To Be Devoured

by Sara Tantlinger

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.

What if I had saved part of her skin or brain or liquids before she was buried? Maybe she’d be living inside me, a small part of her, whispering and guiding me through this life. My whole family, they could be here suspended within my body rather than remembered as skeletons buried inside my bone-castle of memories.