Original Flash Fiction — Written 4/6
Beneath the floorboards there are bones. Striped clean of their flesh and bright white, shining up through dustings of dirt and illuminated by parallel strips of warm light that filter in from above. At night, when he dreams, they chatter together. Desperate to connect and grow back their flesh and hair and teeth and eyes. The souls are gone, safe back wherever it is that souls go, and the names are lost. But he remembers each one.
Now, they are apart of the history of this place. As embedded as the stones in the walls and the ash in the chimney. As permanent a fixture as the vines that creep up, up, up towards the roof and stretch through shattered glass windows to try and find the sun. He waters them happily, sits and watches them grow as he listens to the bones shivering beneath his feet.
There was the camper. Lost, he supposed, and stumbling through thick rain with hair plastered across his forehead and cheeks. Half-blind, he staggered over gnarled roots stuck up from the ground. He tripped, not seeing the small gully inches before his feet. The man found the camper the next day, head resting sweetly against a rock pillow. Blood stained the still water pink. Drowned he looked like, if it were not for the skull cracked near in two. His eyes were open wide in an eternal shock. The man fished him out, dried him off and cleaned the blood from the stones. He burned his clothes and kept his keys – he liked the clacking they made when he swung the ring around his finger – and fed the flesh to the pigs. The clean white bones he blessed and returned to Earth beneath his alter.
Blessed be the pigs. Blessed be the camper. Blessed be this Earth.
A dog joined the stash. Then a squirrel and two pigs — mother and babe. Then a month passed with nothing but rotting leaves sinking into the soil and the drops of sun getting less frequent until the days plunged into night and the heat disappeared. It was then, in the midst of his panic, that he saw the woman. Sad and beautiful, and she climbed to the top of the tallest of the old trees and brushed her fine, red hair with a silver hairbrush before tying a coil of rope around her neck and sending her soul home.
It took him ages to get the bones of the hanged woman. And he’d had to throw rocks to keep the birds away as he tried. By the time he got her down, her joints were stiffening and her skin was the same icy temperature as the air. Then, much like the camper, and in a routine he’d rehearsed, he took her clothes to burn and – he paused. The hanged woman was pregnant.
This was new. He kept still, crouched beside her and the man tilted his head up towards the velvet black sky. Not much was different, he thought. Just like the mother pig and her babe. He could just believe it. So he took their flesh for the pigs, and burned the clothes of the woman and he watched the ashes float up, up, up towards the stars. He took the bones, bright white and blinding and blessed the earth beside the pig and her babe.
Blessed be the pigs. Blessed be the camper. Blessed be the mothers. Blessed be this Earth.
Something Clever 