The Rapture, Ch. 4: The Beauty of Bones

 ~~ 1st  D R A F T . . .  free write  ~~

11/10/17

The Beauty of Bones

She whips past the trees whipping past her and the dark the dark, the evergreen fronds the branches reaching upward into dark and, when it comes, the light, and she is not cognizant of it, but she loves the unchangingness of it, the natural and fully expected world, the trees that do not change color or shape or character. And while the dark may change to light, it comforts her now and the smell of damp earth as her feet slap against the packed path, bare, her skin, the earth, the air, the sky, her lungs pumping it all in like gasoline.

She rounds the corner, the outside of the wood, the one corner bounded by concrete: the curb for the square lines and defines lives to come. The wooded lot is gone and she is crossing over onto the street, coarse and level and rising up the hill to where a chain fence stands inviting those willing to believe: here lies sanctuary. She dashes up the hill, the well worn path is gone, in its place those places she must watch where her feet land, avoiding the spike of fallen nails and splattered wood, but she knows the way, up the hill, to the right, out of sight of the street lamp, round the back side of the houses in various stages of stages of stages . . . pound pound pound pound go her feet and her mind blank the way she wants it the way her lungs slam her air, head down, eyes not seeing not not not not; head shaking shaking, an animal pulling at its restraints, a boxer clearing his head, a sleepless driver seeing double lines on the road ahead thinking focus focus, wishing oblivion. Each night. This is how she runs. 

She hates running. Running is pain. She wants pain. Pain is oblivion. Pain reminds her to stay alive and, when the pain wears off, the pain that keeps her both numb and alive leads her into sleep, too exhausted to think or feel. Too exhausted. Too.

Walking now among the stick-built houses, the bare bones of some ancient reconstruction of extinct animal, some being that should lie allowed to slide into evolutional oblivion: family, that thing that no longer fit to exist on the corporeal plane. Let it slide off the flat earth. Let it live in old songs and ancient holiday rites and the memories of the aging units it fades into mythology. Let it die the death of asteroid dust. It has no right to be granted a temple. Houses. Why build houses? Let us go back to living on the land.

LoLo has a book. The story of a young girl, a girl haunted by the story of her family, the everyday of her family, the things they expect. The duties. The silences. The pretty clothes and candles and lace. The dinner table. The fairytale bedtime stories. The girl does the best she can. Get up. Brush the night out of your mouth. Eat. Go to school like a normal girl. Come home. Take care of the children. Take care of her uncle and Grandfather. Honor her parents. Do her work. Go to bed. Lie awake, lie awake; go to sleep and shock up awake; think the impossible: sleep. Other escapes. 

The girl meets a boy. You’d think this is where the story changes, but it’s not. The girl thought that, too. 

Things go along. Things stay the same. Things, things, things. The family goes from . . . goes from . . . goes . . . the girl goes. Through the neighbor streets she runs, through the city, the countryside, the trees, she makes her way. Shelter, fire, a little food. Fantasy. This was her escape to a place where she would have, would have . . . . It was more about what she wouldn’t have, and when she went without as much as a body could go without, she died, head lying against the lush emerald moss of a decaying log. The moisture between her legs running forth like a fertile delta. The wind shook her hair, her clothes; the rain, the sun, the snow, her skin, running together, slipping away; and her bones, her beautiful bones, picked clean, a banquet for the forest, between her bones nestled the moist green of moss, the kind of family she could have embraced, just as she embraced and sheltered the tiny bones that lay cradled between her legs.

It is worth saying that her whole life, Dolores — once she was grown, LoLo chose to go by her given name — deep into adulthood and beyond, Dolores loved this story, the child woman who ran until she nearly reached the sky, the child who escaped what would kill her. That she did not escape death was of no matter. All life ends in death. This was a true death, a worthy death, a death that all beings know; clean like the white of bare bone. 

Sitting on the unfinished floor of her favorite bare bones building holding her favorite book, he breathing back to normal, her body beginning to tremble with exhaustion, LoLo leaned her head into her hand and drew breath. The sky would be lighter soon. Her eye were heavy. Not tired but closing. She would have to go back. She would always have to go back.

She was twelve.

She was practical. She knew how the world worked.

She knew that dying a beautiful death happened like turning straw into gold: only in stories. There’d be no standing in triumph over her defiant bones.