One morning I come outside to find my grass replaced by dirt. And the hollow of a beast in the ground. Now I know buffalo ghosts have mud baths, too. 

His lashes are long and his tail wags at ghost sandflies. One day I lift my upper lip and breathe as though my vomero-nasal organ isn’t vestigial. As though humans can read pheromones like buffalo. But it’s the ghost I breathed, not the roof of my mouth, that translates for me: the buffalo wants its bones back.