To Be Devoured

by Sara Tantlinger

An old doctor from my teenage years told me I’m in the gray area of suicide, meaning I contemplate it often, but most likely won’t pull the trigger or drive my car into a river.

Freedom is all I want, to shift my spine and shoulder blades like tectonic plates and grow wings instead. Fly, fly away…

What if scientists could shrink the vultures into incredibly miniature beings, tiny as bacteria? Maybe we could place them into our bodies, have them fly through our blood streams, our veins, our bones, our organs, our everything. Have them soar through and clean out all the bad parts—the cancer, the tumors, the buildup of what will one day bring our fleshy husks down into the unloving dirt.

She laughed out a musical melody and my heart sang along.

For whatever reason, my mind has entrapped itself in a dark place this week, the kind of darkness where it’s better to avoid the people you love.

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.

“You’re a virus. You have all this rot inside you and you fill up on it until you pollute everyone around you. Then you wonder why you’re alone at the end of the day with your fucking sadness and dead moths.

Her hand reaches toward me, but she pulls it back like a teasing ocean tide. 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.