Reconstruction

In the fourth grade, she knows what it is to be a body. Gloveless, she sifts mouse bones from an owl pellet. The assignment is to build a whole skeleton out of what has been swallowed and regurgitated, cocooned in its own tangled fur. She pulls out the ribs one-by-one with a pair of tweezers, trying to make a cage of them. She imagines the mouse’s heart howling when the owl hooked her, the sound overpowered by the heartbeat inside the larger bones. She imagines the acid breaking down the mouse’s skin, her heart pumping blood out of the wounds, that blood becoming lost blood, becoming the blood of the dead. She imagines the owl choking her body back up, the violent yawn of her skull resurfacing after he digested her meat. She imagines the pelleted mouse abandoned on the forest floor, heart left in the owl’s stomach. When she arranges the bones on the construction paper, she draws a red fist between the ribs.