Peculiar Girl and Cat Teeth

Cat teeth and a wolf claw, a skunk tail and assorted legs from raccoon, possums, and squirrels. Stay didn't have many bones on her mantel, but her collection grew nearly ever time she walked through the woods. They found her, in the form of a glint of yellow-white poking from brown leaves, a puff of fur nearby; sings she looked for. The only full skeleton she had were her porcupine bones, strung together and flying in front of a window. The rest lay random on the fire mantel, now with the fire silent beneath, in red and orange, mirroring autumn crawling through the windows, warming her naked toes.

The cat teeth were stacked in a small jar the size of her thumb. Molars, canines. Kitten and mature. Sharp and some with blood still clinging to the root. Ever so tiny, strong and capable. They seemed much too small to mean so much to such beasts.

Bones were strange, beautiful puzzle pieces to life. A thing most never saw while living, a beauty that only showed itself in the age of death. Stay wandered the woods and picked up the smooth bones among twigs and leaves. She marveled at the life they had, and at the energy returned the creatures returned to the world; except for that one bone.

Stay imagined assuming the role of Frankenstein. She would put the teeth on white linen, lined up in swooping rows, almost lost against the weave of the fabric. Stay watched in her minds eye as she cut her finger on a tiny tooth, the blood becoming the tooth's blood, the animal's life. The skunk bone would lye on the opposite end of the linen, ensuring a touch of the unknown, of wild mystery. Other beasts would bring her creature strength, stealth, and ferociousness.

Thumbing the bottle, stay gave it a small shake. The teeth jingled on the glass, music of life and death. A molar stock to the bottom of the cork top.

She would be no Frankenstein. She would never be able to care for an animal. Cleaning bones from the outside and dusting them, she could do. Feeding, loving and caring for a living creature other than herself, she could not.

Uncorking the jar, Stay pooled a few teeth onto her palm. How different some looked from others. Spikes and mini mountains, some with pits and others with ravines. There could be a whole minuscule world among these cat teeth. Oh, how Stay would love to live in such a world among calcified mountains.

Rivers would dig deep and trees would grow wide until they all connected, their branches grafted into one mutated web: a tree of life. The sky would turn green and the rain would be leaves. Milk flowers would grow beside the mountain and the river's water would be warm and pure from the tree's roots. This world would be free from disease. Stay imagined living in this world, alone, with no need nor desire to build separate shelter. To block out and hide away. Her bed would be moss, her cup would be bark, her shade would be the great tree of life.

Stay stretched her neck, it gave a lad pop. She had been looking so intently at the teeth in her hand a cramp had formed, snapping her out of the day dream. She carefully placed each tooth, one at a time, back into the jar.

The Peculiar Girl and the Wood Table

Gnarly wood with knots and holes, divots and rings in shades of pale sand to roasted walnuts ran smoothly under Stay’s finger tips. Her porcelain finger caught in a deeper groove before jumping back on track with the rest of her hand lazily tracing the ancient lines. The wood table appeared roughly made; wide, uneven patches of wood set together with pegs, the grains not matching as her eyes jumped from one panel to another. Stay could only assume her mother, or possibly the father she never knew, had made it before she was born. Sitting strong in the center of the kitchen, the table had always held what was post important: a place to fold cranes, to build cakes and skin rabbits. She had bled onto the table, coffee rings almost created a pattern like a dream catcher created filigree along the edges. Gouges in the wood from an angry knife stabbed deep while shallower points were created to hold the blade in thought.

Stay imagined the wood holding onto her memories.  With no mother, father or people to remember or create memories with her, the table was the only one she could imagine capable. Once a living thing, growing strong and tall, reaching for the sky in an endless craving for life, it understood.

Reminiscent and in need of a friend, Stay brought out her old friends. The porcupine bones were still tied together with string being held together like puppets ready to dance and run with her. Stay admired the contrast as she set the bones on the wood table. Smooth creamy bones against rough woods. The combination screamed time and life at her, life gone and time always going. The tree had grown into the earth, sinking roots into the ground while branches spread into the sky. Bones of the porcupine held the life and structure of the animal while the beast remained unaware of its skeleton, the only part of the creature left. The wood and the bones would continue to live on in death, time deepening what they once were. Everything was backwards. The tree and porcupine they were dead but in death remained alive forever, they held age as time went on. Both so beautiful and so different.

Stay craved immortality in bones.

