Bones
The sink disposal spits up a chip of bone in Xander’s face. It grazes his cheek and lands on the counter. He doesn’t know how it got in the disposal in the first place. He hasn’t cooked meat in two years. He picks up the bone shard and squeezes it between his fingers. Perhaps if he can just crush it into dust, it will be like it was never there. But it’s smooth and solid, unyielding to the pressure he exerts. The disposal must have made terrible sounds, the blades screaming as they hacked through the calcium and collagen.
He’s vexed by this development: this skeleton shard doesn’t belong in his apartment. He cannot control the outside world; all he wants, then, is to exert control over his own space. So the bone chip is a wrinkle in the plan. He tapes it to his refrigerator so he can’t lose track of it. It’s almost the same color as the fridge itself: the bone blends right in to the dimpled, cream-colored surface.
After he secures the bone chip, there’s a knock—his groceries. He doesn’t open the door immediately, gives the delivery person enough time to set everything down and walk away, no chance for a conversation. The store sends him a weekly random assortment; they don’t take orders. This is how the stores comply with the fair food distribution laws. Xander hates that he can’t decide what they bring him.
This week, there are lots of cups of microwaveable mac and cheese. He puts them in front of the boxes of angel hair pasta he still hasn’t used. The rest of the bags are vegetables: broccoli, bok choy, Brussels sprouts. Cruciferous and crunchy. He’s learned lots of vegetarian recipes since meat was banned; he tries to master the most complicated ones because it makes him feel like he has power. It’s satisfying to dominate the greens, make them buckle to his prowess as he unlocks savory undertones and complex flavors.
He touches the bone chip again after the groceries are taken care of. What animal did the bone come from, and where in the body had it offered support for muscles and skin? Taped up, it’s thin, a barely discernible bump against the surface. He takes to touching it every time he opens the refrigerator over the next few days, a reminder of the foreign intrusion in his space.
Xander works from home, online freelance work. At the same time every day, he forces himself to take a walk in the park. Even though he doesn’t want to do it, he knows fresh air is good, and the park is big enough that he’s not likely to brush up against other trail trawlers. Poison oak lines the paths—it seems like a great idea, a natural way to deter people from traversing the wilder parts of nature, but it’s not as well-maintained as Xander would like. He wishes someone would prune every now and again. It’s nature, he knows that, but why be a human being if not to impose a bit of order on the world before you die?
A few days after the bone chip appears, Xander sees a rabbit at the edge of one of the paths. It is dead, but only freshly. Its eyes, wide open, are still intact. He throws a rock in the rabbit’s direction just to make sure—it doesn’t move. What could have killed a rabbit in this way, without disemboweling it? Perhaps it got frightened to death. Or got leporine cancer. Before he can craft a full story, a woman wearing a sweatshirt with the hood pulled over her face passes him. She crouches down, prods at the dead rabbit, then stuffs it in a bag.
“Howdy,” she says.
“Hi,” he says back, just to be polite.
“Shame about all these dead animals, huh?” she says, and laughs. She walks away.
Maybe it’s her job to go around the park and clean up the dead animals. That has to be someone’s job, probably the same person who has been neglecting trimming back the poison oak. Xander continues walking. He’s approaching the little clearing, a wide gravel-packed circle in the path where he always turns around. His walk has gone on long enough; he’s ready to go back to his apartment.
Two people are already standing in the clearing when he gets there—one of them is the woman in the hooded sweatshirt. She is holding out the bag with the rabbit inside. The man takes it. “And the poison will just cook out?” he says. After she nods, he gives her some money. “Is this the only meat you have?”
“I just set the pellets out a few days ago. Check back tomorrow,” she said.
Xander pivots on his heel as fast as he can and starts walking away. He wants to look over his shoulder but he’s afraid that someone will pull a gun and shoot him for being a witness to that meat transaction. Leaves rustle as he breaks into a jog—a sparrow hopping on the ground. How long before it, too, would fall down. How much poison would it take to stop its heart?
He locks the door as soon as he gets back, his heart pounding from the jog—he didn’t slow down the entire way back. The dead rabbit is burned into his brain. He’d never eaten rabbit before. Did it taste like beef? Chicken? How would it taste stuffed with potatoes? He imagined the deboning process, which makes him gag. He misses meat, but had always struggled to stomach the bones, having to prise the meat away from the skeleton, gooey sinew clinging in wet strings.
