Bird, bursting

She rose because there was nothing left to do.

She had salt in her throat, salt burrowed in that bridge between nose tip and dip of her lips. Saltwater returning a burn through her throat, so she parted a little and let the stream, with all its tendrils of seaweed and soft crabs, scramble out.

She didn’t want to sleep anymore. That was the gently pulsing thought.

Her father, the man with the black velvet hat (with a long, drifting plume) and a collar that rippled unlike anything she’d ever seen. It was so stiff, the cloth wired up and down in strict patterns. She thought it might crunch if held with two hands. His bootskin on her shoulders made her elbows tremble and she stayed so utterly still. His boots traveled over the rest of her.

She could taste it in all her openings, the material that used to be cattle.

Cattle was a new taste. She’d felt similar things, familiar things, large spotted paws that yielded into her skin, the tuneless breath of bats tracing their way through her hair using echolocation. Their soft electric cries bounced off her scalp. She liked fireflies who gathered in the spaces between her toes, savoring the dark for their own light displays. Every once in a while, a humpback whale’s belly would skim the pad of her longest finger.

Cattle hooves felt strange… and wrong. Already they stamped vast grassy indents into her fleshy underarms and that place just above her hip bone. They grazed slow and wide; each plucking felt forced and deliberate. She didn’t like the way their rubbery lips stained into her folded kneecaps, nibbling. She’d prefer gnashing, ripping, anything other than this slow evaporation.

She still remembered all of it well, including her birth.

The plume of her father’s hat, waving in the west wind. It looked like seaweed in a blue haze, a seahorse’s limbless dance and a tail latched to coral. It looked the way horse’s manes blow and blow. It looked blue and then black and then blue again. I was deceived, said her mother. Her mother did not spit bitterly, but her whole body rumbled inside out. My one mistake. Promise me you will not open to those with blood and beating hearts.

Her father sailed on a ship with white wings, an explorer from the east, though to her mother he was just another sailor on her expansive stomach, traveling from one rib bone to her open pelvis. This was space she knew well and loved. She and her mother both. The skin there was taut in the earliest days, when her mother cried and shrank into her own crust of a body, spurting red in terrible waves. She never learned to love those volcanic pourings, but she learned to accept, if not them, then their source.

A moonwashed night when her mother ached from inside out, a conspiracy of elements. She was wise and old and violent as a child with silver eyes. Her stomach capsized and rebelled; waves flew into her father’s ships like white-edged wings, splintering the masts and sending those flying sails into a dying spiral.

It was beautiful the way a bird bursting into a bloom of feathers is beautiful. Her father fell into that gaping blood-blue space in the center of her mother’s stomach.

And on the sea floor, her parents made love.

In her mother’s last burst of volcanic shame, she gave birth to a child. Who slipped through a crack in the sea floor and rose to the water’s surface, where she hardened and cooled and became body.

Her mother let go, finally, belly rippling, and her father floated to the surface with loose and misty skin. He floated to shore unknowing, his boots crawling up the sand and dragging the rest of him like a shipwreck. He washed up into the curled crook of his daughter’s salt-licked elbow.

Where he discovered her.

She didn’t mind at first; she liked being claimed and climbed over and examined like something precious. Her father was alone and lonely, and she sang to him through her porous skin. He was mostly naked, having lost his hat and plume and everything else to the sea. He parted her hairs, combed through a young jungle. The cats watched him from above and the birds from all around. On bright nights, he walked out to the sea’s edge, not a toe touching the water, and stared as far out as he could.

All the time, there was something less solid growing in her chest.

Her father built a ship out of her own tender nails and sailed away. She slept. He came back with more men, and cattle. And a new plume. The cattle were cattle; they could not feel her buzzing skin beneath their hooves. They did not understand her breathing, and they could not breathe together, and she could no longer sleep.

And the men, the men couldn’t understand a land that lived. What the men knew was how to quench, take, tame. They were wise in a different way.

First they trimmed her toes. One day she woke with a groan and found her ankles missing. It wasn’t long before she lost her fingers, knuckles, her jagged wrists. They were still there but there was no feeling and she could not move them. Terrified she sent a twist of water towards the sea floor. There was a bubbling in response: her mother, crying.

She began breathing the sea, holding sand crabs in her lungs and salt in her eyelids.

Her father with the plume. Some days she watched him and loved him, even as he hacked away at each cross bone of her ribcage. Men sliced open her legs and tightroped on her tendons. Her father had a woman, had children, and his children-- her stepbrothers and sisters-- helped pluck her hairs and snap her sinews.

And her father, with his leather boots, approached the crook of her elbow. The space rubbed smooth from when he’d first drifted onto her body. He wouldn’t dare. She wouldn’t dare. It was a question of who dared first.

She felt something in her chest grow solid. They thought they were clawing her to pieces; they didn’t know they were clawing her open. She was not so young anymore, she was wakening. Deep in her stomach, there was a jolt and a soft caving and a wilting as something gave way. Soon she would burst. Soon it would flood from her, a bright volcanic rebellion.