THE BONES

A short story by Dan Jire

She buried it. 

Jeff Simms stood and watched from his window. He couldn’t help it. A pretty woman stepped out of a beat-up red car and started bending over. Jeff was an old man, but he wasn’t dead yet. 

He was so old, a young woman like her would know there was nothing he could do but stare. She might appreciate that her beauty transcended generations. Maybe she would think of him as a creepy old man or get down on herself for only being attractive to senile old men, but Jeff didn’t think that she should feel either.

Hers was a classic beauty. 

Her blonde hair bounced from shoulder to shoulder as she looked around. Whatever was in the small bag she buried wasn’t something she wanted people to find. Jeff wondered if she suffered from incontinence as he did.  He imagined her on the move, long trip from somewhere and not being able to stop. So, she fishes out a bag, does her business and keeps on moving. Only then it starts to smell. She gets off the interstate and lucks into asphalt-less ground just off of I-295. 

No, that wasn’t it. Jeff could tell there was something a little more to be concerned about, whatever was in that bag seemed important.  She seemed to get her bearings as if trying to remember the exact spot she buried it. Then she took off with the subtly of the Apollo missions. 

Jeff considered another episode of Law and Order, but his hand had already removed the chain on his door, and he was hobbling across the street. 

He could still smell the exhaust from the woman’s battered red hatchback. What was left of the cartilage in his knees ached as he braved the short incline off the street into the ditch. Level ground was welcoming though slippery. He felt his shoes slide a little on the muddy grass beneath, and then he saw where she had dug.  There had been no effort to conceal it. The woman must not have thought anyone would venture off the street in this area. 

Jeff hadn’t owned a shovel in fifteen years but he wanted one now as his arthritis reminded him that he was no young pup. His digging days were over.  He kicked at the loose dirt instead, working his way until he felt something unearthly beneath the clumps of grass and mud.

His body popped.

A moan forced out of his stomach as he knelt and pulled the object out of the ground. 

The bag was purple and an imitation of velvet, like the kind liquor came in when pretending to be fancy. It had a drawstring that was pulled as tight as could be and then knotted to where Jeff Simms’ years of experience knew to get a pair of scissors rather than trying to pick it open. 

As he foraged through his kitchen cabinetry, he imagined what could be in the bag.

He hoped it wasn’t shit.

Jeff knew all about incontinence. He still couldn’t bring himself to wear the adult diapers his children kept sending him to ‘help out.’ 

People had so many medical problems these days. Jeff couldn’t assume a woman of her youth would not be forced to make an embarrassing roadside stop. And if that was the case then Jeff was the jerk for digging it up. But the bag hadn’t felt mushy aside from the obvious mud clinging to it. Instead, there were hard forms within. 

Jeff remembered not to run with the scissors once he found them in his junk drawer. His trembling hands were hazardous enough. He dropped the scissors as soon as he clipped the knot. He knew he was going to have to remember to pick them back up and put them back where they belonged. But the anticipation of the bag’s contents was too much.

The bag pursed open and with a soft shake Jeff watched the contents roll out onto his kitchen table. 

The sight registered in an instant, but Jeff did not gasp or sigh. He just stared, wondering if he was really that senile. He tried to imagine the story behind the woman in the car and the reason she stopped here just outside his home and buried such a thing.

He tried to remember life wasn’t like television, that there often times wasn’t any justice, and perhaps this woman had done the wrong thing to the right person and this was the last bit of evidence to link her to an unfair case in court system, which would not listen to the reasons.  

No, Jeff knew he was senile. These were not human bones. He was sure of that, for all he knew they were chicken bones that had begun to stink on the woman’s drive, and she just finally had to get rid of them.

But then why did she put them in a bag and bury them?

She could’ve tossed them anywhere. Every gas station has a trashcan. 

Occult sacrifice. 

No, pet. Just a pet. 

Jeff liked the simple idealism of his final thought. It was a dead pet  and she had another pet that kept digging up in the yard so this woman took what she could get and drove it miles and miles away and just picked a spot she knew her dog would not sniff out and dig up again.

Or it was her kid’s dead pet, and she didn’t want to deal with explaining death to a young child.

Jeff started to shovel the bones back into the bag when his knee popped. 

He shrieked as his arm swatted at the table for support. The bones scattered about the room and with a whine Jeff rolled on the floor. The pain was too much to bear. He hated taking the drugs the doctors gave him. It made his mind all fuzzy and just like that another day of his last days would whimper away without producing so much as a memory of what he had for breakfast. 

Jeff refused to go down that easy. He cursed the linoleum and used the counter to pull himself back to up to his feet, they felt numb and offered no support so he twisted himself into a chair at the table. His eyes fell on the table and spotted one of the few bones that had not been flung across the room.

He reached for it. 

Jeff stared back at the kitchen table. He was on the floor again, holding a different bone than the one he swore he had just picked up on the table. Only Jeff could see clear as day the bone he had grabbed remained on the table.  He tried to search his memory for a sign that he only imagined sitting down in the chair. 

But his memory was angry that he no longer trusted it. 

Dammit, I just sat down. I know it. 

Jeff dropped the bone in his hand and reached for a nearby doorknob to aid him. He stood up for less than a second before his knees buckled again. He landed face down on the linoleum floor. The smell of antiseptics still fresh from when he last cleaned it. He couldn’t remember that either. 

His mind felt like it had slipped a gear.

How could he be in the wrong place?

He knew he wasn’t on this side of the kitchen a second ago. He clutched the bone he had dropped and his mind flipped again. He felt nauseous, as suddenly he stared from the opposite side the kitchen. He was sure this time that he was holding a different bone and the one he had picked up by the door was still lying on the floor. 

