Oberlin has only one real liquor store, on the edge of town, about a mile north of center. It’s called Johnny’s and it’s only slightly too far away to walk to on a chilly or busy day. It’s a bike trip I make every two months or so–more frequently during especially desperate periods of life–to refill our house’s stockpile of whiskeys, vodkas, rums, and similar.

One of the striking things about biking on freeways, rather than driving, is that you really see the roadkill. You interact with it. There’s nothing between you and the flesh on the ground. Usually on these trips I pass at least one carcass, but this month it seems to have gone up. I biked over (yes, wheels to flesh) no fewer than three, entirely unavoidable, carcasses, flattened to the ground and barely recognizable as what they originally were (meat and bone, moving, alive) looking more like fragments of carpet that have become sticky and matted in the sun.

It’s fall now and I’ve been thinking about dead things. It is, after all, a season of death: The same season in which we celebrate ghosts is the season when leaves die, fall, and begin to rot. I’ve always had a fascination with death. I find beauty in things that most people avoid. I remember Julia dragging a deer carcass to her fire pit and boiling it to get the bones, Ben scavenging roadkill and roasting it for food. How do we make use of what’s dead?

I’ve got two deer bones in my room, rescued from a friend’s venison meal. When I boiled the meat off of them, I originally thought that I would use them for an art project, but they just sat around my room. After a couple weeks, I noticed that the ants were disintegrating the bones, presumably for access to the marrow. Underneath the bone a small pile of white bone dust had accumulated. Branching off from the pile was a thin dusty trail running to the crack in the wall from which the ants were coming to make use of the dead.

When I hold the bones, I feel discomfort. It is easy to imagine what it was once part of, to feel myself digging wrist deep into raw muscle, fat, tissue, and skin, blood down to the elbow. What is the connection between this dead dry object in my hand and the living fleshy animal in my mind? Would I recognize it for what it was, even if I had never been told? Do I have a built-in intuition that links bones to their living counterparts or would it just be a strangely shaped chunk of wood?

I wonder if a deer recognizes its brother’s carcass decaying in the woods or if a raccoon recognizes its fellow flattened and rotting on the road. Is the connection between the animate and the inanimate innate or learned? Is there a point between a fresh corpse and a pile of bones at which that connection is severed?

What I am asking, in other words, is this: if the knowledge was not inside us all along, traveling up the evolutionary tree, was there a first human who saw and comprehended a skeleton? How would such a person recognize it? Did they see a friend or relation wasting away to bones or did they simply recognize a ribcage as the same shape that pressed outward from their own taut skin? Did they cut into someone to find out? When did they first realize that they too would someday be that skeleton? Did it chill them to the bone?