I pick through owl pellets and call it art, though my husband refuses to. The sculptures are mostly skeletal. I dip them in resin squares to freeze them forever. This month I have made:
- A rat with twenty legs that can lift mouse-trap bars off its broken neck and hobble anywhere it pleases.
- A bird with a scorpion tail made from spine and a stinger made of beak. Now she will not be such easy prey.
- A human heart, roughly shaped with feathered atria. Thick black hair veins across the glued bone. I hold its resin cube in my hand and squeeze so tightly it begins to feel like my pulse is its steady thrumming beat.
Frederick says I shouldn’t spend so much time with dead things. He warns that I, too, might atrophy and ossify. He wants to hike, watch birds mate, and go to Wednesday church choir practice. He doesn’t care about
- The angel, four heads of a shrew encircled by wide wings—moles' feet made into beautiful, horrible flying things. Be not afraid, I tell him. Though he is.
Frederick cooks upstairs. The meat and garlic fill the whole house. What makes his dead things better than mine? They are his, perhaps.
- A church of ribs. Inside the hip bone walls, a body kneels. Their mouse skull head bows before the leg cross at the front. A priest once told me that the only truly Christian prayer is simply asking God’s will to unfurl without judgment. That’s what’s going to happen anyway. The mole will always get eaten by the owl. I will always fish its bones from the thrown-up pellet, and Frederick will always wait to start eating until I come upstairs, wash my hands, and sit next to him, even if it means the meat’s gone cold.
In dreams, I am never the owl, I am always the one being eaten. I am the pieces being spat back up. The steak is cold and the chimichurri has begun to separate when I finally come upstairs. It still tastes delicious, but Fredrick is disappointed. It tastes better when it's warm. He mumbles the Lord's Prayer and we eat in silence. He wants to feed me the way he likes to be fed. I don’t want to be fed; I want to be feasted upon.
- A mouth, teeth multitudinous and akimbo, stretched open and the size of a filing cabinet.
There’s a difference, between eating and being eaten, though I haven’t been able to explain this to Fredrick in a way that doesn’t make him look at me like I’m already a skeleton.
- A mouse, small and delicate, pieced together from more than 20 owl pellets. Every bone in their body is constructed from a different dead thing. Alive, again, suddenly, one body made of 20. Eat your feathered heart out Holy Trinity.
We need to talk, Frederick and I. I pick and pick at the puke around him, but nothing of substance falls out. No hair, no bones, nothing I can make sense of. He wants to try couples counseling with our priest. He wants children but he doesn’t want them yet. He doesn’t say it, but he worries that I’ll spit them out before they’re born, that all he will have will be tiny frail, child-shaped bones frozen inside a resin cube.
- His profile, sketched with hair. It is my favorite way of watching him, from the side, his gaze resting on some distant thing, lost in holy thought. I can imagine him happy, his Roman nose perfect against the westward sun.
- A bouquet of skeletal roses he doesn’t like.
I pick and pick, but all I find in him are shards of stained glass. They cut my fingers and I see my reflection, fractured and off-color, inside. The priest I didn’t agree to see rings our doorbell and Fredrick tells me to come upstairs and talk. I have just lowered
- Saint Francis of Assisi made of plastic. St. Patrick drove the snakes into the sea, but St. Francis befriended the animals and called them brothers and sisters under God.
into the resin. I walk upstairs. I am told I have wandered too far from my marriage, that I must work to rediscover this holiest of sacraments. Was Jesus married? I asked. We are not the son of God, I am told. How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are, I answer. The priest turns to my husband and nods. Yes, I agree. Twice a week. They schedule 3 months of sessions without my saying a word. When it’s over, Frederick kisses me on my forehead. I wipe his dried spit from my forehead. The last thing I make this month is
- A hollow, massive owl. I have saved fifty thousand feathers for this. I sculpt each part of him from the bones. His beak is two-hundred bird beaks glued together. His skull is made of skulls. Hair makes his tendons, and I drape his skeleton in sheets of feathers. He lays open and flat, like the stomach of a frog I dissected in high school. I have left a space for myself inside. My feet, though they are not talons, slip through the feathered legs and poke out from the bottom. My head fits tightly inside the skull. I open my mouth and wrap my lips around the back end of the long beak, connecting my jaw to it. In the midnight air, I rise and find my husband asleep on the kitchen table, cold meat pink and dry beside him. I spread my beak wide and hunger blooms like a wound in my animal stomach. I swallow him whole. His bones lodge in my throat. The sky calls. I leave the parts of him I cannot swallow in a pile on the front door for someone else to sculpt, and take flight. My heart thrums.
