And there's a millipede
Angry on your carpet
Oh and I must admit
He's staring with a vengeance
✧
I
wonder why there are so many dead things in the forest.Is it because the leaves are coated in skins of frost, the air so cold everything glistens? Does winter collect dead things like a poacher collects furs? I look to Rook with these silent questions but he is staring down instead, down at the carcass, nothing but pale fur and a stomach torn wide open and guts strewn out on display.
My mask flips over my head as I peer down at it too. I prod hesitantly at a patch of matted fur that would blend near perfectly into the snow, were it not so covered with blood splatter.
It's eviscerated. Steam rises in fluttering waves off of the guts—entrails—and I turn my nose away, faintly disgusted. The marmots and hares the boys dissected back home weren't quite so torn and bloody.
E-vis-cer-a-ted. The word has a strange loveliness to it. Like:
Ex-san-gui-na-tion.
Bird—be quiet. I startle before looking guiltily towards Rook's dark, stiff back. I forget, sometimes, that he can hear me if I'm not careful enough. I back away from the dead thing until my tail presses into the golden fringe of a witch hazel.
I almost think back you were the one who taught those words to me until the carcass grows bloodier from farther away, and Rook grows a little bit less like a deer.
Biting my tongue, I remind myself that he hates death more than he hates me, and that I don't want him to think me the same as Ma.
"Fine," I say instead, my voice bouncing eerily from tree to tree. "I'll bury it."
Rook nods, his white antlers skating distractedly over my neck, before he turns away into the shadow of a snow-laden oak and takes all of his thoughts with him.
On the days that Rook is quiet, it's because he's remembered something he wishes he hasn't.
I approach the torn up carcass like I'm afraid of it, but really it's because of the stench. It's perhaps a day past freshly dead, and even with the snow the smell of decay coats the inside of my nose like one of Elder's infernal perfumes, the ones in the colorful bottles she delights in making herself.
Sighing, I pull my mask as low as it will go over my face, inhale the familiar scent of feathers and bone and old death (like leather, or paper left out too long in the sun), and lean over to start digging the little body out from its thick shroud of snow.
It shouldn't be left there in the open. When I had buried the kingfisher, Rook had made me take it all the way out to the riverbed and scrape away layers of hard earth until I'd reached the soft mud beneath. I'd marked the grave with a smooth stone, and covered it all over with moss.
I'd seen Elder do the same many times, over graves both big and small, because even emptied bodies, she'd said, needed to be properly buried so that our magic (her magic) had no places to fester like rot.
When I've cleared away enough snow so that the carcass can be moved, I drag it gingerly out by its bushy, black-striped tail, and tell myself that there aren't any eyes watching me from the dark between the trees.
(the dead thing is a grey fox, though bird doesn't know this yet!)
