Mélange
The village’s sausage specialtywas pork and chicken groundas fine as a mist—or sometimeschicken and mollusc,maybe beef and shad, or—they could sometimes find a talonor a beak in the mix,like punctuation. And sothese were something like mythological creatures,a griffin, a centaur:more than one,in one.It reminds me of what I’ve readabout the shoddier mummificationsin ancient Egypt: occasional bonesof birds, of sows, of feral catswere added in, to help out, clumsily, whena human part went missing: presumablysometimes someone woke upin the Fields of Everlasting with an armand, on her other side, in an uneasy balance,a wing. She might consider herselfa slightly third-rate versionof the gods—those lovely human bodies,male and female both, but with the headsof hawks or ibises or lions, with the aspectof the ape, the hippopotamus, the scorpion.And when I think,…