“I lost my bones in an accident,” he tells me. “Now I’m only of skin and flesh. Do you have any idea how impossible it has been to sit up?”
I mumble a non-committal answer as I put more muscle into the task in front of me: pushing a wheelbarrow brimming with human-shaped skin, flesh, and hair, on the dirt.
“No matter how much I try,” he continues, “I just sag back to the couch. It’s very frustrating, causing me to swallow my wife’s chief insult a bit harder.”
“What insult?” I ask, licking the sweat off my upper lip.
“She keeps telling me what a spineless man I am. But I have a solid plan. She’ll see.”
“Is that why we are in a graveyard in the dead of the night?”
“Yes, that’s why I hired you,” he says. “You’re going to help me fetch some bones.”
“I don’t think I can steal other peoples’ bones,” I reply.
“You’re a criminal. You killed people. This is where you draw the line?”
“Afraid so,” I say. “Also, I only killed bad people.”
“Bad is a subjective term,” he says, “and you don’t need to worry. This graveyard has my family plot in it. We’re only going to open the graves and take my ancestors’ bones. It’s hardly illegal. I inherited everything else, so what’s a few bones more?”
“I don’t like graves,” I say.
“Well, newsflash for you– the graves don’t fancy you either,” he says, irritably.
Upon arrival, he makes me dig up four different graves, each time carefully considering the skeletons of his ancient ancestors that lay stiff on the silk lining of their coffins. I clench my teeth to keep my composure and not to snap at him as he studies a fibula, a shoulder blade, or a set of phalanges taken from one ancestor under the strong light of a torch, then compares them to the ones taken from another. He’s not satisfied with any of them; he either discovers hairline fractures, wear and tear, rot, or rat droppings on them, or thinks they look too old, brittle, and yellowed.
Hours and hours later, he finally orders me to cover the graves with dirt. The dawn is breaking when I start pushing the wheelbarrow back, sweat dripping from my forehead down on a patch of naked skin in front of me, which, with a gun to my head, I’d guess is his nape.
“It’s okay,” he says, more to himself than me, “everything’s fine. I’ll come back again to look for more. They say the procedure of putting the bones you lack into your body is enormously painful, but I don’t mind.” His voice crackles. “Yes, I’ll return and create myself the perfect skeleton,” he says, proudly attempting to stick out his non-existent chest. Yet, the only thing he can do is hug/squeeze that one perfect femur, stolen from a great-uncle, between the flesh of his arms like a consolation prize.
