To Be Devoured

by Sara Tantlinger

My teeth clamp around the insides of my cheeks, as if I can gnaw and bleed away the hurt of her refusal.

If I don’t talk to someone, all the sour fury inside my marrow builds up.

kettle of vultures

Ugly birds drift in slow, lazy circles, but I shouldn’t judge for what is simply in their nature. Every body is a waiting carcass to them, a future meal to be enjoyed—they don’t care about aesthetics. They take care of it, strip away the decayed flesh from bones like a ravenous, sacred obligation, sharing the duty with pulsating maggots and buzzing flies. A voracious feast of the dead, purging rot and liquified tissue from the skeleton until advanced decay claims everything, giving the remaining nutrients back to the soil, to nature. The way Mother Earth intended. Nothing wrong about it.

The carrion birds are survivors; they’ll outlast us all, thriving long after any apocalypse. Envy sends a hot jolt through my stomach for both the birds and their dead meals. The body is never wrong for them. They devour it. They just eat. They are ugly, and I cannot blame them for this, cannot fault their design the way society faults mine, faults us all.

Silent encouragement settles in the air like a welcoming hug from an old friend.

but cancer doesn’t give a damn who you trust; it just takes away, eats up a person without giving anything back to the earth. No purpose, no place in the ecosystem—a giver of pain and nothing more.

the buildup of what will one day bring our fleshy husks down into the unloving dirt.

What a strange, marvelous thing it would be. Eat away the bad parts—for me, eat away my sadness, the sticky, bitter feelings with their rage inside my body, cloying my will to live some days. Most days.

There’s danger beneath the false purity of snow. Death in the speared points of icicles and frozen lakes.

Her indigo lipstick smeared against her teeth, but Christ was she beautiful.

Bartending turned into an artwork to pay the bills.

We became fast friends. My ache for her was instant. She was the night come to life, a dewdrop of shimmering darkness wearing a bubblegum pink dress and identical heels.

I smiled at her, already hopelessly in love. “Me neither. I just want you.”

Maybe that was the worst part, how you can understand a stranger because you know their pain, because you helped cause their pain.

The moon to my sun, keeping me balanced in a world where my own brain wages civil war with emotions.

Do the bodies haunt the vultures after they consume the carcass? If I eat a human’s meat, do they live on inside me forever? Humans eat cooked ham, steak, venison, and more all the time. All those dead cows, chickens, pigs, fish—they become meals. Their bodies digesting inside another body. Bones and organs, blood and marrow, absorbing and taking what each part needs to survive. It’s cooked, preserved, safe.

Maybe I could have kept them forever. Is this what the vultures do? These guardians of the underworld, these eaters of flesh and souls, what are the secrets hidden inside their curving vertebrae? The longing to hold something dead against my tongue consumes me like a starvation. The power of it floods my body stronger than the sin of wrath ever has. Can dead flesh hold anger?

I need guidance to fill the empty ache in my body. Otherwise, I am forever starving for help, unsure of how to ask for it.

Their beaks will make a banquet of our decay. Our deaths deserve no other meaning than to be devoured. Our bodies have ruined the earth, it seems only right such bodies should give back to nature, to the animals. Because then it does not matter if society declares your face or skin or features wrong, we are all bodies waiting to be swallowed into soil, into the ocean.

Wrath waits in this purgatory of hunger and anger.

My body buzzes toward her like a moth to a beautiful sunbeam.

The yearning to crawl inside the warmth of her washes over me like the steamed heat of an opened oven door. For her, I would disintegrate inside steam. For her, I would burn.

I know the glint in her eyes. I know what hunger looks like.

She laughs her wind chime laugh and the world becomes right again.

The slow slide of her pants and soft, black panties over the curves of her hips lights a twisted fire through my chest.

The raw liquid of my gorgeous girl, flowing through her vessel and keeping her warm and alive.

“Please don’t go,” I whisper. A deep swirling ache of sadness and famine funnel together inside my stomach. Maybe I should let her go, but I’m greedy and obscene and I don’t want her to leave.

Maybe I am something bigger than myself, a descendant of virulent animals who feast on the dead.

Overhead, I pray the vultures watch. Pray they understand me now as I am finally understanding them.

I grind my teeth in an effort to reduce all the stupid things I want to say.

She wants to tell me how she really feels, but she’s scared. I can see that. I used to know everything about her movements, her quirks, her kinks, every twitch of her expressive face, all those gestures and micro expressions were my poetry every day, my Bible I read from; her—the only one I could ever pray to and trust. And I have smashed all of our love down into unrepairable pieces. My girl with nighttime skin and eyes full of starry constellations, what have I done to you?

She is so sad and so beautiful, and I hate myself for equating the two things together.

I wanted to drown with you Luna, not beneath you. Not away from you.

An unseen mass weighs within my chest and maybe that is the virus, the rot she mentioned. My own poison decaying my body from the inside out. All the angry bile souring the nectar of my heart and soul. The way death follows me, the way hostility rests inside me like a bomb coming to take comfort before detonating. Maybe the worst part of all this is how much I like it.

Dread fills me then, quick and cold like someone unlatched my jaw and shoved a hose deep into my throat. A drowning sense of utter loss floods my entire being, and I am lost beneath the water. Searching and fading, finding nothing.

The teeth-grinding frustration of not being able to reel in an almost-memory makes me want to scream. I feel like I am going crazy. When you’ve already been called crazy your entire life, there is nothing worse than thinking you are waning away into a perceived truth. If crazy becomes my truth, I don’t know what else to do.

I never did illegal drugs, surprising given my inclination toward obsessions, toward addicting myself to other vices, toward a sick hunger I cannot satisfy but am so desperate to,

And somewhere in the darkness is my Luna, Luna, burning bright / in the forests of the night. My stubborn, wise girl. My fiercely, strong tiger. My eyes close and I feel her raven curls dancing between my fingers, gaze into the oaken depths of her eyes shining on a sunny day, hear the poetry of her lips pressed against my throat.

What saccharine horror waits, harbored in the darkness of the woods where the vultures circle? The burning darkness of the night is playing your song, Luna. Are you inviting me to sing along?

I love Luna like a good habit, but my obsessions remain directed toward the hunger of carrion, my need to understand the vultures as they guide me into the underworld.

I try to remember any of the techniques Dr. Fawning or my old therapist taught me for dealing with moments like this, but my brain is full of white noise and resentment, a brew for the wrath I know I’ll keep drinking.

I am the outcast girlfriend of someone whom I do not deserve.

My heart beats like a rabid animal trying to break free from a cage.

Some part of my brain doesn’t recognize myself after the words tumble out; it’s as if I’m watching a distorted nightmare version of the woman I have become. I ache to reach out to her and silence the hunger and pain, but I don’t know how.

A laugh crawls out of my throat and again, I am aware and unaware at the same time. A split-screen television of a human watching both sides of myself compete for some kind of harmony or dominance.

My instructors from the Old World, from the New World, let me grow with you and adapt into the freedom of our future. I will be welcomed into their wake and we can all feast together on the body like a family. Bodies consuming bodies, nothing more.

The normally deep voice is quiet and cracked. This broken man who still cares so deeply for her. Something in my own chest twinges for him, a brief moment where we understand each other.

I hated the terror on her face, but I didn’t know what to say. The hurt and the wrath, bubbling into a tar of resentment. The vultures circling overhead, whispering to me. How she reduced me to this weird stranger and nothing more.

Dead or alive, I will find my wind chime girl. Honor her.