CW: Animal death

Bluidy Fingers

She is neither here nor there. She closes both eyes to wash herself in the ambivalent darkness, and then she opens only one so that the world looks as it did when she was a girl: blueberries black and hot in the sun, tracks in the dirt, a willow weeping over a silver lake. A bee buzzes by her ear. She closes her eye, a breath in the dark, then opens the other. The berries are burst and shivering with maggots, the tracks are black smears of mud as dark as old blood, and the willow weeps real, gasping sobs into the lake, filling it up to a boil. The bee beside her ear is no bee at all. She closes her eyes again. Both worlds are real, both are now. Her fingers are sticky from the rainwater caught in the cups of the foxglove.

Beneath the aspen tree

I found him beneath the aspen tree with a mouse between his teeth.

I said nothing to the midwives when he was born with skin so thin, the veins ran

black rivers in marble.

I pretended not to hear his screams as sunlight cut

between the clouds, a scarf thrown casually across the hood, folded twice.

I ignored it when his teeth came in, how he’d bite me when he’d feed – the milk

turned pink.

I looked away when he chewed the necks off things – his stuffed toys like

headless wives.

But today I found him beneath the aspen tree with a mouse between his teeth. I buried the mouse – tendons plucked and skin sucked dry. I had a fleeting thought, as I scrubbed his fingers in the bath, how easy it would be – but if 

it must be him or

me –

Angie Spoto is an American fiction writer and poet living in Edinburgh. In 2020, she completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. Her doctoral thesis was a fantasy novel, called The Grief Nurse, and a collection of essays on grief, madness and language. She is editor of the collection Disclosures: Rewriting the Narrative About HIV published by Edinburgh-based press Stewed Rhubarb. Her poetry, essays and surrealist and horror stories have appeared in numerous publications around the world. Find her online at @Angie_Spoto and https://www.angiespoto.com/