Bone Dust

I count my ribs every morning before school. I do this lying in bed, after I snooze my alarm. Nine minutes of counting. I start from the top, on my right side, and go down. Then I move from the bottom of my left side back up again. I knead at my bones with my fingers. It is best to do the count in the morning – your ribs are most prominent then. I keep thinking I’ll get a different number one day, that my insides will have shifted in the night, but that never happens.

My mom taught me to do the counting. She says a young lady should be able to feel all 24 of them, but I can’t. That’s okay, though. I don’t care about being thin. I count my ribs because I want to become them. I want to be hardened and calcified with no soft parts left. The counting helps me remember that there are rigid things inside me. Things that don’t bend.

Every morning I feel and count and count and feel. Then, after I get up and brush my teeth, I go downstairs and count my other bones, the ones not attached to me. My collection is in the basement where mom doesn’t go because the unfinished walls make her depressed. There lies my work-in-progress, my masterpiece. My bones are there, in varying stages of preparation and assembly. I found them all in the woods, I think some may even be human. I’m like a truffle pig when it comes to bones – I always know where they’ll be. I have 24 rib bones now, from various creatures, and I’ve made a stand for them so they can be lined up in two rows, kind of like a real rib cage. I’m going to make music. I’ve never made anything beautiful before, but this will be.

At first, I was making it for my mother. She’s only happy when she’s singing, her mood crescendoing with the high notes. I wanted to be her accompaniment. But she doesn’t sing at all anymore – just shuts herself in her room listening to old Broadway recordings. She’s too soft for the bones, she doesn’t deserve them. But I’ve found someone who does: Oliver. He’s in my math class. When I see him, I don’t care about counting myself anymore. I want to count him – his freckles, his teeth, his strands of hair. I want to categorize everything about him, to classify every noise that comes out of his mouth. I’m making him something beautiful, an offering. He’ll understand – he’s hard-core like that. I work on the instrument every day. It’s nearly finished.

This morning was the same as always. I counted myself, got ready, and took the bus to school. Math was my first period. I got to the classroom early and waited for Oliver to walk in. He arrived, just a few seconds before the bell, with his dark clothes, calloused hands, eyes on the floor. I wanted to pull his collar bone out of his chest and gnaw on it.

Ms. M said many of us were doing poorly on our quizzes, so she was assigning “homework partners” to help us stay on track. My bones rattled when she read off my name. I was with Oliver.

When the bell released us, he waited for me in the hallway.

“I guess we should meet,” he said. “To work out the problems.”

I swallowed. “Would you like to come to my house? On Thursday after school? No one will bother us.”

“Sure,” he said.

We exchanged phone numbers. That afternoon, I rushed home from the bus stop. I had work to do to get the instrument ready for Thursday. Several of the bones still needed to be cleaned, bleached, and attached to the stand. This was delicate work. They needed to be perfect – pristine and undamaged, and with good tonal quality.

Most people think love requires softness, that it means getting at the gooey center of yourself and scooping it out to plop into your partner’s lap. But not with Oliver. He’s calloused, like me. I can see it in his movements. Our affection for each other will be metallic and precise.

Oliver showed up on-time for our study session. I loved that about him. I invited him in and we started working through the homework problems. Then he took my hand and held it. I had never held hands with a boy before. It felt like bird song.

“Let’s go to the basement,” I said.

I led him downstairs. The instrument was in view, waiting for him.

He walked up to it, his hand still in mine. I was trembling.

“Bones?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you make this?”

“Yes.”

He cocked his head, still staring. “Like a xylophone?”

“More or less.”

He met my eyes. “That’s badass.”

I knew he’d understand. I handed him a percussion mallet from a set I’d liberated from the local music supply store. I took the other for myself, and turned towards my creation.

We began to play.

Kara Crawford is an MFA candidate at George Mason University. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Blind Corner Literary Magazine, Dark Fire Fiction, and Abandon Journal. You can follow her on Twitter @kara_sweaters