Tag Archives: Taylor Rae

The mountain is as cold and grey as your arms. I carry your coyote-gnawed vertebra. It pulses in my pocket, an ossified heartbeat. 

The wind kisses my neck, and I shiver.

Six years of bone-hunting, and every time you’re hidden better than the last. Each bonescrap brings you back for a few precious minutes.

The landmarks bristle with memory. Here’s the embankment edge I spilled down the mountainside. The thicket I landed in, leg broken. The brush you vanished into, looking for help. Beyond that, your unmarked grave, everywhere and nowhere.

Search and rescue found me, but they never found you.

Beside me, pine needles twitch. Your vertebra hums like a dowsing rod as I chase your ghost deeper into the forest. You hint me onward, crackling sticks, scattering leaves until there you are, in an abandoned foxhole: your left mandible, yellowed, meatless.  

I smile, vision blurring. “Found you.”

You murmur behind me, snowfall-soft, “Found you first.”

I lean into your foggy arms and whisper, “Did you meet any clever foxes?”

You’re only empty air, but I know you smiled. “Only you.” You pause. “That’s the last one, babe.”

I hug your jawbone. If I wait until nightfall, I might become a ghost in your arms. It wouldn’t be the worst fate.

“Let’s go home.” You wind-kiss my neck again. “Before it gets dark. You can tell me what we’ll do when we get there.”

We walk home together, and your fingertips feel like the sky just before it rains.

photo by Ta Z and Annie Sprat (via unsplash)

When she was fifteen, Joy cut out her heart so no one could find it. She thought it would hurt more. But once she pried her heart from the wet purse of her ribcage, she couldn’t feel anything. Not the blood dripping down her belly. Not her mother’s knifing words when she discovered the stains on her good towels.

Joy’s heart was still beating as she buried it in the garden, beneath the roses.

“I’ll come back for you,” she whispered.

Her heart drummed back like a fist on a grave: no no no.

But Joy left it there. Every year, the roses brambled thicker than the last; every year, her heartbeat went duller and duller.

Joy grew brambled too. Thorns bristled in her chest like secrets. No one, not even her mother, dared attack her now.

When Joy returned for her heart, she was no child anymore, nor was she alone. The man with her had no scar where his heart should have been.

The roses were bloodred and smelled of copper. Joy lifted the toothy vines. The ground was quiet and dead. Her heart unbeating. Joy clawed at the soil, rocks gouging under her fingernails.

“It has to be here,” she insisted.

The man reached out and squeezed her hand. He looked at her the way he had when he offered his own heart and she had nothing but thorns to give.

“We’ll find it,” he said. “If you let me help.”

Together, they started to dig.

photo by Kristina Paukshtite (via pexels)