Jeff laughed. 

He tried to toss one of the bones as far as he could, but it only landed in the middle of the street like some prepubescent girl had thrown it. He was grateful that all of his fellow Little Leaguers were not present or at least too dead or blind to have commented on his throw. 

Then Jeff walked back into his house, grabbed another bone and continued his laugh out in the middle of the street.

He’d read of this kind of thing in his science fiction magazines as a kid.

It was called teleportation.

And somehow the six bones could transfer Jeff from one to the next like playing connect-the-dots. And he knew their path worked like that of whatever structure the bones once formed. As he collected them, he found as long as he had all of them, he wouldn’t jump to the next and so soon he was laying them out on the table and from his frail memory he knew they had once formed a human finger. 

In all his years Jeff didn’t remember believing more in magic than he did just then.

Figures, that beautiful woman was a witch. 

But here he was with the answer to so many of his problems. He started small and taped one of the bones to the mailbox just outside his door. He practiced a few times and thought he might scare the postman one day just for a laugh.

The next of the bones he took to just outside the grocery store and placed it where he figured it wouldn’t be spotted in some badly hedged boxwood.  He was delighted to find that he would no longer need the bus, and that he could carry his grocery bags directly into his kitchen in the speed of a snapped finger. 

Convenient. 

He then addressed an envelope to his grandchild and mailed him a bone. 

“I got your letter grandpa,” His grandson, Will, said over the phone. 

“Do you have the bone?” 

“Yeah, that’s cool is it like a dog bone?” 

“No, it’s a wishbone! Go ahead and wish that I was there?”

Before the six-year-old could finish hesitating, Jeff was standing next to him. 

“How did you? Grandpa you’re being silly. You were hiding in the closet,” Will said. 

“Was I now? Did you check that closet?” 

“No.” 

“But you’re glad to see me?” 

“Yeah. Want to push me on the swings?” 

Jeff smiled and wondered if he could mail a bone to China so he could finally see The Great Wall. 

Jeff had every intention of becoming a globetrotter. But he never lost his priority of being a grandfather.  He visited little Will every chance he got.   

They had become the best of friends and Jeff’s daughter appreciated the time his watchful eye gave her to rest. Jeff felt like a million-bucks, or better yet, Grandpa-of-the-Decade! 

Then one day, much to his surprise, he did not arrive in Will’s bedroom. 

He arrived in a dark and dank and terrible place. Soda and beer cans and black trash bags swallowed his footing and he collapsed into a heap of trash.

The smell barreled him over until he wretched up his morning cereal. He fought to stand again and knew exactly where he had ended up. 

This can’t be happening!

Only it was—Jeff was stuck in a garbage truck. 

His daughter must’ve found the bone in Will’s room and thrown it out thinking it was simple garbage that the boy had collected.

Jeff was so angry he didn’t notice right away that he had lost the bone. It was somewhere in the trash heap. 

He fought through wet newspapers and packing materials and all kinds of slime. 

Then the air compressor hissed. 

“No!” Jeff cried, as he could hear the gears starting to churn. He would be crushed alive.  

“Help I’m trapped in here!” he screamed. “Somebody help! I’m in here!” 

He dove through the garbage, hoping in the darkness that his hands might stumble upon the bone. He tore apart bag after bag, unleashing the foulest of stenches. 

“Stop! Please!” He hoped the garbage men could hear him, but the truck was already growling forward. Jeff was tossed into the compacting mess. He could feel the pressure of the trash as it snapped the bones in his ankles, and his brittle old shins soon followed. 

Please God help me, please! 

He screamed and dug. He begged that it be a quick death if he couldn’t find that stupid bone. He could feel his heart sputtering—it wasn’t made for this.  

He was going to die.  

He just needed to accept that, but he couldn’t. He dug until the familiar shape appeared in his hand. It was too dark to know for sure, but he didn’t have time to worry about that.  

He squeezed as hard as he could. 

Will jumped over a headstone. “Did you see that, Mommy?” 

“Will, be respectful this is a cemetery.” 

Will didn’t know what that had to do with anything. He jumped another one and this time his mother yanked him by the arm back off the grass.  She almost lost the bouquet of flowers she was carrying. 

“Don’t do that. You will make people mad!” 

“But nobody sees me. Nobody here is alive anymore, Mom. And I know these places aren’t haunted. I’m not six anymore. I’m seven, duh.” 

“Oh really?” 

Will nodded with pride. He wasn’t afraid of anything. 

“Do not jump on people’s graves.” 

Will nodded and his mother tugged him back towards another grave.  

“Hi, Grandpa!” Will screamed. 

“Please,” his mother corrected him, “show some respect.” 

“Ah mom, but dead people can’t hear. They’re so old they can’t hear. You’ve got to yell way louder than I did. Just like with grandpa.” 

“He’s right,” Jeff said looking at his daughter and grandson. 

“How’d you beat us? I thought you hadn’t left your house yet?” 

Jeff smiled and rolled forward in his wheelchair. He’d never shared his secret with his daughter, even after the incident with the trash compactor. No, from now on Jeff decided it was best to keep the bones out of places where other people might move them. 

“How are you doing?” his daughter asked. 

“Well, the wheelchair is different, but I’m getting around. Maybe a bit better than before.” 

His daughter bent down and kissed his forehead. “You aren’t a young man. You can’t go jumping around anymore. Mom would’ve chewed your ear off if she could.” She set the flowers in a vase in front of her mother’s grave. 

“Oh really?” Jeff smirked. “Well, I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” 

His daughter looked at him, completely dumfounded, and then he laughed.  

“Forget about it, all’s well that ends well.” 

THE END.

(C) Copyright 2022 Dan Jire