Loren Eaton has written a short story for a collective Halloween storytelling event. It’s a story of a young girl who discovers she hears and experiences things when she touches the bones of deceased animals. It’s a bone-chilling (heh, heh) idea which rings true in sad way. If we didn’t have a culture of death in this world, this kind of story would feel completely fantastic.
Bones spoke to Jenny.
She discovered the gift — if gift it was — at the age of five. Her brother, Samuel, had been excavating in the backyard with a red-bladed Ames True Temper shovel. A foot down, he accidentally disturbed the grave of one Fluffymump, a former favorite feline. Some surreptitious digging, a quick bend and snatch, and he whirled, shouting, “Hey, Germy, catch.”
Fluffymump’s sepia skull landed in Jenny’s outstretched hands.
Naturally, she screamed and ran upstairs to her room. Naturally, Jenny’s father bent Samuel over his knee and given him three sharp whacks. Naturally, Jenny’s mother followed close after to offer consolation and chocolate chip cookies only just taken from the oven. But that was where expectation ended.
Read the rest on his blog, I Saw Lightning Fall.
.
. “Along with Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles,” “A Canticle for Leibowitz” was one of the first novels to escape from the science-fiction ghetto and become a staple of high-school reading lists.”