A story of a seal

In case you have been wondering the bones called to me first. 

I wouldn’t have found him if it were not for the rock to wake me in its insistence of another form. 

I caught my breath, a seagull overhead screamed down to me: That is not the truth! That is not what you seek! 

I kept walking, stepping over the carcass of stone and kelp. My breath returned and I weaved through driftwood and shells to the detritus far up the beach. I did not gasp as I nearly stepped right through the ribcage and onto the heart. There wasn’t time. 

I almost crushed the gut under well-trod boots.

I caught my breath again. How did I know there would be a body? Was it the scent rolling down the sand? Or the bones pulling me towards the rock-like body melting into the tideline? 

Clavicles bright white in the dying light of the day. 

Pools of saltwatery crimson between the ceiling beams of the heart, those ribs half thatched in nubbled grey. 

The weight of the belly sank into the sand but held its form. 

How was this not strewn every which way? How were the guts so intact with the skin so not? Yes the intestines began to spill onto the driftwood cradling the skeleton, the skin flailed towards the earth in tumbling waterfalls of what it used to contain, but the guts lay in the center of this undecipherable creature (save for the possibility of wings or fins) undiminished. That belly glowing and shimmering lavender and the faintest of blues. 

I wanted to touch, to wrap myself in the folds of this life, but the perfection of decay and untouched insides- vulnerable and resilient to the outside forces- I could do nothing but whisper gratitudes down those bones, into that gut, into the sand absorbing the life ebbing between its grains. 

There is life. 

There is death. 

There is all that intact, vulnerable beauty that lay between ribs and fins.