Sympathy for the Bones
MARJORIE M. LIU
Marjorie M. Liu is an attorney and a New York Times bestselling author of paranormal romances and urban fantasy. She also writes for Marvel Comics. For more information, please visit her website at www.marjoriemliu.com or follow her on Twitter @marjoriemliu.
The funeral was in a bad place, but Martha Bromes never did much care about such things, and so she put her husband into a hole at Cutter’s, and we as her family had to march up the long stone track into the hills to find the damn spot, because the only decent bits of earth in all that place were far deep in the forest, high into the darkness. Rock, everywhere else, and cairns were no good for the dead. The animals were too smart. Might find a piece of human flesh in the yard by the pump with sloppiness like that. I’d seen it myself, years past. No good at all.
The leaves had gone yellow and the air bit cold, whining shrill like the brats left behind the dead, trudging slow beside their weeping mother. Little turds, little nothings. Just blood and bone, passed on from a father who was a cutter, a stone lover, mixing his juice inside a womb that was cold and sly. I did not like Martha. I did not like her husband, either. Edward Bromes was a hard man to enjoy, in any fashion. I cried no tears that he died.
Later that night, I burned the doll that killed him.
—
Next morning, frost; first kiss of winter. I added layers of wool, and laced my feet and legs into boots lined with rabbit; gathered my satchels, took up a tin can I hung from the hook at my belt, and marched from the rotten timber shack into a silver forest, glittering, spiked with light and a chill.
Persimmons had fallen overnight and the deer had not got to them. Quick business, but careful; those thin orange skins split open at the hint of a tense finger, and I ruined more than I cared to admit. Popped them in my mouth to hide the evidence. Spit out the seeds into my palm, and tucked them into the satchel where I kept the needle and thread. The rest, what was perfect and frostbit, I carried in the can for old Ruth.
She was knitting when I came upon her, sitting on her slanting porch as though the cold was nothing to withered flesh. Crooked broken teeth, crooked smile that might have been pretty but for the long scar pulling her bottom lip.
“Clora, you brought me sweets,” she cooed, setting aside her yarn. “Enough for pudding?”
I placed the tin can into her hands, which were scarred with needle pricks. “Not yet. Maybe tomorrow.”
She caught my wrist before I could pull away. “And the ashes?”
I knew better than to hesitate. No good to pretend I was happy, either. Obedience was enough. Obedience was the same as falling on knees, like the Sunday regulars the preacher took down to the river to pray at the cross and handle the Lucifer snake he kept in a pine box.
I dug into the satchel and pulled out a small packet of folded calico, sewn shut with my finest black thread stitches. Ruth’s smile widened, and she snatched it from my hand—holding it up to her nose and closing her eyes with pleasure.
“Good,” she said, finally. “Edward had it coming for what he did to you.”
I grunted, walking past Ruth into the cabin, unable to look into her eyes.
“Clean your needles,” Ruth called after me. “Time for lessons, Clora.”
I lit the fire, and while the flames leapt and scrambled within the stove, I relieved the burden of needle and thread: slender bone daggers punched with holes; and rough spools, collapsed with lichen-dyed browns and a rich burgundy soaked from sumac-bobs; thin as a strangler’s wire and finely made—by my own hands, hours spent at the fixing of such binding threads.
The needles still had blood on them. I sat down at the table, wet the bone with a dash of apple vinegar poured from a flask in my satchel, and scrubbed hard with the pad of my thumb. Skin to bone, trying to summon the proper devotion. I was still scrubbing, whispering, when Ruth limped into her home.
Her own needles gleamed white as snow, hung around her neck like a fan of quick fingers.
“Not saying their names right,” she said, leaning so close the great bulk of her breasts touched my back. “Need to show your kin the proper respect, Clora. All my teachings to no account, otherwise.”
And then her hand fell upon my hair, warm as the fire burning, sinking into my skull behind my eyes, and she said, “Try again tomorrow. Right now we got a poppet to make. Some Buck Creek girl set her eye on a cutter man from the quarry, and her mother wants him gone.”
I spread the needles over the table. “Maybe he loves her.”
Ruth snorted, and drew away. “Her mother brought a cutting of his hair.”
Nothing more needed saying.
—