isabella lane
the vulture
We were going to walk up the Mount that morning. It was too windy. We went to the chemist instead.
They only had one option. It says Yes! on the front. There are two tests. I drink four glasses of water in advance, with a five-second break in-between. Pacing in and out of my dark room like the tiger in Ueno Zoo. I remember timing its paces, counting under my breath, so I could get a perfect photo. The thrill of seeing its whiskers up close was great. The tears that pricked up seeing its zoochosis were greater.
I take the test. Mum reads the results. It is negative. If I don’t get my period while I’m still in Tauranga, I will take the second one that came in the pack. I had already named the baby. My parents call me into their room. I am a disappointment. I am naive. Sitting on my hands to hold myself in place, there is no regret, in me, anywhere, and there never will be because I am young and I am allowed to make mistakes. Chances are there will be a next time. I don’t scare easily. I cried because I was tired, nothing else.
I pace back and forth in our tiny apartment; at Ueno Zoo there were also birds, a massive vulture with moulting grey wings, a wrinkled neck, hunched, designed to pick at what had been left for it. She perches above me now, glaring through me with red eyes. Red eyes and pink neck, pink eyes and red face, tears streaming from one, a judgmental gaze from the other we aren’t so different after all she says you are no tiger you are like me you meet death with logic in the same way that I use it to plan my meals you are no tiger you are the way that you are because it is your nature you animal cannibalistic in your ways all you do is consume until you start to consume yourself then you learn your lesson and you unlearn with such flippancy it’s like it was never taught. I repeat, she crows, you are no tiger. I start to sob harder but she flies closer, digging her talons into my womb. And it’s empty, my uterus is empty as she tears it from me and swallows it whole. For safekeeping, she cries, and for a moment she and I cry at the same time. My arms outstretched mimic wings mid-flight, we aren’t so different after all.
Tomorrow, instead of my mum and I walking up together, my sister and I will walk around the base of the Mount. My parents will walk to the summit. If they like, they can talk about me. Seagulls will accompany my sister and me to the beginning of the base. The vulture will meet me at the end. The two of us will fill the space in between these beasts with as much love as we can press into the forty-minute walk. I hope it will fill whatever hole is still bleeding in me. I hope I can do the same for her.
Isabella Lane is a student who writes when she gets bored of her assignments. She was a finalist in last year’s National Schools Poetry Award, and her work can also be found in the 2020 edition of the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook.