K49814

After several days, the lead stallion had granted me entry into the inner circle of his herd. I was sitting among the sleeping foals when I felt a breath touch my neck.

At night, when forms are indistinguishable, there is only someone who breathes. He breathes because he is will. In breath, he articulates his existence. That is why breath is individual. Breath is a young and an old breath, it is a species breath, but above all, it is a unique breath, one that enters into contact with the world.

When I turned around, I saw a yearling behind me, inviting me to play.

So many gone again. Did they sleep the night before the transport? There must have been uneasiness in the barn. Who will be called next to walk up the ramp? Do you have a cross painted on your back? Scenes of farewell. Hard to imagine otherwise. I want to meet them and ask them about their short stories. To document, to archive. For the time after. Because their breathing is part of world history.

When the pig's eye and the human eye meet before the door of the gas chamber closes, we recognize each other, the pig and I. The line drawn between us is an illusion. I become a fish scale in my fish scale garden and, with it, the formless indifference of the ocean, the cosmic background noise.

The foetuses had broken into the air chamber of the eggs and taken their first breath. They had pecked at the shell hundreds of times until a small hole had formed. Their lungs had had to get used to the outside air for a few hours before they could perform the energy-sapping twist to break open the shell. Wet and exhausted, lying on the metal grid, the new-borns searched for their mothers.

From the tightly packed crates destined for overseas, I blindly took three bodies. I warmed them against my body, swam with them in the lake, and listened to them breathe, softly honking as they slept.

Many nights I lay in stables or outdoors with the unharmed animals and asked them for their breath. Breath, they say, is a fragile thing, one that needs trust.

Where breath is held, there is hell. A place where no stranger is allowed to enter.

In order to be able to tell their story nonetheless, I borrowed the number on the ear tag of a cow, Emma, the one with a reddish pelt. She lay isolated in darkness, chained. I promised her a life of freedom and kept my word.

Are you, beyond breath? I want to ask the many others.