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Meat
Poems |
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Fairy Tale |
There once was a small chunk of meat who lived in cabin in a forest of books. The meat had no idea how she had gotten there, or what her name was, or whether she even had one, only that she was a she, with meat for legs and meat for a head, and that she was as American as a dollar. Every morning she awoke, took four strides across the tiny room, and threw open the rough wooden door.
Outside, books dangled from branches. Some of the books were ancient, with covers made of skins embossed with gold curlicues and devils prancing evilly in the margins. Other books were small and square, with bold covers and tiny print. When breezes blew, the books fluttered and snapped, dropping pages that twirled toward the ground. When the meat girl walked through flurries and showers of pages, she thought to herself, "It is raining," and, "I have gotten all wet." The forest floor was matted, here and there, with pages that had drifted and gathered into piles. Small shoots pushed up through the decaying pages and unfurled papery leaves whose veins were black and blue and gold with ink that formed single, spidery letters. A sweet smell of rotting paper often drifted through the cabin. A flock of small birds called librarian finches lived in the forest. The birds wore tiny pince-nez that rested atop shiny, silver beaks. Slim gold chains that ran from wing to beak affixed the spectacles to their walnut-shell-sized heads. Every day, the librarian finches flew into the cabin with ripped out pages of books dangling from their beaks, and laid the pages down in the shape of a parabola. The meat girl would read the pages one by one, starting with the page to her left, and inching her way slowly along the arch. She would reach the apex by noon or so, when the shadows fell just so through the doorway and across the bare pine floor of the cabin. By dark, the meat girl would finished and climb back onto her bed, watching pictures squirm through her mind. One day, the meat woke up with a small cloud lodged in her head. She swung her legs from the bed and noticed a shadow crawling behind her left eye. The room looked shaded, by degrees. The meat stumbled across the floorboards and leaned against the door, pressing her ear against it. She heard a quietness, not like blood in her ear or pince-nez sliding down finch beak, but a deeper quietness, as if the breath of the world had gone out. The cloud in her shifted with a motion that resembled a shadow dissolving into a million shadows. |
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