Fiction: To Consume an Ortolan Bunting (A Practice of Ambelopoulia) by Sarah Guo

 By Sarah Guo

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Catch me on this cool autumn night, when the buzz of crickets is so loud it drowns out the sound of my screaming. After all, the passerine’s mournful song will never be enough for you - you have to have her for yourself, you must, for this practice of ambelopoulia is not an act born from simple longing. Rather, it is a practice in the extent to which man can be cruel and yet redeemable, inhuman and yet refined. 

Thus, string up your black, fine-mesh nylon fishing nets between the branches of the acacia tree. Its innumerable branches are thin, riddled with shatterpoints as all broken things are. Even its psychoactive alkaloids and potassium fluoroacetate cannot protect me from the net, so I fall into your grasp, terrified and not yet aware of the fate that awaits me. Even when subjugating me, thrusting me from innocence into a world where man finds himself inexplicably in control despite the all-important and yet unimportant fact that the idea of the willing subject is merely an illusion, you cannot find it in yourself to provide me the illusion of gentleness. You bruise my wings as you pin me down. I still. 

Lock me in my cage, then, and find me subdued. I'll gorge myself on your offerings until I am twice what I used to be only because I now know nothing else. I am relieved in some sense, knowing that there was no other alternative other than to be drowned. In the dark, you become my everything. The world seems infinite and yet I cannot be free. I wonder what it must be like to live unburdened by shame. 

So, what is there now? What is there now between us as you submerge me in Armagnac? Ugni blanc grapes, the scent of oak wooden barrels, and I fade to nothing. Your advances have destroyed me. What am I but yours? What have I been reduced to but my body, an object of endless male obsession? What value does my birdsong have in the face of your lust? 

I am gone, and yet we remain. You consume me feet first, an act so indulgent and yet so cruel that you cover your head with a cloth. Are you hiding your face from God, or are you preserving even my precious fragrance? That’s a mystery even for you. As you consume me, you shatter my spindle-thin bones between your teeth, letting the blood my splinters draw as a last measure of defiance only enrich my priceless taste. 

Perhaps, in the future, some unborn osteopath will find themself beholding the bones you spit out, those too thick and unwieldy for your endless hunger. Perhaps, in some future, they will piece together my osteometric points, uncovering my story, revealing the truth. For now, though, I am one Ortolan bunting amongst thousands, a species hunted to extinction by flesh amnesiacs.