The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

There are childish shapes with a little spread around the shoulders—spread too bunchy and rumpled to be wings, though. They have outgrown the nest and here and there a limb projects between the sticks. It messes with the nest’s integrity, loosens the whole structure and leaves it bulging and inclined to shed. It could rupture in the night and drop all of you, sleeping and unprepared. The popping of twigs keeps you awake, held by tensile lines of possibility: a rumbling fall and your own shadow gaping wider, like a mouth inside the ground.

If they were ready, their capes wouldn’t crease up like that. They wouldn’t have that washed-out tint. They would be expansive, scarlet and tumid with blood, able to handle whatever overflow of air came their way. But then it’s questionable if their capes will ever catch up with their lumpy hips, spindling arms, general bodily extravagance. You can see it all more clearly in dark like this dark, dark that digs itself into your face like fresh eyes. One of them is even turning hunchbacked. They’re supposed to be children, you know, but at times you can’t quite see them that way. At the very least, they’re getting too old for this.

Wait for morning, anyway. A fighting chance at what you find yourself referring to as a secondary life. A kind of supplement to this life in the nest, to be lived in secondary, almost incidentally flighted bodies. What counts after all is the swollen moment, their crush and sweat as they smear their dreaming faces on their siblings’ stomachs. There’s no compelling reason for a moment to lead anywhere other than the ground.

As the dawn comes around their legs start to glimmer in blue spandex. Perhaps they might have accomplished something exciting. Caught falling airplanes and carried them to safety. But it’s hard to escape the impression that they really won’t amount to much.

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