05-15-2021, 11:44 AM
The bones finally spoke to me last night. I've been coaxing them for so long, and it finally worked. It was an accident, as so much of my life is. I didn't mean to knock over the pile of fox and badger, squirrel and deer. I was angry first, then afraid someone would hear, and investigate the clattering sound they'd made. No one did, and I set about restoring them to their rightful places.
I hadn't moved very many (a squirrel skull and a handful of opossum ribs returned lovingly to their places) when it occurred to me that there were pictures in the way the bones had fallen. They were talking to each other, and I was being allowed to listen in.
Bone and stone, claw and mummified paw. They lay on one another, between each other, opposed each other. Told a story she was beginning to understand, in the most abstract of ways. Go East, the toothless deer jaw suggested. Dawn, whispered the sparrow wing, poised daintily on the fox's scapula. I smiled ruefully, ready to dismiss the images as wistful thinking. I picked up my collection, every piece returned home until it was as if nothing had ever happened.
The next morning I woke with the sun. The filtered light was warm and coaxing as I emerged from my den, and I wondered why my mother had ever wished it gone. The sun was beautiful, and I savored a moment just soaking it in. Well. I had nothing better to do today, did I?
Almost by accident, I found myself on the eastern edge of the forest. Looking out to where the trees thinned and the grassland began. The boundary between my world and the next. It was so open, so broad, a shiver of fear prickled my skin. There was no where to hide out there. I almost turned back just then. The was no point in testing fate, in bringing destruction down on my own head so carelessly.
The breeze kicked up just then. Cold and clean and bearing the scents of something I couldn't place. But I wanted to. I wanted to know what made the air smell like that. So with tiny, hesitant steps that stretched into an unexpected run, I fled into the open, not daring to look back.
I hadn't moved very many (a squirrel skull and a handful of opossum ribs returned lovingly to their places) when it occurred to me that there were pictures in the way the bones had fallen. They were talking to each other, and I was being allowed to listen in.
Bone and stone, claw and mummified paw. They lay on one another, between each other, opposed each other. Told a story she was beginning to understand, in the most abstract of ways. Go East, the toothless deer jaw suggested. Dawn, whispered the sparrow wing, poised daintily on the fox's scapula. I smiled ruefully, ready to dismiss the images as wistful thinking. I picked up my collection, every piece returned home until it was as if nothing had ever happened.
The next morning I woke with the sun. The filtered light was warm and coaxing as I emerged from my den, and I wondered why my mother had ever wished it gone. The sun was beautiful, and I savored a moment just soaking it in. Well. I had nothing better to do today, did I?
Almost by accident, I found myself on the eastern edge of the forest. Looking out to where the trees thinned and the grassland began. The boundary between my world and the next. It was so open, so broad, a shiver of fear prickled my skin. There was no where to hide out there. I almost turned back just then. The was no point in testing fate, in bringing destruction down on my own head so carelessly.
The breeze kicked up just then. Cold and clean and bearing the scents of something I couldn't place. But I wanted to. I wanted to know what made the air smell like that. So with tiny, hesitant steps that stretched into an unexpected run, I fled into the open, not daring to look back.