Death Burlesque
There is no music.
There is a body. Clothed.
Furs and feathers. He has caught them all.
He takes a rifle, powder, lead. He used to lie flat in the dirt, waiting for days sometimes just to get a view of his quarry, to get enough of a sighting to start shooting.
Now he lies in the dirt and his rifle is unused and the barrel overrun with snow and damp beside him. Face up or face down it does not matter, because he cannot see whatever is there in either direction. It does not matter whether it is the worms or the birds that take his eyes. The worms will be taken by the birds in their turn.
There is no music.
There are no cheers.
Time passes and there is still a body, but there is less skin on show. He is still wearing clothes, and in the snow and the winter breeze they are shifted further off his frame. The cold keeps him still and fixed for longer than a desert might, but even after weeks in this, his bones begin to show.
They stand out pink, then yellow, then just another shade of white amongst the frozen water and the land.
As ligaments begin to fade, and their hold at joints begins to lessen, the form of that old hunter becomes more distant from how it landed when it fell.
His heart.
His poor old heart.
So many days out in the cold, looking for fur and feathers, things that only men like him can collect, can bring back to New York, can see shipped off to Paris.
Fashion originates, like rivers, in the mountains.
Primal catwalk corpse with wildlife, miscellaneous, dragging scraps and strips of this, his finest coat, away, so that they can with greater clarity inspect the bones for whatever frosted shards of meat may yet remain.
There is no music.
There are no cheers.
There is no wild applause.
Fingertips are carried off, a radius, the left one. A femur scavenged now for marrow. Nutrition is a hard thing in such a long cold winter for animals to find. The ones that do not sleep it out, that is.
The leather bag of powder is ripped, inadvertently, and the blackness of it sits out upon the snow, before weighing down within it, like a young child’s leaden handprint pressed there in curiosity. If it finds what lies underneath that snow nobody sees because another layer soon falls down. The heaviest yet. It seems like the body now, in all its clear-boned splendour, could be just another risen contour, or a misleading mound caked atop a hidden drift.
Springtime may yet find it naked.
*Dan Micklethwaite mainly writes short fiction and poetry, a large selection of which he makes available on his blog at http://smalltimebooks.blogspot.com/.
