Work Text:
I'm about ready to turn back and find my way home when I come across the bones. A pelvis, a sacrum, and a few scattered vertebrae and ribs, with brown stains of soil and rotting leaves against the grayish-white of old bone. A deer, I think.
Somewhere around here there might be a skull. There - among the rocks and mud of the creek bed. A buck, one antler broken down to a stump, the other still large and branching, though crumbling with age. I pick up the skull, carry it back to the open patch of soil and fallen leaves to lie with the other bones. I sit, facing it, on the ground, ignoring the slight dampness of the soil.
“You must have some stories to tell, huh?”
I don’t expect an answer, but I ask, and I listen. A distant breeze gently rustles the treetops. Somewhere nearer, a mosquito whines.
“Here, I’ll trade you. A story for a story.”
Talking to the bones reminds me of something haven’t thought about in years. A story, I guess, worth telling to this long-dead deer.
“When I was a child,” I confess, “I would speak to trees. And not just like I’m speaking to you now. I’d try to talk to them in what I thought was their language. I’d press the palm of my hand to the bark of a trunk, and whisper like shhhhhwhhhhshhhshhhh, like wind in branches, I thought, and I’d think a question as loud as I could. And then I’d listen to the rustling of the leaves, and listen to whatever thoughts drifted into my head, and I’d imagine that those were the tree’s answers.”
The bones don’t respond, in my head or otherwise.
“The other kids said it was weird, so I stopped, I guess. But I guess I still do it sometimes - not the shhhhhwhhhhshhhshhhh thing, I mean, but, y’know. I’m talking to you now, aren’t I...”
Somewhere, a towhee rifles loudly through leaf litter in search of bugs.
“So. What can you tell me?”
I pick up the skull, turn it over in my hand. I know there are stories written in bones, although I don’t fully know how to read them. This one has been dead a long time, I can tell - the tough yellowish proteins of living bone have degraded away, leaving only brittle, flaky, grayish-white mineral. It looks like this buck had lived a long life, too - his one remaining antler is large, and his teeth, where they’re not chipped or missing, are worn smooth.
But I don’t have the skill to read anything beyond that - whether he ever survived any harrowing encounters with hunters or illness or other deer, whether he was born near here or traveled far in his lifetime, how his bones came to lie in this creek bed, what predator or scavengers cleaned his flesh from them, what they might have witnessed in the forest as they slowly crumbled.
As though to draw the stories out through touch, I run curious fingers over the complicated shapes and textures of the skull. I feel the chipped and broken edges, brush bits of dirt out of the corners and crevices, trace the shapes of cracks and stains.
I notice also something out of place on my own hand - a loose bit of dry skin by a fingernail. I pull it away, unthinking, and it tears a bit of healthy skin off with it. A drop of blood wells up, and, on an impulse, I press it to the forehead of the skull. The dry, chalky bone soaks it up like paper might. Ordinarily I would have simply licked the blood off my finger, but somehow this feels like the time and place for a ritual - it feels right to anoint the antlered skull like this, communing a step further than the one-sided conversation we've been having.
I set the skull down with the other bones, close my eyes, and listen again. The towhee scratches in the leaves some more, then stops. A jay caws somewhere in the trees above. A little way up the creek, water makes a faint cascading sound as it trickles from one broad, slow pool into another. A fly buzzes somewhere nearby, and, a little more distant, I hear the lower hum of a bee.
A slight breeze stirs the leaves above with a very faint shhhhhwhhhhshhhshhhh. I let that sound fill my mind, clearing away thought.
No messages come through from the trees, or from the bones, but for a minute there, the whispers of the forest sound almost like music.