Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 192

Hi.

Coffee:  Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

My white bones crept out to have a walk around while I was sleeping. I was deflated. They tucked the covers up to my chin.

Outside, in stark moonlight, my white bones walked only the back roads on their way out of the city. They left the comfort of our culdesac and ducked alleys in old neighborhoods. The dogs barked, but no other creature knew me, or had the senses to sniff them out.

At the edge of Wake and Chatham, my white bones licked cold stones below a highway. It was gravel, refuse, dust. They slipped into tall grass where the ticks live, and into dark trees with rough baubles left by some other traveler in the branches.

At the river, cool water stopped them. My white bones found an old dead beaver and finished its work, wrapping its teeth in reeds until the tool could fell a rotting birch. There were no splashes when the tree fell, only whimpers. My white bones had found a route to cross the river, and they did.

It was the swamps they were looking for. An old bog in the forest that’s too crowded in oak groves to be seen during day. But the moonlight had it, and my white bones knew how to seek it out.

Each night, it happens like this: the branches clear. Soft black snakes wreath the space where there used to be arteries. In the Chatham bog at midnight, my white bones sink below the surface. They spend the hours passing into peat and pumice, and just before the sun comes up they surface a little darker, creeping back into me, still wet with what I cannot know.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

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Thank Goodness I have nearly
unlearned
folding my desire into itself
being afraid to claim it.

Yrsa Daley-Ward, bone