The Skeleton: a (very) short story

She walks alone, small and inconsequential. Beside her a sea-wall looms like a frozen concrete wave. The day is uncomfortably hot, the sun, a furnace that greedily consumes the seawater turning it into an impenetrable haze, covers the world in a sodden blanket.

Sounds and sight emerge sporadically from the mist as distances become difficult to judge. Waves whisper to her from the other side of the sea wall. They sound like a recording made on a cheap cassette, muffled and distant. The salt from the spray mixes with the minerals in her own sweat to create a pungent concoction that runs from the creases in her forehead and into her eyes.

A filthy fish and chip shop emerges from the murk. People cling to its door like it was a life raft.. She can taste the tang of vinegar soaked chips that have been trodden into the ground. The pungent aroma mingles with the salt of the sea air and she envies the seagulls that tear at the tarmac trying to dislodge the graying mulch that was once food.

The mist is fading. She walks along a promenade comprised almost entirely of amusement arcades and rundown souvenir shops. They are little more than kindling in the heat. At the terminus of the decaying promenade, a pier juts impotently out into the void. A despondent fairground teeters precariously at the end of the world, ready to jump at the slightest provocation. She imagine the waters beyond the pier to be as a black and as still as a slab of volcanic glass.

She continues past identical men clothed in identical dirty aprons, squatting in identical white vans. They lurk from within small openings, offering warm fish guts for sale to incredulous passers-by – who buy the proffered offal without asking for a price before carrying their small polystyrene prize at arm’s length to the nearest bin, tipping it in untouched.

She is mugged by the nauseous color and deafening noise of an arcade. She examines its eco-system with a critical eye: money flows like a river into is doors, eddying around the spent shells of recently ejected people, who stumble against the flow, slack jawed and awkward. With downcast, unblinking, eyes, they reach involuntarily inside empty pockets, searching for coin.

Further inside, old women sit enveloped in clouds of cigarette smoke voraciously feeding fistfuls of coins into small black slits in yellow plastic in the desperate hope of winning a ceramic leopard or a free standing ash tray.

She arrives.

She stands motionless in front of the glass case. Inside a figure reclines lazily on an old wooden rocking chair. The old man, (or girl, who can tell with a skeleton,) looks ready to sit there all day given half the chance.

She has visited the skeleton many times. She has a routine. She will soon reach into her pocket and drop a penny into a slit at the front of the glass case, and as soon as the coin tricks some hidden mechanism, the skeleton is going to react as if reanimated by magic. It will leap to its feet and begin to dance. The resurrection will be nothing short of miraculous.

She pauses, reluctant to proceed. She watches the coin drop into the slot again and again, pausing and rewinding her memory like a video tape, feeling a flutter of excitement in her gut each time the coin teeters in the slot. She drops the coin and stands with her nose pressed against the glass, transfixed by the spectacle.

Music comes from a small black speaker set into the glass of the case. It is a small uncomfortable sound. As the skeleton begins its dance, she wonders who it belonged to before someone put it in a glass case and tied wires to its knees and wrists. It must have belonged to someone after all.

Its dance is always the same, but she keeps feeding pennies’ into the slot in the hope that if she watches it long enough, It might do something different: make a mistake or miss a step. She knows if this were to happen, then she would know for sure the skeleton was still alive. But its dance is always exactly the same no matter how many pennies she feeds into the slot.

She talks to the skeleton to it in her head. She tells it that if it gives her a sign that it really is alive, if he would just lift his little finger, then she will come back in the middle of the night with a hammer and set it free. She is banging on the glass, making a fuss.

The owner of the arcade is not happy to see her. He has a bunch of keys in his hand. He bends down with his palms on his knees and asks her what all this fuss is about. His breath is hot fish. He sighs. The skeleton is happy working for him. He and the skeleton are good friends. On an evening he helps the skeleton out if its case and into his car and drives him home to have supper with him and his wife.

She scowls at this idea. He says that sometimes the world inside your head is better than the one outside, and if you insist on proving everything is real then you are going to be disappointed. The man reaches into the case and begins to disconnect the wires from the skeleton wrists and knees. She feels sure that as soon as this is done the skeleton will jump straight out.

The man continues to disconnect the wires and when finished lifts the skeleton from the case. He sets it down on a ledge and beckons her over. The skeleton is lying limp across his lap. He moves one of his hands to reveal a patch of writing scratched on the back of the skeleton’s head.

Made in China.

Does this means that the person the skeleton was from, was Chinese. She has the odd notion that she too might have this writing on her skull and rubs the back of her head to double check. He replies no, that it means that the skeleton was made in China and that it is plastic. She can touch it if she wants. But she doesn’t want to touch it. She doesn’t want to hear the things the man is telling her. She knows the skeleton is real and that it as alive. She doesn’t need to touch it to know that, she can see it with her own eyes.

Standing on unsteady legs, she runs from the man holding the skeleton in a heap of bones across his lap. She runs with her eyes tight shut, her hands over her small cold ears. She staggers into the path of a tourist steam bus. It is a slow lumbering beast, but she is small and frail. The bus takes her from one world to the next without slowing, without even asking for a ticket.

There is a crowd. A woman weeps quietly. Men lay their jackets over the saddest sight they are likely to ever see. Police arrive. The thing which was once the girl is cleared from the road. Normality is restored. Life goes on. The skeleton stares ahead through eyeless sockets, unable to look away, unable to stop smiling, unable to lift a finger.

The End

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Filed under: Writing