Lamb
The coldest day of the year is damp. This body has forgotten what real cold feels like. The barefoot races that my adolescent feet ran through sinking white powder are gone from my body’s memory. Lost is the part of me that darted beside my brothers, just three hares sprinting in the snow; bursting back inside, panting, and watching our feet turn red like six tomatoes in a line.
Now I grow numb all on my own, cold weather or no. Where has my thickened skin gone? Callouses have faded and given way to soft skin, a weak armor easily marred. I have grown weak with it, muscles atrophied into malleable, barely-there lumps along my bones.
The mattress has a me-shaped furrow, fibers worn down and pressed firm with my weight over the dragging months I have rotted here. A neat little row like a freshly dug garden bed, or a grave. Cradled in my childhood home, I am a wilting body of useless feathers and flightless wings. Everything about me is softening, the bed pulling my veins into bulging strings, cooking my muscles down to nothing. I am a pot full of sugar and bleeding fruit, boiling and reducing in a forced transformation.
I think if you peeled me, properly, my insides would sweeten as they met the air, revealing a seed-littered fig jam. Honey where muscles should be, wasp-fed flesh an unsightly shade of browning purple. It would be my first time revealed, seen. The vacated corpse, insides finally on display. Shed of beak and feathers, skin shirked off like a shawl, would that at last yield a portrait of the girl within? Until then, clouded with illness and bedridden fatigue, I rot a little, health-spurned harpy in a domestic wasteland.
Beyond my window, a frost-lined orchard glints in the cold sun and imitates ice. Offerings of once-was fruit lay split to jam on the ground, rotting, then frozen. Preserved in a state of decay until the thaw of spring will offer them up to indiscriminate decomposers who will lay them to rest mouthful by mouthful. I wonder when they will come for me, and what state I will be in when they do.
I am my mother’s favorite wound. The one she opens again and again, acrid disinfectant and picked scabs her declarations of love. Her swirling fingers pick me clean, taking any viable part of me and leaving a pillaged, wasteland body. Vulturine adoration hovers when she is near. How she loves to have me in this room, dusty corners holding me in a childhood vignette that never should have lasted. She loves me with that thick, syrupy kind of care that wraps its hands around your throat and refuses to let go. It holds me in its sweet changeling tide, bitter honey that leaves me starved and sated all at once.
The pain is sharp, but pain is not new. It is an undercurrent in my body, pulsing like the florescence of an electric eel. It is everywhere. It has always been here. Unyielding and undeniably a part of me, it blooms inside me like the most well-tended garden, erupting and making me volatile. Not volatile like a person, but volatile like a chemical. I am formaldehyde, or chloroform, darting into the atmosphere and escaping from myself. Synthesized ghost, my particles loosely hold the shape of a girl. Sick girl, hurting girl, hidden girl.
My mother gives me medicine each day, tipping the amber glass bottle against my lips and dripping acrid liquid beneath my tongue. What she gives me I do not know, but it holds me to the bed with feather-lined arms. The tincture hollows out my head, light as a smothering pillow, and makes me rest just one day longer. Tomorrow, I think, I will rise. Tomorrow I will not drink her medicine. But I know that if I do not drink it willingly, it will be concealed within the food she brings me, the food that I cannot make for myself. If I do not eat the food, it is no feat at all to simply pry my jaws open and tip the bottle in all the same. Surrender is the gentlest form of violence.
My brothers have gone, escaped from the maw that never sought to swallow them. The house is an empty echo, a cave that pulses with my mother’s footsteps and my labored breathing. They are not harpies. They are not the monstrous, winged beasts that my mother and I are. They do not bear our hooked and gulping appetite, or dwell halfway between earth and sky like the amalgamations we were born to. I have become domesticated. Brutal, curling claws lie limp against my duvet. Illness has parted from me anything that was once wild and vicious, anything that had bite. The warren of this labyrinthine tar pit holds me fast. Cobwebs drape above my head, wavering on a breeze undetectable to me. Everything here is designed to hold something. Everything here is a trap.
The wallpaper is painted with black rabbits who run in a darting blur, stark against peeling cream plaster. The bed that holds me is a four-poster frame of dark iron, like glinting earth. Its spires rise around me; the bars are a birdcage, a penitentiary. Fearsome monster turned sick girl, I stare at the ceiling and wheeze.
Twisting vestiges of a girl with wings. A sparrow splayed on the forest floor, hollow bones a snapped apparatus that makes for a tempting morsel. Zeus’s hound, a harpy chained at the ankle and held in a bed of her own plucked feathers. A parakeet’s tiny gold cage, procured for spectacle and status. How strange, to think a cage belongs to the one it holds. How many ways can I say that I am a flighted creature, trapped and decaying in a place that I meant to leave long ago?
The coldest day of the year is damp, and my body is not the only thing that forgets as it settles into my joints and ligaments. I always find a new way to ache, a new way to hurt. Either the world is fading around me, or I am fading away from the world. The lights flicker, or I do. Darkness is an encompassing eye, blinking at me.
I wear my layered illnesses like a shroud, broken bones healed into a crooked, gnawing monument. Everything is distant now, pushed away with both hands.
The bottle glows,
Dripping dark molasses.
Fly not, but fall,
Winged shroud carries
Harpy girl
Below
Below
Below.