#23: Bone Collection

Things were unnerving with all the ghosts around. In the living room, when the sun was just right coming through the parted windows, you could see two people playing cards at a table that wasn't there. In the den, there were no less than three people reading books at one time.

We knew the cause was father's bone collection in the basement. He had my brother and me follow him to the old cemetery in the hills and gather the bones at night. The rains and soil on the hill had kept them in "wonderful condition," he told us.

I wondered if the graves crawled with these spirits before we took the bones, or if the movement disturbed their memories, or if it was all in my head, as my mother had suggested that we were collectively going crazy.

I tried to speak with them, tried to hold conversations. Only once did a man look at me, confused, as if he were staring at an apparition.

Father categorized them below us. The different bones, the different bodies, all in a taxidermical strata of organization. He showed us breaks, healed bones, diseases of the heart that had affected the marrow.

In the years that followed, long after the ghosts left our home, I wondered what attentions my bones would have, framed in cases or filtered into stone. Or would the the wind just whip the grasses above them, carrying pollen through gentle breezes?

Micro-Fiction Index