Talon
6 May 2009
Today I found a talon in the garden. I went up there just to make sure things were okay, and while I was there I pulled a few weeds. As I was about to leave, the talon caught my eye. It’s maybe two inches long, fingernail-colored, except the tip of it is coated in some kind of darker glossy stuff. It’s hollow. I brought it inside and washed the dirt off, then left it to dry on the drainer with my dishes.
It reminded me of one of my favorite first lines: “A boy was digging at the edge of the garden when he saw a big toe.” That’s from “The Big Toe,” which is the first story in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, by Alvin Schwartz. Some of the stories in that book are scary and some are not, but they are all made a billion times scarier by the illustrations.
After I found the talon, I went for a long walk down a dirt road and found a strange area I’d never been to before. It’s hard to explain this area, but there are some very steep hills and rotten trees and the concrete foundation of a small building, I can’t imagine what it was. This is in the middle of nowhere: I’ve walked down this dirt road a few times, and never seen anyone else on it. It’s not near a paved road. There was also a fire pit filled with screws (someone was burning carpentry debris I think) and one piece of charred rope.
I want to do something in this new area, but I don’t know what. While I was there, I forgot all about the talon. But I remember very clearly going to the top of one of the hills where there weren’t any trees, and looking all around, and then going down among the closest and rottenest of the close, rotten trees, where the ground was covered in thick moss, and looking up in the sky and seeing a hawk. That made me happy; I felt very alone in a kind of bewitched place and I was sharing it with this hawk.
And then just now I looked at the dish drainer and there is the talon.
That’s what happened today.
(Also, it is Michelle’s birthday. We potted some herbs and ate popovers, even though her oven is berserk and accidentally cooked the popovers at five hundred and fifty degrees until we smelled the smoke. They were not the best popovers, but many of them were still very good, and we had berries to go with them and talked about making ice cream in the summer.)
Comments (1)
the schwartz book – people on somethingawful are obsessed with it. probably the drawings, yes. i remember the copy my local public library had.
happy birthday to michelle!