Nazir 52b
One way of measuring creatures is by volume.
For the purposes of consumption, we consider
parts. Like, it’s one thing to eat an ant, but what if
we’re talking just a leg or two, fallen into the pot.
How much is a lentil-bulk? How much to equal an olive?
The rabbis say it is true that something smaller than
a lentil is too small to consider, but at the same time,
that’s only true if the creature in question has no soul.
If there is a soul, volume is irrelevant and we must consider
their chance of survival. An ant without a leg is not the same
as the leg of an ant, when weighting sins of consumption.
We fall to pieces. We tear apart. We tabulate for hunger
and for heartbreak. One can be at peace with dying
but must still avoid being in a room with the dead.
Is any box full of bones a corpse? If a spine and a skull,
matched, we count one, one corpse. A whole, holy,
hole in the world. Even if the ribs are missing. Any
amount of bones taken from a grave remains a whole,
count one, held together by the act of burying, after
the skin, after the flesh, after the tendons. But a box
of parts missing a skull or a spine, unburied between
death and now, is something other than a dead man.
An unquantifiable loss. These are the lists of things you
should never touch: a limb from a corpse stacked
with two dead strangers, pieces of limbs mingled
from two or more still-living people, a half-kav of bones
from at least two dead things, a barrel of blood, a bone
the size of a barley grain if it’s been broken in two,
a spine and a skull from two corpses mixed in one box.
We prepare. We predetermine. We prevent personal pollution.
Shana Ross is a recent transplant to Edmonton, Alberta and Treaty Six Territory. Qui transtulit sustinet. Her work has recently appeared in Haven Spec, Identity Theory, Ninth Letter, The Dread Machine and more. She is the winner of the 2022 Anne C. Barnhill prize and the 2021 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry competition. She serves as an editor for Luna Station Quarterly and a critic for Pencilhouse. She prefers walking in the woods to social media, so she budgets her time accordingly.
