To Be Devoured

by Sara Tantlinger

I could purchase raw meat at the grocery store, but it wouldn’t be the same. I need to know what the vultures know, and they sure as hell aren’t walking into stores and carrying out plastic bags of packaged flanks and tenderloins.

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

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

have been tying the quilled ends of the feathers together with curled, black strands, admiring how they glisten in the winter’s seldom sunlight. When the project is finished, I will have my own wings and fly with the great vultures and watch the world from above, waiting for life to die, to rot, to sustain me long after the living vermin of the earth are gone.

If I can’t fly away with the birds, I will settle for being another body they consume. Perhaps they will honor me, praise my skeleton and liquifying organs as I return to the earth as we all must. As we all deserve to do and nothing more.

But at least it is my ending, my bitter devouring. At least it is something they cannot take from me.