Photo by Steve Harvey on Unsplash
The bones look fake. Like a plastic model in a museum, or a science classroom. They’re not the remains of a fish, because there’s a ribcage, curving, and yellowed. Alma stands on the wooden foot bridge that crosses the creek behind her house, entranced. It could be a baby raccoon, she supposes, or a muskrat. A creature caught by a larger predator. The woods, she knows, are filled with them.
That night, Alma can’t stop wondering. What could have picked the bones clean like that? Chewed and gobbled every morsel of flesh, to leave a perfectly preserved skeleton? She ignores the flashing light on the answering machine and reads about foxes and coyotes on the internet, instead of listening to the messages that are certainly from her mother. Intrigued by her findings, she considers the many possibilities regarding the fate of that unknown animal.
Curiosity compels her to experiment. At the seafood counter in the grocery store, she points to a whole fish labelled “Snapper,” and the lady grips the gleaming scaled body with a gloved hand. Wraps it in brown paper and hands it to Alma. Tells her she hopes she’ll enjoy her dinner, and Alma responds, “Oh, it’s not for me, but thank you.”
At dusk Alma sneaks across her back yard to the beaten path that leads to the bridge. Rustling sounds surround her, small squeaks and strange cooing. She places the snapper at the apex of the arch, slits it from gills to tail with a jackknife. She knows how to do this because her grandfather used to take her fishing on Sundays and taught her how to debone the white meat to prepare it for frying. She’d felt so reassured watching him, sensed that he wanted to pass on survival skills to this frail, pale little thing named Alma. Despite the nightmares filled with squirming fishes and bulging eyes, she appreciated the tips.
The poor thing is already dead, she reminds herself, it can’t feel a thing. It’s like cutting off hair, or fingernails, completely painless and guilt free. Once she is satisfied with the presentation of the bait, Alma retreats to the safety of the lawn to wait.
Ten minutes pass. Alma is looking from left to right, each nocturnal call distracting her, so that she misses the grand entrance of the culprit. An enormous black bird with a bald, red head. Petrified, she remains immobile as the thing stoops to tear away bits of the oblivious fish. Of course, she realizes. A turkey vulture. If she remembers correctly, Eddie pointed one out to her, perched in the bare branches of a skeletal tree last winter. Just after they bought this place, right before he left her here.
Back in the city, she shared a tiny apartment with Eddie for years. Once they decided, on an evening filled with too many vodka sodas, to get married, they began searching for a home. He wanted property, he wanted water. He wanted a lot of things. Some she gave him, others she could not. Now she spends sleepless nights tossing and turning in their king sized bed, certain that she will die alone up here in the north, away from her family and friends.
Sell the place, they advised. It’s too wild, too remote. Alma could see the sense in it, and yet she didn’t want to leave. She’d miss sitting at the edge of the creek in the afternoon. Didn’t want to abandon the flowers she planted, the vegetables. She knows Eddie isn’t coming back, but she feels rooted to this patch of land. And now, she feels, she’s acquired a new pet.
Veal, Alma decides the morning after the late-night feeding, might serve as a greater temptation to the turkey vulture. She purchases a tray of cutlets, and this time, sets them at intervals across the yard. One beside the lounge, one near the solar light. One right in the center, a thin slab of slimy inducement.
She is barely sheltered within the glass walls of the sunroom before he arrives. He’s bolder this time, sidling straight towards the veal, beak gnashing at the meat as though he’s starved. After he’s consumed every scrap, he spreads his vast wings and circles upwards until he reaches the perfect height for soaring. Fascinated, Alma follows his flight pattern with her eyes until he disappears.
Feeding Buzz, as she now calls him, will become expensive. Alma’s thoughts stray back to the pile of bones on the bridge. Could it be as simple as putting on Eddie’s old work gloves and scouring the paths in the forest for carrion with a shovel and a garbage bag? As easy as tossing the found corpses into the yard so she could sit safely inside and observe Buzz while he pecks and gnaws the bones clean?
She becomes a scavenger herself, collecting tiny bodies and lugging them home each morning. What would Eddie say if he could see her trouncing through the woods in his old rubber boots cultivating her grim harvest? He’d accused her of obsessing over the miscarriages, but he didn’t understand. They didn’t bother her, the doctor assured her they were normal occurrences. She’d endured it all quietly, until the third one anyway, because that’s when Eddie’s eyes went blank. She knew he stopped believing in her when his words started slipping out like shadows from some hollow place inside him. It was Alma, though, who’d been hollowed, and when she woke up one morning to find Eddie gone, she was not surprised, and didn’t even mind a bit.
Buzz lands gracefully on the grass, and Alma gently slides the glass doors open, to step gingerly towards him. He raises his head from the mangled opossum she found at the side of the road to eye her intently. She takes another step, then sits down cross legged like a child. Tentatively, Buzz approaches her, and though she tastes bile rising in her throat she remains still until he is so close, he can peck out her eyes if he wants. He doesn’t though, just settles down to nest among her folded legs like some death-eating lap dog.
An onslaught of voices startle Buzz, and before Alma can ascertain why he’s bristling and hissing, she recognizes the hunched, worried form of her mother accompanied by Eddie and a stranger in a suit. Intuitively she strokes Buzz along the black feathers of his back, but he utters a guttural growl and soars into the sky.
“What on earth are you doing, her mother asks, and she feels like she’s five again. Before she can answer, Eddie squats down in front of her, “Honey, everyone’s worried about you, you’re not answering our calls or our e-mails.”
“Who the hell is that?” Alma inquires, nodding toward the lanky man with the pamphlets in his hands.
“He’s a real estate agent,” her mother says, “we want to talk to you about selling this place, about coming back home.”
Alma laughs, stands up and dusts herself off. Watches Buzz circling in the air overhead and raises her arm like she saw the wildlife handlers on YouTube do. To her immense satisfaction, Buzz swoops down in a rush to land on her forearm. She holds firm under his hulking weight, and the deep pleasure of this symbiotic relationship courses through her.
“I’m fine,” she says to the trio of unwelcome visitors, “and I’m staying here. If you sell this place, it’ll be over my dead body.” And she laughs, delighted to imagine that her insignificant body will gain importance by one day giving Buzz the sustenance he requires to live.
Sara Dobbie is a Canadian writer from Southern Ontario. Her work has appeared in Menacing Hedge, Maudlin House, Trampset, Ellipsis Zine, and elsewhere. Look for stories forthcoming from Emerge Literary Journal and Fiction Kitchen Berlin, and follow her on Twitter @sbdobbie.