To Be Devoured

by Sara Tantlinger

Each grave marker nothing more than a symbol of solid pain, constantly digging broken concrete slabs deeper into my head, reminders of all the funerals I’ve attended in my nearly three decades of life.

They stay rooted there in sticky cobwebs until my therapist pulls them free, like a spider knocking away the remnants of dead bugs.

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. I loved my parents, but don’t want to follow in their footsteps to an early death. Freedom is all I want, to shift my spine and shoulder blades like tectonic plates and grow wings instead. Fly, fly away…

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.

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.

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 somedays. Most days.

She was the night come to life, a dewdrop of shimmering darkness wearing a bubblegum pink dress and matching heels.

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

What does it taste like—dead flesh? 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?

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.

Maybe I could have kept them forever.

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? Mine would. Mine would be the most excruciatingly bitter of them all.

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.

Condensation drips from the still warm lid, and the liquid reminds me of Dr. Fawning’s dewy eyes today when she’d said my love for Luna is more obsession than real love.

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.

I stand like a helpless zombie, letting her fix me, as always.

They are all so bitter, just like me. Luna, Malik, the cops, even dead Mr. Landon. And my parents, how they should have survived for me. My father’s bitterness ruining us all. I am the daughter of wrath.