Photo by Jason Bricoe
Little Owen, our six-year-old grandson, asked me the other day if a cheetah was the strongest animal in the world. I looked around at him from the front of the car as Grandpa drove and saw his curious face. He chattered on with little, excited questions, “They eat other animals, don’t they? It’d have to be strong to eat another animal?” He seemed to be thinking hard about it, perhaps imagining it or seeing it, maybe, and for just a moment, I saw it, too.
I really couldn’t answer him for sure. I told him I thought a cheetah was a fast runner with really sharp, strong teeth. Owen scrunched up his own face and bared his teeth, dramatically pushing them to the front of his mouth. He looked as if he was pretending to be a cheetah ready to rip into some sort of meaty flesh from another animal, or possibly he was pretending to be strong and brave. I resisted asking him, unwilling to interrupt a fantasy only he could see. His older sister piped up that maybe an elephant was stronger because it was so big. “Maybe,” I said, not wanting to disappoint either child. But Owen’s question lingered with me.
It’s the mystery, I think, of not knowing that makes things like cheetahs fascinating. It would have been easy to pull out a phone, look up “cheetah” and “elephant,” and prove one of these two children right and the other wrong. Or I could have said, “OK, Google. What’s the strongest animal in the world?” It sounds wrong to do such a thing, yet we do it consistently. Maybe not to children, although we might, always be educating with facts rather than allowing fanciful images. We certainly do it to ourselves or to our dinner guests assembled around the table or gathered on outdoor patios as the sun dips and wanes on an extended summer evening. Conversations sink to facts: a cheetah can run at 58 mph, an elephant can carry the weight of 130 adult humans, and there is the bright glow of first one phone then another.
The mystery is solved, and most of us are saddened by the ending. It’s like getting to the end of a good book. You feel it coming. The pages are thinning, and the front of the book slowly becomes heavier than the back. There is a loss that can’t be satisfied despite the accomplishment, despite the unanswered questions that have been all buttoned up.
On that day in the car, I decided to look at the image in my own head. And I saw a cheetah. I saw its fur as a yellowish-brown covered in black spots. I saw it slinking through the tall grass that is yellow and brittle from dryness that I can create only in my mind because I’ve never actually seen a place where it seldom rains. And I saw it slowly, noiselessly, hunch and hide in the grass and watch with narrowed eyes something just outside my vision. I created the soundless journey of the animal. The hungry look to its mouth, the drool that forms sticky, wet globs against black, sagging gums, and the never-blinking eyes that follow and concentrate. And I heard the sudden pop, saw the grass spring back to its previous position as the cheetah launched itself like a rocket into an open field. Zigging and zagging in pursuit, his muscles compacted and firm, body drawn out and lean as the black spots turned to a blur that I could hardly follow.
I can’t say where or how Owen knew about cheetahs, but he did. It’s possible he learned about it when their mother, our oldest daughter, took them to the library on zoo day, yet I feel sure she would have told us if they’d seen a cheetah. Once, they sent us pictures of a visiting wolf pup attached to a leash and lying on a carpeted floor beside the keeper’s hiking-boot-clad feet. A couple of weeks later, eating breakfast at a diner on a cold morning, Owen began unbuttoning his little dress shirt. When I reached over to touch his hands and remind him it was snowing outside, his mother said, “He wants to show you his wolf t-shirt underneath.” Scattered all over the front of the shirt were tiny prints of wolves in various positions, some howling, some running, and some stalking it seemed. He traced the printed likenesses with his finger and then rubbed his hand over the front of the shirt before rebuttoning. Fascination spread once more across his face, appearing so content to just ponder. I wondered again, what was in his imagination, and how he saw what he could not really know. What puzzles he might be considering about cheetahs or wolves, or even about himself?
Maybe most of us don’t linger in the unknown long enough, don’t allow the questions to bubble up and simmer in our minds and bodies. We’re so quick to replace the unknown with the known, to exchange wonder for facts when it’s the uncertainty, not the certainty that persuades us to pull our lips back and bare our teeth. I suppose I could look up a cheetah and verify my own picture. The endeavor would either correct my imagination or ensure I’d paid attention to a book or a TV show about wild animals, at least enough to add to my own conjuring. Either way, my vision of the dry field and the hungry chase would vanish along with the sleek, strong animal, and so would my amazement.
Photo by Nam Anh
The Author
Shawna Green is originally from a small Appalachian town in West Virginia where she grew up with her two brothers and a sister. Her blue-collar, working-class roots are often the source of many of her stories and continue to inspire her creative energy.
Shawna is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department for The Ohio State University. She has been teaching writing for nearly eighteen years and continues to enjoy sharing her passion and her stories. She has a Master of Arts degree in English and a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Information Systems. Shawna worked as a software engineer for a number of years before returning to school to pursue her love of literature and writing and soon discovered the distance between the sciences and the literary was not as cavernous as she first imagined.
She now has a happy home in the classroom and in creative nonfiction. To that end, she has been aggressively pursuing her creative nonfiction work by joining a writing group, reading memoirs, and returning, once again, to the classroom as a student herself. Finding cohorts who share her interests and enthusiasm has been exciting and inspirational. Her discoveries have convinced her it’s time to share the stories of those she’s known, loved, and perhaps feared.
Shawna Green, Lancaster, OH