Lizzy Burnam 🐞

I found the meaning of life on a flat sheet of granite at the top of a hill near Charlotte, Vermont. The sun was directly overhead and I baked like a wet clay figurine in nature’s kiln, hardening into a terracotta bust of myself. A woodpecker hammered a tree with twisted branches and the tree curled more tightly into itself like a wrung rag. I strained to hear the meaning and shattered. The squirrels and robins came to pick through the clay shards of me scattered like seeds across the rock. They carried me in pieces down the hill and through the trees, buried me in soft soil near the lake, braided me into nests with dry grasses and shoelaces. A winter passed.