She imagined her body lying on the long kitchen table. Her form slowly decomposing and the wood soaking up what it could of her body, allowing her soul and essence to become part of the world until years drift by and it would only be her bones left on the table. Creamy, slender and elegant cradled by the table, her small bony fingers settling in the grooves of the wood, her skull pitched back to rest along a worn knot in ecstasy.

Stay rubbed the back of her head, feeling the gentle curve of her skull bend in toward her spine, the delicate balance of her entire being resting at that pivotal point. She couldn’t help wonder at how easy it would be.

Standing up and pushing away from the table, Stay shoves those thoughts away. Thinking of life and death and the potential immortality of death is dangerous. Though she never knew what happened to her mother for certain, she felt it in the center of her heart; her mother was dead.

Stay’s mother had problems. One of the comforting things Stay read in her many books was every single person had a multitude of problems. They could have problems that were solved but created new problems, problems that followed them through life and problems they never even know they had. That was the kind of problem Stay’s mother had. The kind of problem that ate away at her happiness and told her she wasn’t ok the way she was until she didn’t know how to feel. She thought the only way she could feel normal again was through pain. Stay had seen the scars forming on her mother’s arms and peeking under the hem of her shorts on her thighs.

The life left her eyes until she looked at Stay with nothing buy greyness. There were moments when Stay thought she was ok again, when her mother would fold cranes and line them on the sill in the kitchen, she would bake a strawberry tart and dust it with powdered sugar, blowing it like a cloud over the table and smiling through the cloud at Stay. The times of momentary rightness were quickly shadowed by hours, sometimes days, of stagnation. Her mother would sit in the living room staring out the window, barely moving. No more cuts, only staring into the woods as if waiting for something. Was she waiting for Stay’s father to return? Was she waiting for a reason to live?

Her mother had a problem she didn’t know she had and she couldn’t fix it. Pills might have helped her. There was a pharmacy in town and an old, kind doctor Stay saw once as a child when she had a fever. But, her mother didn’t go. She went to the market and bought food and other necessities as if she could bake it all away.

Now Stay glared at the table that held the confections of her mother’s love. The table that taunted her with life and death, making a mockery out of all Stay knew. The table soaked in their life and love and acted like its support was enough to give in return. Did it keep her mother alive? Did the hard-hearted table stop Stay’s mother from hurting herself? Did it offer support when Stay cut her finger off? Perhaps 18 years with this table was enough, maybe it was time for her to move on from the problems of her mother and make this home her own.

 Stay wanted to stay alive. The table sucked the life out of her. It would stand like an unmoving stone as a constant reminder of the pain her mother held, making it her own. It would cut at her heart making her wonder at her father and hold resentment toward her mother.

The house had an unused landline she could dust off to call information and get a technician to install internet. Then buy an old laptop from the resale shop and purchase a new table online. Stay wouldn't have to leave the house often. She could remake the home she had into anything she wanted, a Parisian coffee shop or a Buddhist temple.

With the decision made, Stay took her porcupine pals and hung them from a hook above the kitchen window. Opening the window allowed a breeze to pulsate through, the bones becoming chimes as they gently knocked on one another like laughter.

The table would have to go.

© Ash Huntley

The Peculiar Girl and Porcupine Bones

Porcupine skeletons danced on moon streaked ice, propelled by fishing line stretched over the lake and to the hands of a girl. She twirled her fingers and flicked her wrists, watching the ghosts skitter and hop, joyous in their lively endeavor.

Fissures ran along the surface, chasing one another as they bounced beams like twinkling Christmas lights on a decked home of cheer. She imagined smiling faces shining through the window as laughter spills like smoke up the chimney and ribbons spin around the tree on red and green foil boxes.

This was not the girl's first time. Her peculiar interests left her alone and isolated. The time she spent in public was time spent with people giving her side long glances, where skittish whispers followed her shadowed footsteps, leaving echoed impressions in the snow. Reactions that only pushed her further away from furrowed brows and turned backs. It pulled her deeper into her strange hobbies, allowing her to have solace in the only friendships she ever had.

As a little girl, roaming the dense woods with a butterfly net she collected small bones of small beasts. She dreamed of bringing them back to life. Grateful to her, the beasts would never leave her side, trailing her wake as faithful furry friends.

The closest she came was watching them prance from afar, an illusion she was happy enough to indulge in.

The floating bones gleamed and paused. The girl threw the lines to the ground, something swelled in her chest like a balloon until she couldn't breathe. A wind charged over the ice, pressing and pushing the snow off branches to fall heavily atop her head. Wrapping her arms around herself, she shook with an urgency to stay warm as tears spilled on her cheeks and a forced breath steamed from her frozen lungs. Joy

© Ash Huntley