During the Autopsy

"She hid it well," they say, gathered around the body. Some standingin the gallery think of their god, big as an ox, and are thankful

for once not to be the chosen one. Her stomach opened to revealthe tree growing inside her, seeming to take root near the navel,

branching out between the ribs. Thick bark falling away underthe scalpel. A man worries a pair of bats from her throat. Wings

raw from rubbing against the wood, panicky. Flesh housesmilk-white bulbs, new life, pale like her throat, a nice one.

A throat to be stroked nightly by some woodsman. And the batsare the most vibrant black the man has ever seen. Their wings

seem to be living separately from their bodies, trying to detach.And so he pictures the woman in the same light, tree its own

creature, not hers, not her, as he takes a bone saw to a branch,or, with the smaller ones, snaps them off with his hands.

One must, at times, learn to ignore the body. In a dreamthe man was once patron saint of ships. Not only did he build

the most seaworthy ships of his small town, but he blessedall the vessels in the shipyard. Walking from wood hull to wood

hull, he would press his hands against them, speak to them with hispalms. And they would speak back. The man would carry their

stories with him from sleep, so that, in the morning, his hands werestill full with them, seemed to anchor him to the mattress, hands

heavy with whale bones and kelp nests. With crates of rottingfruit, the smell of too many men together, skin sloughing off

like flakes of sel de mer. And the man had forgotten all this, untilhis hands were around the trunk, growing like his own thigh,

and he could see each layer of the cut-into wood, which lookednot unlike each layer of the thick skin of the belly, the woman

not a woman, but a tree now. The tree, with his hands around it,sang into him a high-pitched song, song of a siren, a woman's

voice asking to be returned to the sea. Any sea. And as hewashed his hands after, thorough as always, as he walked

home in the rain to his wife. As he drank the glass of watershe had poured him from a clay pitcher, he could feel that voice

in his throat, and that night he woke—suddenly, salt watercovering his entire body—to that other woman's song.