It’s going to be kohlrabi for dinner. Xander saw a recipe for how to cut and sauté it to make pretend scallops. The process is lengthy, involved: he can’t wait to devote himself to it, to transform the ingredients into something new. There’s roasting, cutting, a sauce, a puree. It will take at least two hours to cook. He hasn’t eaten a single vegetable plain in months: raw cucumbers are his favorite vegetable though he pickles them out of spite.
After he washes his hands to clean the outside world off himself, he reaches for the bone chip. But it’s not there. The piece of tape is stuck flat to the surface of the refrigerator, no bone shard in sight. In fact, the entire refrigerator is oddly smooth: no dimpling across the surface. It’s the same cream color it’s always been, but something has happened, Xander is certain. Did his landlord sneak in while he was gone to replace the refrigerator? The contents inside are the same, in the same positions they were before—alphabetized top to bottom for easy access. He runs his hands over the surface again. Flat, burnished.
Panic chokes him up, but he doesn’t stop to consider more possibilities. His day will not be further derailed. He gets all the ingredients he needs for his kohlrabi scallops, lays them out on his counter. The knife leaves grooves in the cutting board as he chops and minces and slices aggressively. He measures things out precisely, half-cups and quarter-teaspoons. The cutlery drawer rattles strangely when he opens it. He sorts through the silverware and finds it—a fork, the same smooth cream as the refrigerator. So light it almost flies out of his hand. It’s made of bone, he realizes. The refrigerator, too. He counts the forks, just to be sure someone hasn’t added one. But there are nine, same as always. Except that one of them has transformed.
The kohlrabi burns while he tears the kitchen apart to examine each cooking implement, every plastic leftover container, and make sure nothing else is bone. When he’s finished, he makes himself eat the burnt outsides of the vegetable, even though the charred bits crumble in his mouth and taste like ash.
Over the next few days, he sees more dead animals on his park walks. A woodchuck, fat body gone still. Several mice, paws drawn together as if in prayer. The coiled copper body of a snake. The woman in the hooded sweatshirt is probably making a fortune with all these dead creatures. Sometimes, the ants have found a body first, meat picked clean, bones exposed. Xander marvels at the delicate bowed segments of a squirrel’s ribcage, fascination and disgust rising up in equal measure. Once or twice, he thinks about smuggling an animal under his coat, cooking it up. But this would invite too much chaos into his life.
And he already had enough chaos. Every day he found something new had turned to bone: a hairbrush, the doorknob to his closet, the entire shower. At first, he obsesses over these changes; he loses an hour in the shower, rubbing his feet back and forth across a slippery tub floor that used to be made of grippy vinyl. But he can’t spend so much time focusing on this—it makes him feel like he’s going to leave his body.
One day when he returns from his walk, his hand hovers over the door handle. He finds he doesn’t want to go in. This is a new feeling, unexpected. He always wants to return home. From the porch, though, Xander can pretend there’s no boneification. This pleases him, so he stays outside, sitting against the door, until the sun goes down. His neighbor comes home from work.
“How you doing?” the neighbor says. “Haven’t seen you in a while. I thought about knocking on your door the other day to make sure you were alive.” He stands there, talking and talking and talking. Xander doesn’t even have to respond. Eventually, the neighbor goes inside. That rules out sitting on the porch—Xander doesn’t want to deal with interactions like that. How long would it be before the man got comfortable and started asking uncomfortable questions, trying to invite himself inside Xander’s space? It would not do.
When he does enter the apartment again, he discovers all his hangers are bone now, shirts stretched taut like skin across shoulder blades. The vegetarian cookbooks have also boneified, pages turned stiff and blank. Useless. Most of his cookware has already ossified, too, and none of it works the same way it did before. The pans don’t do well on the stovetop, turning brittle from the heat. When he cleans them, he feels like they will crack if he scrubs too hard. This is the strange thing about bone, Xander thinks. It is the structure, the order for the body, the thing that determines the shape of life. But it’s so fragile—too easy to destroy.
