Amiena Mahsoob

Slag Heap

I walk past houses perched above the riverbank. With the heavy rains that can happen any time now, the homes come closer and closer to the edge. One family shored up their backyard with fill, but it took a construction team with grappling hooks and belaying gear to do it. A tight three-foot black metal fence stands sentry against the rains that could wash them over. I always look for this house, comforted for a moment by their guarded hope.

The last house is built high above the street, and the path lies just past the boulder a few inches from their property line. I skirt around it, and then pick up the pace. Up 25 feet is the best view of the river and the gashes on the other side: miles of strip mall constructed on the brown fields of the old factories, empty warehouses, and the last remaining mill that billows toxins into the air. The path skirts the edge of the cliff, created by blasts of dynamite to level the ground below for the railway. At the bottom, center beam flatcars rust on the line, retired from carrying steel away from here and construction materials in when people started believing it was safe to breathe the air again.

In the few weeks since I visited last, the redevelopment authority pulled the razor wire right up to the edge. No Trespassing signs are posted in neon yellow across the fence, but the path weaves around it. I grab a piece of rebar and pull myself around the fence, shutting my eyes against the vision of plummeting to the railroad tracks far below. 

Then it’s just one foot in front of the other in this swath of forest, watching for roots and rocks that jut out beneath a layer of decaying leaves. The river glitters below. Just before the path turns sharply away, I catch the reflection of the scrapyard where I’m sure the bones are tossed after the bodies are burned. I keep running, my body warming up now, my breathing regulating. Some people listen to music while they run, but I want to take it all in: the squirrels that alarm as a twig snaps beneath my feet, the call of a blue jay whose territory I invaded, a train whistle echoing up through the valley. I rarely see anyone else on this part of the trail, though a few locals have taken to letting their dogs off-leash. After that little boy was attacked, committees formed supporting the dogs’ rights to roam, and others to fight it, spiraling the community into increasingly smaller factions. 

I come to the power lines, a no man’s land of bramble and waste stretching to the edge of the next cliff. I see the ruts of the demolition crews, trees shredded to sawdust as they powered up from the valley below, clearcutting for Phase II. I run through the remaining column of brush. Briars latch onto my leggings and protective vest. I dodge the parts of the trail pocked with mud puddles and scramble over the grey mound of grit to reach the monument. It’s just a slab of concrete pressed with handprints, and a branch reaching for the sky, a bit of hope. I lean against it with my left hand and stretch my right foot behind me. 

Nothing grows on these parts: a mountain of slag formed from the excrement of steel mills, the fossilized remains of industrialization, topsoil composed of soot. In its heyday, the heap emitted a perpetual sunrise/sunset when smog obscured our stars. Teenagers flocked to overlooks for date nights, embracing in its glow. Now the weeds stretch for miles. I reach for my toes, sweat trickling down my shin. I feel a gentle nudge as water finds its way through the tiniest weaknesses in it all, tracing its way to the river a mile away. 

Across the ravine lies the future, they say. Manicured lawns, five-bedroom houses or condos that start in the 250’s surrounded by a ring of sycamore trees, perched on the opposite slag heap. They say the Phase I houses were drilled right into it, that they have thirty-foot basements and that they’ll never slide off the cliff. They have a private club there and a pool that stayed open when all the others in the city closed. 

I spin and stretch my other leg, my hand catching my Kevlar shoe and pulling it tight behind me. On my side will be Phase II. Four luxury homes to attract and retain the talent brought in from around the world and one mixed-income duplex for the tax break. A nice view of the river and the strip mall right across. Convenient shopping. Easy access to the trails through the old clear-cut sites, the last trees standing in the city after the storms. I remember going out the morning after, seeing miles of hundred-foot tall trees splintered, topsoil eroding and exposing the roots of others that would die soon enough. Now vines bigger than my wrist wrap the few remaining trees, reaching the highest branches, waiting for a blast of wind to tug it all down. In their place, the brambles creep up, blocking out other possibilities. At least it's not as bad as what happens on the river beds: the noxious weeds that grow three feet a day in the summer, sear lung tissues, and leave a dusting of pollen on all surfaces.

I wipe the sweat off my brow and start making my way back down the slag heap to the fields below, empty stretches where only one kind of weed can grow, sameness as far as the eye can see. On this bit of the trail, I slow down, careful not to slice my leg on a sharp bit that can cut near to the bone. There are bits and bobs here: an old Christmas tree, needles browned and tinsel blowing gently in the breeze; a box spring covered in moss; a hunting blind to get the deer that ravage lawns and the few remaining untamed coywolves. I find my way towards the exit, the hole in the razor wire fence made by a few snips of a wire cutter. Probably the hunter, or the teenage kids who used to get high before it all became legal.

