Marrow Parish Reprise

A figure, all tendon-twine and burlap sinew, teeters on split stilts of gnarled driftwood; clavicle bent like a hooked lantern pole, shoulders bristling with molted shrapnel. From her open sternum, a lattice of copper filigree unspools—slick with marrow sap, trembling beneath the weight of unseen current—while above her, a crimson pith helmet droops sideways, gnawed through by unseen larvae.

The air rattles; not wind, exactly, but the soft churn of bone grit tumbling inside burlap lungs. Behind her, a pylon smolders, draped in oilcloth banners stitched from eel skins and thumbprints; atop it, a bell without a tongue judders in its sleep, coughing up fistfuls of soot-flecked sleet.

A hyena-faced laureate slouches nearby, scraping a jaw harp strung with fishing wire; his verses are damp with vinegar and loam, trickling out in stunted gasps—

First came the glass moths,

Then the spindle crabs,

Then the blind juggler clutching keys for doors long walled shut.

Underfoot, the tiling ripples: tessellations of blister pearl and antler root shifting like a throat swallowing its own vowels. Cracks widen; out spill the archives—scrolls of nettle fiber and brittle rind, scrawled in ink pressed from the glands of sleeping serpents.

Someone hurls a shoe into the rafters; it returns as a crown of rusted staples. Applause flickers, brief as a cough.

In the leftmost corner, a weeping idol fashioned from kiln-slaked mud exudes faint steam, its eyes replaced with spinning tokens that display, in sequence, forgotten currency symbols, none of them still valid.

And then the centerpiece:

A tower of knotted velvet, pierced through with beetle husks;

A gourd-shaped reliquary leaking salt foam;

A pendulum made from frozen barnacles and the stringy remnants of a broken fiddle bow.

They say it’s all been rehearsed, though no one remembers the lines—

only that when the lantern gutters and the bell finally gags down its last ember,

the woman peels herself open from the clavicle down,

revealing—not organs, but a staircase;

spiraling, uneven, slick as kelp,

descending into a theater where the next act waits,

already sharpening its teeth.