Curating the Dead

They were the grinning stars of our childhood museum, looming above the conches & fossil ferns, the brain coral & the blue & green glass bottles that once held medicine. We’d found them in the woods not far from the houses, their other bones littered about, but it was only them we carried home, those skulls: two cows & a mule. Our elderly neighbor remembered the mule’s name: Charlie. Some of the teeth were loose & soon went missing, like strip-mined mountains.

We didn’t think about their deaths or even what they’d been before, as working livestock; they were still live enough for us. The zigzag sutures where the parts of the skull fit together made them self-evidently whole & perfect, & the way the lower jaws hinged behind the empty eyes inspired awe. Every kid, no matter how bored, would stop, lift the mule’s top jaw & make him talk.