In Fiona Warnick’s novel The Skunks, recent college graduate Isabel moves back to her hometown to housesit, babysit, work at a yoga studio, and try to avoid thinking about boys. She knows she is a bit obsessed; as her longtime friend Ellie tells her, “I can probably name more boys you’ve liked than classes you’ve taken.”
Not thinking of boys is easier said than done, but for Isabel, observing three neighborhood skunks helps not only transfer her attention but also to find meaning in her days as she adapts to new adulthood. Even Ellie agrees: “I like these skunks for you.”
Isabel imagines the skunks are siblings, calling them Eldest Skunk, Middle Skunk, and Third Skunk, even while observing that “they were never individuals, even when alone. Names could make the skunks forget they are only segments of something larger.”
Isabel’s observations of the skunks are closely aligned with her own journey: being back home, connecting with Ellie on a new level, and becoming fixated on Eli, the son of the homeowners she’s housesitting for. The skunks, she observes, have a friend in a local oriole, who is waiting for his mate and will eventually move on to become a father, and Isabel’s journey with Eli, with whom she’d had an encounter back in high school, is not dissimilar. “The oriole had … been a pair of eyes, and the skunk had seen herself through those eyes.”
As she wonders how her relationship with Eli might evolve, Isabel tries to decode his texts while seeking insights and meaning in the world of the skunks. Seeing one of the skunks alone out in the rain, she wonders: “I wanted to know if the skunk was lonely or just alone.”
Meanwhile, Cecelia, the four-year-old Isabel babysits for another family, becomes obsessed with skunks as well, and the books Isabel reads to her offer some skunk insights (such as: a newborn skunk weighs about as much as ten marshmallows). With Isabel’s help, Cecelia decides to celebrate a midsummer “Skunk Christmas,” which somehow leaves Isabel feeling even more adrift: “So Cecelia had a purpose, and I had nothing.”
The chapters alternate between Isabel’s days meandering through her post-college life and her lovely, meditative observations of the skunks; both lives are quiet, though the skunks have a clearer purpose in their daily survival, something Isabel seems to recognize as she goes about her own days glued helplessly to her phone. “My phone often made me unhappy. I knew it wasn’t really the phone’s fault—it was what was inside the phone, combined with what was inside me … I couldn’t think of any reason to put my phone down.”
She also keeps a journal, in which she writes, “Does thinking about Eli mean I’m stuck in the past? Or am I thinking about him because of the emptiness of the future?” She realizes that, when it comes to thinking about the future, she already knows the answer: “That was the purpose of boys: they gave you something else to think about.”
Isabel can’t entirely escape her apprehension about growing up; while picking blackberries with her father, she finds herself relieved to be slower than he is. “As a child, I’d thought growing up would mean keeping up. Now I felt afraid to outpace him. I wasn’t tall enough for my father to be shrinking.”
More than halfway through the summer Isabel awakens early and sees one of the baby skunks on the lawn. “The skunk no longer looked like an adult in miniature. It had grown over the summer, and now it looked like an adult. Its fur was sleek and shiny. Was it an adult? Were there variables besides scale?”
In the end, despite the drama Isabel creates in her world, the journey to adulthood is far gentler for her than it is for the skunks, a sad reminder that as much as we admire and welcome nature into our lives, and as much as they can illuminate what’s going on in our own lives, the animals we share our neighborhoods with are always, ultimately, at the mercy of humans.
Midge Raymond is a co-founder of Ashland Creek Press. She is the author of the novels Floreana and My Last Continent, the award-winning short story collection Forgetting English, and, with John Yunker, the suspense novel Devils Island.