The Woman Who Fed Birds
A Memoir of Merciful Decomposition
---
Frances kept a mourning dove that was actually a fragment of God's regret. Found it dissolving in her workshop, wings turning to water, and she held it together with her bare hands until it solidified into something almost like a bird. It would perch on her shoulder leaking prophecies that sounded like apologies.
"He remembers being the first disappointment," she'd say, the dove weeping silver tears into her hair. "When creation realized it could fail."
I knew Frances for thirty-seven years, watched her transform not by choice but by divine mercy—God's way of helping her become less human and therefore less capable of suffering like one.
---
The Hagfish Cathedral
Her apartment above Kowalski's Bakery was a sanctuary for backward prayers. She moved through it like a hagfish through the corpse of a whale—necessary, graceful, producing light from decay. The yeast rising at 3 AM wasn't bread but the breath of saints who'd given up trying.
"Privacy is God practicing for abandonment," she'd say, kneading dough that would never rise properly because mercy meant accepting failure. "I'm rehearsing disappearance so He won't feel guilty when I'm gone."
The herbs turned toward her because they recognized another organism being slowly digested by holiness.
---
The Mantis Shrimp's Kindness
When they tried to demolish Maple Street housing, Frances transformed into a mantis shrimp—not the insect but the ocean's most violent prayer. Her eyes could see colors that didn't exist yet, her strikes could shatter bulletproof glass with love.
She walked into city council meetings emanating light visible only to the suicidal. "You're already dead," she told them with melancholic empathy. "I'm just here to help you notice."
She chained herself to the bulldozer as an altruistic act—taking its sin of destruction into her own body. Spent the night in jail teaching inmates how to breathe underwater, how to grow gills from grief.
---
The Axolotl Highway
Found her on Highway 49 transformed into an axolotl—that perpetual infant that never grows up, just grows external gills and breathes through its skin. God's joke about potential never realized.
"I'm young today," she explained, "young like trauma makes you—frozen at the moment of breaking."
She met Yaniel, a refugee from tomorrow who'd already lived through what was coming. His partner Marcos had drowned in floods that hadn't happened yet. "Time moves backward through tragedy," he explained, aging in reverse toward his death.
Then came Anya Who Wasn't—refugee from existence itself, carrying water from places that were never created. "This is holy because it doesn't exist," she'd say, offering drinks that made you remember things that never happened.
---
The Tardigrade Testament
Frances's illness was God's greatest mercy—transforming her into a tardigrade, that microscopic bear that survives everything by technically dying first. She'd enter cryptobiosis for days, existing between states.
"I'm practicing resurrection," she'd whisper, her body dried to almost nothing then rehydrating with tears. "Each time I come back less. It's altruistic—leaving more room for others."
Kairos (not Kyle but Kairos, who existed outside time) would visit with weather from other dimensions. "In Universe B, you're already dead and happy. In Universe C, you never existed and that's even better."
---
The Vampire Squid Virgin
Between deaths (she had several), Frances became a vampire squid—not vampiric but inside-out when threatened, revealing her soft interior as defense. "Vulnerability as weapon," she called it, turning herself inside out during arguments, showing her unprotected organs as accusation.
She'd tell stories of milking black holes for dark matter, storing absence in mason jars. "Nothing glows brightest in absolute darkness," she'd explain. "I was saving emptiness for when I'd need to not exist."
---
The Pangolin Prophet
Her last decade, Frances transformed into a pangolin—covered in scales made of compressed prayers, rolling into a ball when touched. Each scale was someone else's unanswered request to God, which she wore as armor.
"Mothers must partially eat their children," she'd tell young women with disturbing kindness. "Not physically—spiritually. Consume their need until you're poisoned by it. This is mercy. They'll thank you for disappearing."
She knew from her three children who were actually one child experienced three times—past, present, and future versions of the same loss.
---
The Glassfrog Gospel
Frances died transparent—a glassfrog with visible organs, everyone watching her heart stop through her skin. Died in my arms saying "This is God's kindest cruelty—letting you see exactly how I'm leaving."
Her last breath was the sound of God admitting mistake. I saw all her forms collapse into one—the hagfish-light, the shrimp-violence, the axolotl-infant, the tardigrade-death, the squid-inversion, the pangolin-prayer, finally the glassfrog-transparency.
Holly painted her using pigments made from cremated gods—small gods, household gods, the ones who died when people stopped believing. The painting shows Frances as the space between extinction and evolution.
---
The Mercy That Remains
Her workshop still breathes—inhaling sawdust, exhaling forgiveness. Her three-children-who-are-one continue her work: building furniture from driftwood (past), creating from nothing (present), documenting what won't happen (future).
Yaniel lives backward now, getting younger each day, heading toward a birth that will erase him. Anya Who Wasn't opened a shop selling nothing to no one, perfectly successful. Kairos forecasts weather for dimensions that shouldn't exist.
And me? Still writing Frances wrong, which is the only way to write her right—with mistakes that reveal truth.
"Go away" she commanded lovingly, meaning: "Disappear with dignity while God watches and weeps."
We're all becoming extinct, Frances taught through her transformations. The lucky ones get to choose their creature on the way out. The blessed ones realize extinction is just God's way of saying "I'm sorry for making you exist."
That's the carpenter's daughter's truth—we build selves from salvaged wood, already rotting, already beautiful in decay.
