A pit of bones
Some flash fiction
UPDATE 12/30/21: I’ve decided to make both my books (Ophelia, Alive and Murder-Bears, Moonshine, and Mayhem) permanently available for free to everyone who signs up for my Substack. Click the link below to start reading both immediately:
You want to know why I’m so late. Why it took me so long to get back.
I’ll tell you, but I already know what you’re going to say. (It’s dark now, isn’t it? I hadn’t noticed.)
Back when the sun was still high in the sky — it was noon, I guess, right? But was that today? Is it still today? (I guess it must be.) Back around noon, then, when we were both out on the slopes and you said you were heading back to the lodge but I told you I wanted to try the one slope we hadn’t tried (so many black diamonds that scared you away)—remember? So you left and I tried the new slope, and at some point my skis slipped out from under me and I tumbled headlong into a pit of bones.
(I know that sounds strange. But that’s what it was.)
I didn’t know they were bones, not at first. They looked like tree trunks and felt like stones. Cold and burning and broken, like my leg, tearing through flesh and the ground, and scraping the clouds with their marrow.
(The sky was spinning and my leg was on fire.)
And I knew that I wouldn’t be climbing out, wouldn’t be walking away. That my shattered bones, like the ones I lay upon, would soon return like pebbles to the ground. I shook my gloved fist, wrapped in bright polyester, at the sky, and I tore off my gloves (because, what was the point?) and watched my hands turn blue in the snow decaying into mud.
And I cursed at the bones.
Then the ground and its bones—ribs, femurs, and skulls—caught the sun, and that was the moment I knew, now for sure, that I hadn’t been lying on rocks or on trees, but on things that had once been alive. On something more real than myself. Still, I screamed at the ground, till my voice became hoarse and my eyes stung with tears, and the ground and the bones grew muscle and sinew and bone. The fever was true, and I saw then that rocks are never mere rocks, and that all things are done standing on the bones of the dead, and sometimes the bones of the gods.
(Just the right hole in time, and the Things That Are Real spill into our world.)
And the god pulled me out of the cleft in his cavernous ribs, brushed the mud from my hands and my face, touched my leg with a fiery finger. His lips burned like the sun, and he set me back down on the trail.
And later I found myself walking back toward the lodge. And so, here I am.
(What?)
Oh—right. I did say my leg was broken.
I remember now. It was.
And now it isn’t. (But …)
But I’m not telling you this story because I think it makes sense.
I’m telling it to you because it happened.
I’m telling you this story because it is true.
Stuff I’ve been enjoying lately
When I started watching Love, Death, and Robots last year, it was possibly the most disorienting experience I’ve ever had watching a show, which is entirely Netflix’s fault. The previews they showed me were about a trio of wisecracking robots wandering around a post-human apocalypse. I watched the first episode, and it made me laugh. Those wacky robots! I couldn’t wait to see their next adventure, so I let episode two play as well.
Wait, why was this episode about gritty, realistically-drawn space marines grunting and sneering at each other on the bridge of a spaceship? Oh man, it was going to be so hilarious when these gritty, serious space marines made it back to earth and met up with these wacky robots!
But then … they never did.
Anyway, the short version of this story is that I was three episodes deep before I realized I was watching an anthology series. Which … the whole thing wasn’t my smartest moment, I confess.
Turns out that Love, Death, and Robots is what eventually came of the many aborted attempts to revive the Heavy Metal movie franchise a decade or two ago. Heavy Metal, if you’ll recall, was basically what what would happen if a 1980s teen boy’s id was allowed to make an animated anthology film. It was a cult hit, and it eventually received a (pretty much universally reviled, from what I can tell) sequel, Heavy Metal 2000, in (wait for it) 2000. But that was it.
Around 2010, there were murmurings of a “reboot,” or whatever, and there were a lot of famous names attached (David Fincher, Tim Miller, James Cameron, Jack Black), but nothing ever came of it; at some point, though, the whole thing morphed into a Netflix series called Love, Death, and Robots.
This was for the best, since Heavy Metal was kind of dumb. Love, Death, and Robots is a much smarter series — one that understands that being “adult” means being thought-provoking and empathetic, as opposed to featuring lots-of-animated-gore-and-nudity-’cause-we-can. There’s a bit of that, particularly in the first season, but it gives way pretty quickly to meditations on death, morality, and what it means to be human in an incomprehensible universe — along with some stunningly beautiful animation. If Heavy Metal was a 1970s underground comic come to life, Love, Death, and Robots feels more like watching short stories from the golden age of weird fiction, and it’s all the better for it.
Anyway, the second season just dropped, and while it’s only half as long as the first, it’s much stronger — almost entirely gone is the gratuitous teen boy stuff, and in its place is some very solid science fiction and horror. It’s well worth a look.
Me, elsewhere
I wrote a thing on the self-esteem movement for my column at Christ and Pop Culture, and I thought is was one of the better things I’ve written in a while, but it didn’t get much traction, so go give it some, please and thanks.
Writing for Grunge occasionally requires me to write things that are a bit outside of my comfort zone. I’m far from a hip hop expert, but yesterday, I had to write a piece on Migos’s new album. I think I acquitted myself pretty well. If you want to read something I was a little more comfortable writing, here’s a piece about Herod the Great’s wives, and here’s something about the time Paul Revere dug through a pile of corpses to find a walrus tooth.
Part of the reason I just published “A Pit of Bones” here is because multiple people have asked me when I’m going to get back to dark fiction. I don’t know! I’ve got a novel I’m trying to find a home for (¯\_(ツ)_/¯), but in the meantime, you can read my first novel, Ophelia, Alive. It’s free if you have Kindle Unlimited. Also, did you ever check out that pirate ghost story I cowrote with K.B. Hoyle?
Just a reminder that my nonfiction debut — which a librarian in Kentucky described as “the Bible … being explained to me by a teenage boy” — is still available wherever mediocre-to-okay books are sold.