By Emma Gorenberg
The first skeleton drawn from the earth, they called beautiful. And
she was, to their particular vantage—they who knew bleach from
ocher, bone from rock from gully. It is three days before I see the
limb breaching, femur or humerus I’m unsure, another before I will
feel it with an outstretched hand, another and I will push some of its
loamy casing away, but go no further. A week and I cannot leave it.
The pottery that births around it is more beautiful, but the bone is
captivating, hypnotic with the absence of life. And I will distinguish
each bone from earth if there are more, just as we scour the body not
to know the buried, but to realize how we walk above.
Autopsy (3500 BCE)
