Once upon a time a mother took her children to play on the sandy banks of a mild little creek. She made sure there was no danger for them other than the dangers and frustrations they caused for themselves—quarreling over the best sticks, getting their socks too sandy, and loosening Band-Aids that they couldn’t bear to pluck away from long-healed scrapes. As the children played, a gar swam to the bank and said, “Pick the child you can most bear to part with, for I’m hungry and must eat one.”
“Get real,” the mother said and grabbed the fish out of the shallow waters. “Shall I break your back, throw you into the woods, or toss you downstream beyond the beaver’s dam?” She was a quick woman and irritated from dousing petty arguments all afternoon.
“Please, let me swim away downstream. I’ll owe you my life,” the gar pleaded. The mother tossed it away, as she had always intended to do, so as not to scar her children’s delicate sensibilities.
While the children ate their picnic, a water moccasin made its way toward them. The curves of its movement rippled the water beautifully. Its slither across the sand was just as fluid.
“Which one should I bite? My venom is beating in my teeth like an extra heartbeat, and I can’t stand it any longer,” the snake said.
“Oh, let me think,” the mother said as she rose from the bank and dusted her thighs. Before the snake had drawn back to strike, the mother had her heel on its head. “Fuck off,” she said as she reached down and grabbed it by the neck. The snake wrapped her forearm and shat in its anger, but the mother would not let go.
“Would you prefer to be a belt or a purse?” she asked.
“Let me go, and you’ll never see me or my kin in these woods ever again,” the snake pleaded.
The mother bit the very tiniest tip off the snake’s tail. It tasted metallic and felt tough between her teeth. Then, she tossed the snake into a stand of privet hedge. “It’s time to go,” she hollered at the children who were filling their shoes with water and mud.
But before she could gather up their discarded toys and socks, a coyote appeared. The mother felt the forest air go still around her. “Shall I eat you or your children?” it asked. The mother immediately realized this coyote was a mother herself and couldn’t be so easily banished. “Me, of course,” the mother answered.
“Of course.” The coyote nodded and waited.
“Run along home to father,” the mother told the children. “Tell him a coyote has eaten me and to throw out your underwear when it gets holes.” The children ran home, arguing about which would be the one to say the part about the coyote and which the underwear.
“As one mother to another, is there anything I can do for you after I’ve eaten you?” the coyote asked.
As she undressed, the mother thought of her childhood along this same creek. She looked at the willow tree and remembered how she used to lay across its lowest branch and watch the eddies of the creek beneath her. “Rest my pelvic bone in the crook of that tree that leans over the water.”
The coyote devoured the mother reverently. Lapping the blood so that the mother’s body was never messy during the eating. She licked, and licked, and licked. She made sure that the bones were picked clean and sent downstream one by one except for the pelvic bone, which she wedged into the tree. She then went away to suckle her den of pups.
The summer breezes dried away the humid dews that settled on the little pelvic bone. The sharp winds of winter made the bone shimmy in its perch. The pelvic bone gave sound advice to whomever came walking by or kayaking underneath. Some days, it sat in silence. Other days, woodpecker drumbeats reverberated through the hollow marrow passages.
In honor of Little Pelvic Bone, the coyote returned with all her pups, full grown by now. Little Pelvic Bone used ghostly arms to gently massage the teats of the mother coyote and her female offspring. The milk that poured from them made the creek froth white. Deer, beavers, foxes, and even squirrels and rabbits came to be milked by Little Pelvic Bone for her touch was exotic and fluttery. It made the animals scared and full of pleasure all at once.
Eventually, the moccasin with its nubbed tail emerged from the underbrush. Little Pelvic Bone nodded and the moccasin approached. Little Pelvic Bone milked its venom and the snake writhed in pleasure. The milk creek curdled with this new addition.
Soon a boutique farmer downstream noticed his crops were growing thicker and fatter the closer they grew to the creek. He determined that he must have the secret to this fertilizer. He put on boots and a hat his wife had given him and trudged upstream. He walked all day. Finally, he came to the bend where Little Pelvic Bone rested. All the animals bolted into the underbrush, but Little Pelvic Bone couldn’t escape.
The farmer started to tug Little Pelvic Bone from her perch. She pleaded with him to leave her be, that she wasn’t the breast from which this milk poured but only a dry old bone. The farmer refused to listen. His boots were greasy from the curdled milk, and his hat was sweated through.
The little pelvic bone had no choice. She took a great breath and sucked the farmer into her pelvic inlet. First, his head with the sad, wet hat, then his shoulders, which had to shift and twist to make it through, and finally his legs, kicking in their many-pocketed pants. He was born backwards into nothing.
His heritage breed cattle and heirloom tomatoes grew plump under the watchful eye of his wife, and when outdoor enthusiasts passed underneath Little Pelvic Bone’s tree, she continued to give good advice, and they said, “That is Little Pelvic Bone, who was eaten by a she-coyote.”
Jessica Fordham Kidd is a lifelong Alabamian. She works as the associate director of First-Year Writing at the University of Alabama. Her fiction has appeared in Phantom Drift, Puerto del Sol, and Blue Earth Review, and her poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Drunken Boat, and Tinderbox among others. She is the author of the poetry book Bad Jamie published by Anhinga Press. Twitter: @jessicafkidd
Photo by Tomáš Malík from Pexels