Xander makes himself mashed potatoes for dinner and accidentally snaps the head off one of his bone spoons trying to scoop a bite to his mouth. He gets angry then, the first time he’s let himself be upset, and smashes some of his pots and pans that have turned to bone. No problem; he can go back to eating all his vegetables raw. Breakfast: carrots. Lunch: celery and peanut butter. Dinner: cucumbers.
The day after his table and chairs have transformed, he sees the woman in the hooded sweatshirt at the park. “Do you want to buy some meat?” she says.
Xander is surprised by her brazenness—for all she knows, he could be an undercover cop. “What do you have for sale?” he says.
She opens her bag. “There’s a raccoon in here.”
“How much?” He haggles her down to fifty dollars. She pulls the raccoon from the bag. It’s larger than he expects. “That’s an awful lot of meat for one person.”
And just like that, the woman is in his apartment with him. He hadn’t meant to invite her, but there was something invigorating about the disruption. Like he’s lashing out at the apartment, at the bones that fill his space up. The raccoon is hard to skin since all his knives are bone, but he manages. It’s been so long since he’s prepared meat. So laborious.
“Your décor is really interesting,” the woman says. She runs her hand across several pieces of furniture that have turned to bone. Normally this unpermitted touching, this unwanted observation, would make Xander feel uncomfortable, but what does he care? “I didn’t know they made bookshelves out of ivory.”
“Bone, actually,” he says. He puts the meat in the only glass baking dish he has left, seasons it with some spices and fills the rest of the pan with arugula and lemon juice. The bones are still in the meat. He couldn’t handle the deboning. The smell of it cooking makes his mouth water. He and the woman wait in silence while the meat cooks—for this, he is grateful. Finally, it’s cooked long enough, and they eat it. Not particularly tasty, but still his stomach burns gratefully, his blood thumping through his body, rich with iron.
“Are you going to use the bones to make more forks?” the woman says.
“What?” says Xander.
“I just assumed you were the one making all the bone stuff. How many horses did you have to kill to make this table?” she says. “Exquisite craftsmanship.”
“Oh, I didn’t make any of this,” he says. He gathers up all the bones onto his plate.
“What are you going to do with them, then?”
“I need to get rid of them,” Xander says. “Do you have any tips?” He can’t just put the bones in his garbage. There have been stories of people getting busted after their garbage is searched.
“Well don’t throw them out before we’ve eaten the best part,” the woman says. She picks up one of the longer bones, cracks it open, and sucks out the marrow. “This was the thing that got me into the meat biz. I missed the flavor of marrow.”
Xander has never eaten marrow before, but he tries it. The raccoon bones are small and easy to fracture. He inhales the marrow greedily. It’s spongy and sweet and rich. The two of them make short work of the skeleton, leaving the table littered with tiny broken bones.
“Thank you for sharing it with me,” the woman says. “I usually don’t eat from my own supply.”
Xander clears the table, taking everything to the sink. “What’s the best animal from the park to eat?” Perhaps he’ll treat himself to illegal meat once a week. But the woman doesn’t answer. He turns around. She, too, has become bone, like a statue. He raps his knuckles against her arm—solid. What’s he supposed to do about this? He doesn’t know.
What he does know is that he needs to get rid of the evidence of the meat. Does he just soak the raccoon bones in bleach to keep as decoration? He could glue them together and make a little dollhouse, a miniature of his apartment. Instead, he soaks them in vinegar and bakes them again—they go soft and then extremely brittle.
He puts them in the sink disposal. The blades have no problem handling the bones after he’s weakened them. The machine whirs and swirls and shakes as the bones are destroyed. He lets the water run for a bit after. When he flicks the off switch, a tiny chip of bone flies out at him. But he’s prepared for this—maybe it’s foolish to say he knew it would happen, but certainly he isn’t surprised.
He catches it, squeezes it tight. What should he do with it? Obviously just keeping it is a mistake. He looks at the woman, turned to bone. So much of his apartment isn’t his anymore—how long will it take for the whole place to be made over in off-white? He wants to fight the boneification, but he doesn’t know how. Maybe it’s too much for him to handle. He sits at the table with the woman, bone chip in the palm of his hand. If he swallows this shard, will he turn to bone, too? But isn’t that a form of control, taking that risk?
He downs it like a pill and stares into the distance, waiting to feel himself ossify.
Jonathan Wlodarski is pursuing a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Rathalla Review, and Fairy Tale Review.