bones

warning: this post contains descriptions and photos of wild animal remains.
also, the deer photos were taken by the sweetie.

i first see the sharp white claw of ribcage when we are driving back from our fishing spot at the old bridge. we hadn’t been fishing, only stopping by to see if the water was still too high and there along the road the whiteness stood out enough to draw my attention from whatever we’d been saying. so when i finally get the image to fix itself up with words and am able to yell, “ribcage!” and then “skeleton!” and then jabber on something about maybe a deer or something big like that the sweetie’s immediate response is, “do you want to go back?” which, of course, he already knows the answer to. because we’d spent a good part of our lives together with the tiny skull of a rat perched on our bathroom window ledge, orange gnawing teeth spiraling into what should have been space for brain. something in my eye can pick out skeletons from forever away and i’d seen it lying in the gravel of a park path, clean as a skull in a new york park will ever be. i swoon over skeletons in little shops selling oddities. snake spines swirling all over themselves. frogs all hinges and joints. elegant little bats defying the laws of everything.

so of course we turn around, drive back to the fishing spot and retrace our drive slowly, with me unnecessarily craning my neck to find the whiteness again, something i’d seen from the corner of my eye the first time while not even looking, while engaged in something else altogether. we cover something less than a mile probably, drive cautiously around a parked truck overloaded with hay, threatening to tip over on us if we get too close. nothing. no skeleton. not even a white scrap of trash pretending to be something better.

the sweetie is sure i didn’t really see anyone’s ribcage. there is nothing on the side of the road but my imagination glowing like bones. but when we drive back later in the evening with a car full of fishing gear i peer over nonchalantly for that last mile or so, thinking maybe those ribs will be more visible from the other side of the road. they are not. the sweetie fishes and i follow a pack of geese with my camera. their leader is a large bird with a damaged wing. feathers stick up from his back every which way and he reminds me of a duck my sister brought home years ago. he is undaunted by his inability to fly and this somehow lets the other geese have faith in him. they follow him around in the water, up the steep bank, across the path.

when it is time to leave i am looking out the window of the car and right there where we are turning around i see that flash of white again. three or four clean vertebrae clinging to one another, a slow curve, thick and heavy. “spine!” i holler. “vertebrae!” and the sweetie looks at me like i’ve begun hallucinating skeletons. we do not stop for these bones and i consider slumping in the seat to express my frustration but i notice we’re driving awfully slowly back toward home. i look off to the side for that ribcage again. i hold my hands up like a clamshell to show the sweetie or maybe to remind myself what i saw.

when he pulls the car to the shoulder i think he has spotted the ribs. “no,” he says, “but they have to be right around here.” and as the words hit my ears the fingers of bone roll up toward my eyes like distant mountains. how are his guesses so precise? this is where the hay truck was parked earlier, where the driver maybe had that same itch in him to go up and be next to what used to be inside another animal.

as we get out of the car i think of bones my sisters and i found years ago, scattered on a wooded path like tea leaves, a story for those able to read them. and our dad, dad of the microscope and magnifying glass and the feeding of wounded baby birds, said it was okay to pick one up, bring something of this animal back with us. our mother, seeing us coming back with the filthy insides of a dead thing did not share quite the same feelings but seemed to know that children need skeletal things. who would we have been if we’d had other parents?

when the sweetie and i get up close what we see is what used to be a deer, arced across the bank of a wash, head thrown back like it is laughing. the front legs have wandered off on their own somewhere and the jawbone is a few feet from the skull. there are tufts of fur all around it like scattered rabbits’ feet. the hind legs, evidently without merit as food, are still intact- hoof, fur, skin. but the rest of it is clean and all the secrets of how a deer can move the way it does and why it is so beautiful are lying right out there for everyone to see. naked and plain.