If you walk long enough on the path, a paved yet crumbling little road, along the shore of the lake with rocks crusting on either side of it, you are likely to find bones. Nestled in the large gray chunks of earth are bones of all creatures, of all sizes. If you are anything like Naomi, you will walk this path and only notice the bones, the proof of dead things that have perished far away from their homes. A fish head with half an eye, a spine of somesort, talons from a hawk long gone, seahorse-like baby bird skeletons—none of these things should have died here.
At least once a month, Naomi brings me here for a bone-picking date. She stoops down like a child, in a squat like when you play marbles, and sifts through the stones looking for remnants of the dead. I tease her and tell her that this is creepy, that she is a graverobber, that she likes to take things that aren’t hers. Naomi doesn’t listen to me. Instead, she rolls her eyes at me, little half-mooned scleras, and shakes her head so her blonde hair bobs about. I watch as she gathers pieces of other things, smaller things, in the bowl of her palm like a lesser god.
Naomi likes dead things. The shelves in her office are miniature altars to patron saints of roadkill and blanched bones. She has a collection of skulls from animals that would have eaten each other in life: ivory comb fish-spines, hollowed out bird-wing framework, singular nondescript claws, and large spindly horns. She’s picked up all of them from near the lake, hiking trails, or from our expansive backyard.
On our drive back home, the bleached turtle skull she just picked up stares back at me with hollowed eyes from the dashboard. Naomi’s right hand rests in my left, unwashed.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
A rabbit carcass has been rotting in our backyard now for three weeks and has made the air thick with the scent of hot decay. The grass has mottled around its small body and even smaller things are feasting on its remains, making meals of marrow like the rich. Naomi checks on the carcass with the excitement of a child checking on wrapped presents under a Christmas tree, and at dinner, she updates me on the progress the elements and animals have made. She tells me what they’ve taken so far.
She wants to hang this one up whole because she doesn’t have an entire rabbit skeleton in her collection, just an odd foot her father gave her after a hunting trip. Naomi’s always liked hunting: girls and animals, I think they’re the same to her.
Naomi waits until things die before she collects what she thinks is hers.
Since she found the one rabbit decaying in the grass, she’s begun peeling animals clotted with fur and blood from the middle of the road and bringing them home to dry on plywood sheets in the backyard. We keep the windows closed now because the smell is vile and clings to our clothes and hair regardless of however many washes we do. The animals rest on their wooden cots, some with roped guts spilling out of their sides and others with skulls smashed open like beer bottles. Fat, stupid flies buzz around the carcasses and bump into the glass windows facing the backyard with loud thuds, and from a distance, the squirming maggots look like boiling pasta shells, cooking in the hollows of the dead. The stagnancy here engulfs us; we live among dead things.
Every evening, she leaves a sloppy, wet kiss on my forehead as soon as she gets home from work out of routine, before she circles the bodies outside like a vulture. When she comes back inside and walks to her office, I do not follow. She says I follow too much like a dumb dog.
She waits until most of the meat has been pecked or pulled off the dead things before bringing the mangled bodies inside to begin her salvation process. In a large Sterilite container filled with warm water and blue dish soap, the animals are baptized by maceration until their meat and gristle dissolve like wet tissue paper. The liquid looks like soup, a kind of bone broth I couldn’t stomach. Naomi follows tutorials online made by people who like dead things as much as she does. In her nauseatingly bright home office, Naomi hunches over her desk and uses her tiny scalpels, like silver fangs, to scrape the last signs of life from the bone-cracks before dunking them in a hydrogen peroxide bath.
The bones bleach until they are cleansed of whatever happened to them before.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
We spend Thanksgiving at Naomi’s parents’ house every year, and every year, I am reminded of how different our families are. Naomi’s family takes pride in the things they’ve killed. My family shames the things for having died.
China shines like freshly burst adult teeth around the table skirted in blood reds and oranges. At the center is a bronzed turkey that looks like a pregnant belly, surrounded by smaller sides in bone-white dishes. Here, there are three courses, each served with a different drink because her mother insists it’s the only way to eat a proper meal. Around the table, with mouths full of half-chewn food, Naomi’s family asks us about our relationship, the one that mine still doesn’t know about, about our drive over, about our jobs and our friends. They drink and eat and laugh with their mouths wide open, the excess dribbling out. Here, they fight over who gets to snap the wishbone.
