Bolus

The woman at the necropsy table talks to the birds the way you'd talk to somebody's kids at a wedding: so who do you belong to, then? She means the family. She can nearly tell before the scalpel, from the hook of the bill and the little tube along the top of it, what she's going to find, and she's right more often than the diet tables say she should be. Petrels hold on. There's a room before the room in them, and what goes in there stays a while, rattles, gets worn smooth. Other birds just cough. A gull will bring the whole bad meal back up as a pellet on the rocks, a neat grey parcel, and fly off lighter. So on paper the gull looks clean and the petrel looks like a warning, and the sea that fed them both is the same sea. Up on the colony the old birds come in at dusk and the chicks start up, that thin creaking that means now, now, now, and the parent leans down and gives them what it carried, all of it, the squid and the bottle cap, because that's how you feed a child in that family, from the inside. Before they fledge, the young ones throw up the whole hard winter in one wet knot: squid beaks, pumice, a lighter, a blue thread of net. Then they go. The ones who never got it up wash in, in spring, and get counted. She doesn't call that fate. She writes it down as a guess, and that's what a family mostly is, a guess about you, made early, out of whatever they couldn't help. She has a list of birds nobody's opened yet. A hundred and forty-three. She'll go to the ones the tree says will be full, and to a few it says will be empty, and she'll wait, a little hopefully, for the first one to tell her she was wrong.