I used to sit on my porch and find my peace, but that was before the black flies came, before the most-wanted signs for invasive pests were posted on each remaining tree, before the last mill was allowed to belch out poisons again, before everything. The changes felt slow at first. They said my cat was old, that cancer was normal at her age when I felt the lump beneath her hindquarters under her softest fur, a tangerine with vines tangling around her insides. If I close my eyes, I can still feel her paw in my hand before it grew cold, still hear my ex sobbing next to me. My neighbor across the way was next, pulling an oxygen tank and a six-pack in the sidecar of her hoveround before her lungs gave way. The thrashing worms that devour nutrients in the soil and jump a foot to escape are common now. They go out in biohazard bags with the trash. 

I didn’t come here until I kicked my husband out, and with him the injuries from the slag heap, from when he scrambled too fast down the cliff. He’d come home streaming blood, and I could feel the scream coming from within me, but couldn’t hear it. “It doesn’t even hurt,” he’d say, pushing his finger into the wound, the blood gushing faster down his leg. I remember the rising tide of horror with all the scars where they couldn't pull the bits of metal out, his skin growing taut around it, burls rusting just beneath. It was never enough anyway, he could never just run it off. Slowly his skin seemed more iron ore than human, arrogance encased his pulp of kindness, and the smell that oozed from him in his sleep started to poison me, too. One day I came here through the driving rain, through the hole in the razor wire, rinsing it off. I returned to the house, packed up his bag, ordered him out, and changed the locks.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a flash of gray-brown. I drop to all fours, just a few feet from the fence, my heart pounding. We all learned this back in preschool: the only way to stay safe was to submit. “Don’t let fear freeze you,” the trainer told us. “Slow your breathing. Pause between breaths to slow your heart rate. They won’t sense your fear this way.” 

I remember crouching like this next to Kerri, whose blond waves tickled my face. I glanced up, and her face was red to start, then slowly paled to her normal pink. I felt my heart slow to a gentle thud and imagined her hair the brush of a coywolf. I squeezed my eyes shut, flooded with longing. 

I hear a low snarl and will myself not to look up. I taste blood in my mouth from biting my cheek. “Breathe,” the trainer’s voice echoes in my head. I feel the prick of hair at the back of my neck as the coywolf approaches, sniffing at my shoes. My nose fills with the scent of her: the oil of her fur, then trickling and the sharp smell of urine. She scampers off. My body collapses with relief. I wait until I know she’s gone, then gather the marked leaves near my feet. I unzip my vest and pull off my t-shirt beneath, laying it carefully on the ground and pushing the leaves into a pile before tying it up. I pull my arms into my vest, then place the bundle near my stomach, and slowly zip around it. In a few minutes, I’m back in the neighborhood, jogging past Sears Roebuck homes. A dog rushes at me from behind a picket fence, then whimpers and scampers away when he catches the scent of the coywolf. 

When I reach the house, I take off my shoes near the door and bang them together, slapping the mud and rubble into the yard. I carefully unzip my vest, balancing my parcel in my hand. I’d read about this before, deep in the stacks of my college library when I procrastinated studying for Biology. Even back then, there hadn’t been public reports of a marking in decades. The tamed coywolves that the bourgeoisie owned were all designed. They looked like them, but most of their DNA was domesticated canine. It was just the odd one here and there that mauled a child, but most of those were backyard breeders, not the pricey ones that came from a laboratory.

I untie the bundle and spread the leaves out on the counter, turning each one over, lifting each to my nose, the stringent tang entering me, my head spinning, then settling. I feel my heart pounding. I slow my breath. I have to remember. I have to think clearly and remember how it’s supposed to be done. 

I close my eyes and envision the diagrams in the account I read all those years ago. How to gather the materials that were marked. How the scent needed to waft through the air before entering the body. How the body would slow and accept. Each step, a movement, an allowing, a surrender, the gentle opening to a gift.

There were, of course, asterisks and warnings. It wouldn't take each time. Some claimed this was how the coywolves would toy with humans, find weak points in which to penetrate, homes in which to bear their young in the middle of cities. The pack sought hosts that fed them meat each day. As the pack grew stronger, they tired of human obeisance. And of course there were the urban legends of piles of collars from missing pets, stacks of bones in pits behind suburban shopping centers. Despite all this, scrawled in red pen in the margin in all caps were the words, “ALL LIFE COMES WITH RISK.”

I gather up the pile of leaves, feeling oddly comforted by them now. Then I gently say goodbye to all of it, starting with the creature comforts: sheets that tangled around my legs as I escaped in my dreams, the soft carpet beneath my feet with a layer of soot that never swept up from the mill, the warm shower against my skin that I couldn't take now for risk of losing this, too. I pull the sheet from my bed, strip down, and look at myself in the mirror, fully human. I then slowly crumple each leaf in my palm and rub the dust on my body, the scent becoming gentler now, the alchemy of my body and hers. I take the sheet to my bed, and lay down to rest until dusk, bits of leaves rustling around me and catching in my hair as I settle my body.

