When she was young she knew a man—younger, many men, but in this instance, one man—whose name or nickname was Buffalo. Buffalo Bill or Buffalo Bob, she can’t remember anymore, it was that long ago and a whole lot of cities in between. Buffalo. What she knew about the word was that there used to be and maybe still were buffalo in Golden Gate Park. It was in San Francisco that she knew that man. She didn’t know him well, knew some of his friends better. But he was the one she always remembered—built like the shaggy haired wild ox of the prairie, big and short and broad in the chest and the paunch. Maybe more paunch than a buffalo, which after all were lean in the belly. Maybe he came on to her, or into her, in a Russian bath. It was so long ago, what can she know? She had moved on since then, moved away, back and forth, for decades. She had lived in Ohio and Iowa and Massachusetts and New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and—was that all?—Oregon, too, as well as in northern California again, until finally, full circle, she came home.
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She is not interested anymore in difficulties of language, does not care one iota or give one fig about foxes or lazy dogs, is not quick or brown or jumping, but the jingling bells she wore today must have proven to someone somewhere her value on this earth.
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San Francisco was the only place she ever saw a buffalo. They’re extinct, she thinks, were extinct even then, although some were kept living in the park. Or maybe they are not extinct? Maybe they came back with the wolves. Back to the plains. Back with the native peoples, who understand them. Understand them the way she understands, say, a dog. Dogs are smaller than buffalos, and probably softer. But how would she know? People, native people, in the Dakotas probably, or Kansas, maybe know about the softness of buffalo. And the taste of the meat. She ate the meat once herself, tasted it, at Knott’s Berry Farm, when she was a little girl. Knott’s Berry Farm probably wasn’t there anymore either. She doesn’t know, she would have to look it up. If she had time. But what will it matter? Everything that had ever been in her world was gone or vanishing, and she isn’t even all that old. Old but not that old. It was just that the world changed faster than anyone ever said it would when she was young—when they gave the impression that all things were stable, that losing a house to the wrecking ball was anomaly, that buffalo disappearing from the wild was, as a loss, exceptional, an aberration. Not in the normal course of events. Not the way things actually are.

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She would have been a zebra, if she could, loved the stripes and black and white, the flicking tail, the lazy way of life on a savannah, the occasional desperate run from a lion, the jolt of fear that would set her off, the little sidestep, the quiet before, the excited shriek, and most of all the end, the catch, the kill—down, down, into the wild grass, to ground—until amen.
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She wonders whether that man whose name was Buffalo—Dick maybe or even Tom or Harry?—wonders whether that man can still be alive. She was a good deal younger than he was back then. He would be a nonagenarian now, at least, maybe more than a hundred years old. More likely he was history, like the animal whose name he bore. She sees them sometimes on the computer screen where she watches movies and TV. Not that she watches westerns much—watched—more likely science fiction. That would be something, to see a buffalo on The Expanse, maybe, or Battlestar Galactica. Imagine, a buffalo out there in space, flying around, maybe learning to speak. Channeling its story to some heroic but puny human—
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She hates tea, drank coffee all her life, lots of it, more when she still drank vodka and gin, less as she grew older, but still enjoys a thrill, painting the face this morning, the red lips, the thickened lashes, the contrast to the white of her hair, her image in a mirror—the jingling of her bracelets, the quickening pulse, the bliss of celebration and protest, of bodies and music, and even now, the slackening, the laxity of surrender, zeroing in on the end of things, of time, of herself.
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You killed me, the sci-fi buffalo says. You brought me to an end. You, pale European person, came and stole the land and subordinated the peoples and animals and pretended you owned it and them and us and you go on pretending. What’s your reward? Pandemic and collapse of the biosphere. The end of your line. We who laugh last laugh best. You think you’re really going to send us into space? A molecule here, a DNA chain there? No way, José. I am the creature I always was. Big and brute and wise and, above all, alive. Did that man rape you in that Russian bath? Don’t blame the buffalo. That was pure human. Did some random angry white man shoot unrepentant into a motley crowd and take you out with a gun? Get over it. The whole world collapses. Every world bleeds out. Even this one that you call your own. Especially this one. Bells are ringing. Counting down. One hundred seconds on the doomsday clock. Are you ready? Or you can come along with us. You’re welcome with us anytime. A big old herd of shaggy buffalo storming in the sky.

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All her life she has loved purple, douses her body now in lilac and lavender, sometimes rose or sage, still plays poker late into the night, even old, even tired, online with old men, their muse, a favorite, knowing how she jangles in their dreams, quivering, their zest, their fox, all silver and gold, for life.

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She doesn’t know how to answer him after this rant. Him? Maybe it’s a she-buffalo that speaks to her this way. A buffalo cow. Even more exploited than the hairy male. Milked. There had been buffalo milk, too, at that place of her childhood, and buffalo cheese, and cowboys with pistols and bandannas pretending to rob the train she rode that day with her mother and uncle and cousin. In the land of the Wild West, in that fantasy in which she had been a child. Worlds away. Time long gone. Petering out now. One-minute warning, the buffalo says. It makes the hundred seconds counting down to the end of human life on earth seem a long, long possibility. Adios, then, she thinks. Says. Shouts. Adios.

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And still a few seconds more. Can she not find one word to say for herself?—because there must be time for this, a final chance, no deception, forgetting nothing, jumping over contradiction, no more kicking the can down the road, no quitting, just one last leap after the next exacting detail, a victory over infinite zero—all will be well—one more breath—all manner of thing—one, last, more—

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