The road is slick with dew by the time we leave, and the car’s hum feels like tv static filling the silence between us. Naomi’s been driving for about thirty minutes, and we’re still coddled in the darkness of the trees that seep all the way into the next town over. I rest my forehead against the window, the grease on my powdered face leaving a large smudge, and stare out at nothing until my eyes are heavy with sleep. I don’t sleep, though, don’t even close my eyes, because Naomi pushes against the brakes and I jolt forward.
There is a deer in the middle of the road haloed like an angel by the headlights. Its eyes are big and dumb and dark like mine.
“I want it,” Naomi says, her eyes, blue like a Chesapeake crab, locked with the deer’s.
“No, Naomi. We can’t keep a deer as a pet.”
“I didn’t mean as a pet.”
“It’s not dead.”
“Not yet.”
In an instant her foot is off the brake and we’re veering forward, the car hurtling toward the deer which stands still like an idol mossed in fur. This time I do close my eyes with enough force to bring flashing red lights behind my eyelids because I want to stop. There is a thump at first from where the deer is knocked down then a squelching pop from its hide splitting like an overripe fruit, flesh bursting. Bones crunch under the tires, and I wonder what Naomi will do with them since they’re broken.
I don’t see how the deer looks after we kill it. I keep my eyes closed while Naomi gets out of the driver’s seat to collect the poor thing from under the car, while she opens the trunk and lays it to rest on the gray tarp that’s always there, while she wipes her hands on her jeans. I only open my eyes when I feel the car moving and am certain we’ve driven far enough away from the pool of blood. When I look over at Naomi’s hands, they are rusting.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
We haven’t been able to shower or brush our teeth in the bathroom since we brought the deer home that night. Instead, I boil water in our kettle, dump it into a bucket of tap water, and we clean ourselves with sickeningly sweet body wash in the soft swathe of the early morning light. In the evenings, after work, I scrub the white scabbed toothpaste from the kitchen sink before I make dinner. The house is a meat freezer; I walk around shrouded in a throw blanket the color of pink butcher paper, and my feet are tucked in lambskin socks. We shiver like scared animals even when we’re just sitting at the table picking at whatever frozen I managed to heat up. Naomi stares at me disgusted at the clumps of food in the black microwave-safe container.
Every day, I clog the bottom of the bathroom door with an old towel to keep the rankness of death in there. Every night, Naomi kicks it to the side as she locks herself in after we eat and never puts it back.
The bathtub is stained with dried blood, and the wall of the alcove is splattered with bits of brain and scraps of furred skin. The deer, or what’s left of it, is curled up like a baby in a crib under plastic cling film sheets, the same ones that carpet the floor, creating a barrier between the pretty white tile and whatever Naomi spills. Since bringing it home, Naomi fusses over it like a mother, like she once fussed over me when I was new to her. She’s taken a gleaming steak knife from the kitchen along with her smaller, more precise ones and stocked them where we kept our toothbrushes. I know she hangs her streaked and smeared vinyl apron on the hook where we once hung our bathrobes.
Naomi’s nails are perpetually brown, and she stinks of death. Her hair sticks to her forehead in wet strips like yellow bacon fat, and purple pools under her eyes from staying up until odd hours of the morning tending to the deer. When she finally climbs into bed with me, when the night fades away like a day-old bruise, when she slips her hands under my shirt to warm up, she is cold the way I assume the deer is.
But tonight, she does not come to bed.
From where I lie, flat on my back with my arms stiff to my sides, her footsteps crinkling the film in the bathroom echo through our attached bedroom and so does the occasional clink of the metal knives against the enamel of the tub. If I turn my face, I can see the shadows of Naomi’s feet pacing back and forth.
After a while, there are no shadows. Nothing blocking the golden light of the bathroom. Nothing makes noise. No one makes noise. The night becomes dead silent, and I bring the blanket up over my head.
I wonder how the deer felt when it saw the car lurch forward toward it. Why it didn’t move or flinch in the faces of death, the face of a pretty white girl and her darker, browner girlfriend. Sometimes I wonder if Naomi will take my bones when I die, strip my body of skin like she strips me of my clothes before she fucks me. If she’d mount me on the wall whole or just keep pieces of me, the prettier pieces—the ones she likes.