Eram Quod Es
by Tim Mucci
Its eyes, your eyes are hollow, cracked voids. Shallow bowls, empty sockets, blind ditches in the upper half portion of your face. If it could it still be called a face. The upper half portion of your skull, because let’s, in the spirit of all honesty, call a spade a spade: you are a skull. A human skull purchased in a small antique shop in Maine, a “must have” item for any study, for any lover of the macabre, for any serious writer. Trafficking in human remains? Check. The dealer told a clipped story about purchasing it (you) from a lawyer who used you (it) in a court case. You don’t look fresh enough for that to have happened this century. Your yellowish color defies the norm of grey-white bone, you’re missing your mandible, but despite it all you’re still beautiful, a riddle.
Your four front teeth are missing, seemingly knocked right out of their maxillary homes, but the rest of your teeth are fine. Canines, premolars, and molars are all intact, which lends sinister thoughts to how you may have become what you are. The missing teeth, the small half-inch divot in the frontal pate, and the large gaping hole in your left fossa temporalis; these are all cause for dark thoughts. I’ve always assumed that you were a woman due to your size, your smooth brow, the gentle slope of your nasal cavity. You’re a reminder, a soft whisper in those quiet moments, what you are I once was, what I am you will surely become.
Tan bone, hard and cold with a byzantine filigree of nicks and scratches. Twisting lines where the bones meet like a roadmap of night’s desert; or lonely rivers, dry and searching for their outlet to the sea but finding only parietal, occipital, and temporal bones.
