#2

The Dirt’s Dream

written by Mathias Svalina

I am growing bones, three or four a week. The tips of the bones pop out of me like sprouting weeds, & over the course of days, fully emerge. While there is the occasional clavicle or femur or even skull, most of the bones are unrecognizable, they could be a tortoise’s vertebra or a skunk’s wrist for all I know. As each bone emerges I go online to the bone-trading site & list it, describing the bone in detail, including a quick pic. Sure enough, within a day, a vole or a stork or an architect arrives & gets the bone. Each creature thanks me in the ways it can express thanks, then trundles or slithers or flops off with their needed bone. I have been growing what must be a whale bone for weeks, the long rib daily emerging further & further, towering into the sky above the library. I hate it, this huge rib, but there’s not much you can do about it. And somewhere, I know, I have faith in this, there is a whale out there that needs this rib.