Where Vultures Come From

Kat Roland

Where Vultures Comes From

Kat Roland

1.

He tells you he doesn’t feel anything for you. His violin ribcage holds a hollow song there. Your lungs fill with weight. The air smells of your almost two year friendship beginning to rot in his apartment. His arms offer a hug on your way out the door but the warmth is like stone. Outside, you can’t taste the sun. You know a beak is open because you can hear an animal hurting. It sounds both foreign and familiar. Organs flame beneath skin; the curled spine shrinks; it’s you who is cryingyou fold into feathered limbs.

2.

Vultures make homes out of abandoned and unwanted places. The best nesting ground exists far from civilization. Here, the forest feels like the right environment for forgetting. You find a cracked tree on its side. Sweet termites crawl through its open spleen. The decaying bark makes a perfect bed. You pull your hunched body into its nook. Sleep sounds like a running engine.

In the middle of the forest, you find his car. A mechanical carcass. All of the doors—except the back door with the broken handle—flung open. It’s too human in there. On the dashboard: a photo of his high school girlfriend with the renaissance body and candle wax skin. At the floor of the passenger’s side: summer parchment flown to addresses back and forth with postage stamps. Promises dripping in Blue Spring waters. On the radio: his voice swimming through the phone in a species language you no longer understand.

You smooth your feathers and refold your wings. Maybe next time the dream won’t taste so cold.

3.

Hungry vultures recognize the world is filled with too many hunters who go around hurting. You don’t hunt. Instead, you send your soft feathered form into the air and look for what’s already dead. The pink meat and blood will taste sweeter knowing you did no harm.

In practice, you find a few strange animals. The first: a surrendering white leg. Its burnt form extends from blue contents in a glass belly. A candle you bought with him in August. Laundry detergent scents swim upwards from an orange flame.

You search the trees and try again. Protruding from dirt: torn white material. Handwritten letters. Vulture tongues shouldn’t chew on these types of things. You crane your neck away.

Hunger bellows in the ribcage. You must find food soon. Spotted: some unknown thing. Muscles spill open from a cut shape. Flies circle the line. You pick a claw through pink flesh. It slices apart. You pull a dripping talon to your tongue for a taste. It’s an actual animal.

It doesn’t taste like Rabbit, Insect, Bird, Deer, or any other species. It’s just food, you tell yourself, and it’s good to feel nothing. This is new.

4.

Everywhere, humans are hurting and turning into vultures. You rest on a broken branch and listen. Familiar cries cover the world in quick flashes. Like lightening, lips split into beaks. Wounds sprout a bird’s plumage. In time, this will all be phantom.

You remember the week you saw your sister’s eyes in the body of a bird. The feather in her journal rattles. The feather in your mother’s scrapbook stays fastened. The feather in your father’s keepsake remains caged. You’ve seen the feathers of strangers float past. All of us have been animals.

5.

After enough time passes, your beak nudges an object in the grass. It appears nothing more than object, a color and shape. Then another object. And another. You let everything about him become ghost to you. Listen. The wind sounds clear without his syllables. When you realize this, a chill vibrates under your feathers. Wings fold into shoulders and collarbones; feathers disappear into skin; nails protrude from fingers. You emerge as a human once again. In your lined palm, a single feather: flat and freshly released from bird’s form.

Kat Roland’s Where Vultures Come From appears in Flock 22.

N.B.: We recommend mobile viewing in landscape. 

1.

He tells you he doesn’t feel anything for you. His violin ribcage holds a hollow song there. Your lungs fill with weight. The air smells of your almost two year friendship beginning to rot in his apartment. His arms offer a hug on your way out the door but the warmth is like stone. Outside, you can’t taste the sun. You know a beak is open because you can hear an animal hurting. It sounds both foreign and familiar. Organs flame beneath skin; the curled spine shrinks; it’s you who is crying –you fold into feathered limbs.

2.

Vultures make homes out of abandoned and unwanted places. The best nesting ground exists far from civilization. Here, the forest feels like the right environment for forgetting. You find a cracked tree on its side. Sweet termites crawl through its open spleen. The decaying bark makes a perfect bed. You pull your hunched body into its nook. Sleep sounds like a running engine.

In the middle of the forest, you find his car. A mechanical carcass. All of the doors—except the back door with the broken handle— flung open. It’s too human in there. On the dashboard: a photo of his high school girlfriend with the renaissance body and candle wax skin. At the floor of the passenger’s side: summer parchment flown to addresses back and forth with postage stamps. Promises dripping in Blue Spring waters. On the radio: his voice swimming through the phone in a species language you no longer understand.

You smooth your feathers and refold your wings. Maybe next time the dream won’t taste so cold.

3.

Hungry vultures recognize the world is filled with too many hunters who go around hurting. You don’t hunt. Instead, you send your soft feathered form into the air and look for what’s already dead. The pink meat and blood will taste sweeter knowing you did no harm.

In practice, you find a few strange animals. The first: a surrendering white leg. Its burnt form extends from blue contents in a glass belly. A candle you bought with him in August. Laundry detergent scents swim upwards from an orange flame.

You search the trees and try again. Protruding from dirt: torn white material. Handwritten letters. Vulture tongues shouldn’t chew on these types of things. You crane your neck away.

Hunger bellows in the ribcage. You must find food soon. Spotted: some unknown thing. Muscles spill open from a cut shape. Flies circle the line. You pick a claw through pink flesh. It slices apart. You pull a dripping talon to your tongue for a taste. It’s an actual animal.

It doesn’t taste like Rabbit, Insect, Bird, Deer, or any other species. It’s just food, you tell yourself, and it’s good to feel nothing. This is new.

4.

Everywhere, humans are hurting and turning into vultures. You rest on a broken branch and listen. Familiar cries cover the world in quick flashes. Like lightening, lips split into beaks. Wounds sprout a bird’s plumage. In time, this will all be phantom.

You remember the week you saw your sister’s eyes in the body of a bird. The feather in her journal rattles. The feather in your mother’s scrapbook stays fastened. The feather in your father’s keepsake remains caged. You’ve seen the feathers of strangers float past. All of us have been animals.

5.

After enough time passes, your beak nudges an object in the grass. It appears nothing more than object, a color and shape. Then another object. And another. You let everything about him become ghost to you. Listen. The wind sounds clear without his syllables. When you realize this, a chill vibrates under your feathers. Wings fold into shoulders and collarbones; feathers disappear into skin; nails protrude from fingers. You emerge as a human once again. In your lined palm, a single feather: flat and freshly released from bird’s form.

Kat Roland’s Where Vultures Come From appears in Flock 22.

Kat Roland is a writer from Jacksonville, Florida. She recently graduated from the University of North Florida with a bachelor’s degree in English and minor in Creative Writing. She is currently the Managing Editor of Talon Review. Her work won the Amy Wainwright Award and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. You can read more of her stories at Paper DartsGingerbread House, and The Gateway Review