On that lonely island in Aasha’s picture Chellam wanders … Inside her head a dozen snakes lie coiled around one another in a heavy mass. Inside her belly stands a tiny matchstick figure, a smaller version of herself … This matchstick representation of Chellam is accurate in at least one respect: there is indeed a terrible colubrine knot of bad memories and black questions inside Chellam’s head that will die with her, unhatched.

Moore uses quotations most often to describe the male figure, and in reshaping the words of male writers, she undercuts both his character and language …. The snippet of [Philip] Littell’s words in the poem is “something feline, / something colubrine.” In different ways, the two adjectives reflect a certain denigration of male power. A description of a male figure as colubrine has phallic overtones, but also the negative connotations of a snake; feline is typically used in reference to a female…

He is sometimes called wolverine .… The European labourers in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company call him Quickhatch …. Some people seem to think that he is a variety of the badger; others, that he is a kind of bear. The glutton is so greedy that he stuffs himself till he is ready to burst. But some writers say that this is fable. But all agree that he is very troublesome to man.

The wolverine—also called the mountain devil, the quickhatch, the carcajou, the skunk bear––is a cantankerous, and sometimes vicious animal about the size of a small labrador retriever. It is the largest land dweller in the weasel family, and an an odd fit to be at the vanguard in the debate of how climate change threatens animals and what should be done about it.

The lock buzzed and she pushed inward to a claustrophobic hall of black-painted walls and sticky green carpet. Beyond that, a narrow staircase led down to a nightclub that managed to be both garish and penumbral. Nearly a dozen rooms ran off the lower corridor, which finally opened into a dance floor and bar. On the wall was a pair of crossed scimitars, vaguely Baltic in origin.

After a while the darkness gets the better of her. It cannot even be called darkness anymore, since she’s begun to see bluish filaments of lights coiling and uncoiling like glowing threads in the space above her .… When she can no longer resist—it’s either turn on the light or continue to pinch her face to remind herself she has form and heft and isn’t merely a pair of eyes connected to a brain in shapeless dark—the penlight throws a ghostly penumbral beam on the far wall, temporarily banishing these.