Bones
BY SARAH VOSS
The dog’s last summer is a hungry one. The universe is a jaw, ravenous for things that rot, carnations and corn gnashing against satellites and elusive stars.
The girl and the dog hover between these cosmic teeth. Teeth, the girl knows, are stronger than bones, so long as one takes care of them. The dog’s molars are stained but sturdy, crunching the artificial chicken bones that the girl buys, which satiate nothing but the tongue. In spring, it was enough just to taste, but by summer, the dog stops eating. So does the girl.
The celestial mouth, however, is a black hole. Food perpetually floats in.
—
The girl practices paleontology, unearthing her bones from slabs of fat to prepare for the day she’ll have to dig up the dog. She is not going to let the ground digest the dog; by autumn, she is going to defeat death, or at the very least, she is going to get skinny.
She acquires a summer job at a flower shop, where nobody notices when she stops taking her lunch breaks, and when someone pokes fun at her sugar-free soda, she says that she is protecting her teeth. In a moment of weakness, she claws into a pile of molded roses and shovels them into her mouth. Their thorns are kind as canines. Their stems squish. They satiate nothing.
One thing she learns: a flower shop is a womb for hope. Girls get so bored during the closing shift that they plant prayers and so woozy from starvation that they believe those prayers escape the seed, sprouting blossoms reaped by godly fingers. Fingers that cleave cosmic teeth like a tongue, that snatch dogs from maws, that shuck meat from hallowed and hollowing bones.
Another thing she learns: a flower shop is a morgue for beauty. Obituaries of thinner girls glut the order box. Funeral arrangements require their own services, for flowers are corpses from the moment they are picked. Yet when they rot, they leave no remains. No marrow, no memory. Nothing to mourn.
—
The dog was initially a farm dog before the family grew fond of her. Now she spends most of her time tending carpet, but the girl and the dog still venture into cornfields when the fangs get tall. Each time, the girl is so famished that she’s tempted to steal a cob and crack her teeth on its kernels. But it’s seedcorn, anyway, not bred for consumption, and she certainly doesn’t want anything growing in her.
She has been warned that putting one’s body under a great deal of stress can wither its fertility. This is desirable; she wants her stomach to shrink, not swell. And she knows, after throwing so many flowers in the trash, that after ripening comes rotting.
The dog never had puppies. The family got her fixed. Her only fruit was a tumor, which clung to her spleen until the vet carved the organ out. Now her gut is concave. The girl is jealous.
And yet the cancer is carried to term in medullary cavities. It wants to fatten. It consumes, uninhibited.
The girl is jealous.
—
Bruises spoil the girl’s skin like troops of mushrooms. Their mycelia feast on waning tissue, gnawing away the bones she so desperately wants to see. Calcium decays before fat can be devoured; her teeth are softening. One day, they will disintegrate, and she won’t have to eat ever again.
The dog is not doing well. The dog lays on her side, wheezing, but the girl stands, for she knows that standing burns more calories. She carries the dog outside after work one day, as the greedy evening snubs the stars, and a picture is taken, not the last of the dog but the last of the two together. The girl laments. She laments that the picture was not taken in a month, when she is sure to have lost twenty more pounds.
Stars puncture sky. A stomach growls, and it reminds the dog of another life, one where she chased off smokers and snapped at raccoon tails. This growl, however, is not a warning. It is a welcome.
—
When the dog dies, the girl is only twelve pounds lighter. The dog is cremated. The family chose this. Her ashes will be scattered in a cornfield, where good memories supposedly linger. Spider silk and sunless humidity—what heaven.
The girl knows, however, that heaven is not a cornfield. It is certainly not a flower shop. It is not even a place up high, where godly fingers flinch into fists. It probably is a memory, one where the girl was plump with dinner and kissed the soft place between the dog’s eyes.
But her best proposal is this: heaven is giving in. Heaven is the week-old roses dissolving on her tongue. Heaven is the chicken-flavored bones collecting dust. Heaven is not the destination but the death. Not the stomach but the swallow.
—
As tasseled teeth shudder down the throat of a combine, the girl pretends that the dog has been buried. But when her hands breach soil, they snag on strings, worms and old roots and the hair that falls from her scalp in clumps. Nothing awaits her in the hole.
She lays a lilac branch at the bottom. Its petals are nearly blue, if that means anything. She does not intend it to. She chose it not for the flower but the stem, which is thick and woody, which is the closest thing she could find to a bone.
—
In what was never a memory, the girl and the dog chase each other into a cornfield. A pivot track coils into a divine thumbprint, in which the girl and the dog lay on their backs and watch tracks of satellites scatter into wishing stars. They gorge themselves on chocolate bars. Their bellies bloat into bubbles, and they float up and up and in, nothing to weigh them down.