I doze off and feel the gentle nudge of her wet nose against my side, hard enough that I awake, blinking as the last rays of sun reflect into my room from the building next door. I take a deep breath, and swing my legs over the side of the bed, steadying myself. The sun is beginning to set, and I have to prepare now before it all slips away.

I unzip my hood from its hidden pocket in my protective vest and cinch it tight around my face. My hair feels hot against my neck, and I pull off the hood. I strip down, staring at myself in the mirror, my hair draping over my shoulders and covering my breasts. I close my eyes and imagine the coywolf’s fur, how she might feel beneath my fingers as I rake my hands through my hair. I walk into the bathroom and pull the scissors out from beneath the sink and shear it all off. My hair piles into the sink. When I finish, my hair is an inch long from the scalp, long enough for protection, but short enough to not be a liability. I layer on a few extra t-shirts and test the vest and hood. I strap my multi-tool to my leg, consider whether or not to take a flashlight, and decide against it. I take a small water sack that fits in a vest pocket and a small box of matches. My heart pounds and I steady myself again, then stretch out again in the marked leaves, the stringent scent faint now, like autumn and wood fires. “It’s time,” I say aloud. “You’ll be okay.” I push a few last crumbled leaves into my pocket and breathe the musk from my fingers.

I jog through the neighborhood once more. A neighbor walks past me on the sidewalk tugging his pit bull, “Hey there...” he looks in surprise as his dog winces and backs away from me. I run past the houses that will slide off the cliff someday, past the boulder, and make my way around the razor wire. No one comes here at this hour. It’s just me and the coywolf, wherever she is. I reach into my pocket and touch the crumbled leaves. In the half light, I make my way gingerly and quietly across the slag heap to the blind. I step inside and smell the pungent aroma of artificial musk sold at hunting supply stores. I take my knife out and slowly slash vertically every inch, then slowly cut horizontally. I’m satisfied when I’m done and see the camo streamers billow gently in the breeze. Streetlights flicker on a few blocks away.

I make my way to the marking spot, remembering the diagram and the invocation, “Submit completely.” I push the remaining leaves into a nest and curl into a fetal position. I slow my breath, pausing between. First four counts, then seven, then ten. My heartbeat is just a faint murmur, joining the rainwater that trickles through the slag heap hundreds of feet below, yearning for the river.

Soon the darkness is complete, and I hear the scurry of field mice nearby, ferrying supplies into their nests. My body begins to feel stiff, but I fear moving could spook the coywolf, so I breathe through the discomfort. A spider crawls across my hand and settles on my sleeve. The breeze picks up and I can feel the neighborhood nearby shift into sleep. 

I picture what I can of the rest of the book, the various research cited, the theories touted, and the paragraph I memorized. “The coywolf, a subspecies of the wolf and coyote, is only possible due to the incursion of humans onto native coyote and wolf territories, shattering the natural separation of the species,” one researcher suggested. “Thus, a natural dependency unseen in the coyote or wolf populations erupts in the coywolf. It never lives far from human populations, and occasionally acts with aggression towards humans, behavior atypical of its progenitors. However, in moments of extreme stress for humans or coywolves, when both are threatened, she-coywolves have been known to nurse wounded humans, creating a mutually beneficial bond.”

I must have dozed off, because the next thing I know, I feel her breath on me, hear her faint growl, smell her damp fur. She paws at my back, but my vest protects me. She nudges me with her nose. I keep my eyes closed as she breathes me in, recognizing herself. She’s twice my size, and I know this is it. I imagine how the tree must feel when the wind hits, before it splinters and falls, how the mountain I rest on is made of molten iron ore. How the water makes its way to the river. How none of us should be here. 

In an instant, she lifts me by my hood near the scruff of my neck, canines grazing me, and drags me under. I squeeze my eyes shut, and feel the ground scrape beneath me. We slide around corners and sprint through tunnels. I feel a buzzing in my head and the world goes black. I wake to the sound of whimpering and darkness, the squirming softness of pups suckling, and her tongue cleansing my palms. She nudges my cheek with her nose, pushing me against her belly, welcoming me. I feel her warmth against my mouth and pull her in, filling me with sweetness, a gentle burning as her milk slakes my longing. I settle in against her, gently raking my fingers through her fur, taking in her scent and wildness. I’ll survive this, I think. We all will.

Amiena Mahsoob (she/her) lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she explores, writes, and sets tiny effigies alight on the Monongahela River with her child and husband. Her yet-to-be published memoir, Translating Our Diaspora, traces her father’s political exile from Iraq, the contours of grief, and the construction of identity. Her professional work, community service, and mentorship of women were honored through the ATHENA Young Professional Award. She taught English in public schools in Pennsylvania and Japan and is a nonprofit maven. Connect with her on Twitter @amienamah