The left side of my body was dead to me. I never used it anyway. I stopped the bloodflow to my left arm and rested it on the table in front of me. As I pushed the razor’s blade into the vein at the wrist my hand shuddered instinctively, a residue of feeling in the nerves that caused my flesh to twitch but never reached my brain.
Dead blood welled up at the point of incision, no longer being pumped in but still as eager as ever to escape. I pulled the knife along the course of the vein, opening up the forearm from wrist to elbow. I peeled the skin open, pinning it on either side to the table. I wiped the blood away from the bones with a tea-towel that was still damp from dinner.
The etchings on the ulna were even more beautiful than I’d hoped. I started to remove it, sawing through the bone first just below the wrist, then just above the elbow. The breadknife was barely up to the job but it struggled through. Once I’d finished I put the knife aside, and then pulled this internal scrimshaw free from its pit.
I wiped it clean. I rotated it before me. The picture extended all the way round. It was more than a picture, it was a story told in delicate lines, circular and unending, no beginning or end, a constant loop of unsettling depravity. Consumption and expulsion, death and birth and re-death, all that the universe holds reduced to so little, implying so much. It was hard to let go, but I forced myself to set it aside.
At the bottom of the valley of my hollowed arm, in the clotted blood and the seeping marrow, my children were beginning to stir, unfurling in the light. Their translucent skin and formless faces turned towards the heat of the lamp. I picked them out as delicately as I could, my fingertips twice the size of their skulls. One of them popped beneath my fingers, but the other two survived. I placed them together on a saucer, and baptised them with milk.
I took the blackbird from its cage. It froze in my hand, shock and fear stilling its wings, its heart beating so hard against my palm it felt like it might burst forth from its chest. I placed it in the cavity in my arm and left it to form.
I pulled the pins from the desk and folded the skin back together, sealing the wound with masking tape, one piece along the line of the cut, then several looped around my arm. I let the blood flow back into it. As I rolled my sleeve back down I could feel the beat of her wings inside.
