Bathing the Bones
by Christopher Conlon

from Thundershowers at Dusk: Gothic Stories
Copyright © 2006 by Christopher Conlon

     The woman discovered the graveyard one afternoon while planting zinnias, planting carnations and roses, this graveyard she had never known of before. This happened: her trowel knocked against wood, hard-angled, a corner of wood. Digging around it, she found a small oblong box, about a foot long, perhaps six inches wide. She brushed it off and saw that tiny nails had been driven in all around its edges to seal it. The wood itself was softened, partly disintegrating; using a screwdriver, she pried up the top, splintering it as she went along, and looked inside. It was hard to tell what might once have been there. Despite the obvious trouble someone had gone to in constructing the box, the elements had seeped into its interior and there was mud, bits of root, even a worm. And yet within this mixture there was something else, something identifiable: tiny bones, bits of bone. She picked them up one at a time–they did not touch her skin, she had on her gardening gloves–and studied them. Part of a very small skull. Broken pieces of what must have been wings. A bird.

     This was strange. She had lived in the house her entire life, over forty years; yet she had no memory of ever burying a bird here. Had they ever owned a bird? A songbird, a parakeet, a canary? Could it have been a wild bird that showed up on their porch injured, sick, dying?

     Sealing the box again–nailing it together as best she could–she continued digging in this back patch of loamy earth and soon came across another box, this one rather larger, but of the same general type. Overcome with curiosity, she pried open this box as well. This one had been sealed somewhat better; the inside was covered in a foully-odored black fungus, but was otherwise intact. Though they had partly turned to dust, she immediately recognized the remaining bones therein as being those of a cat.

     She was sure that they had never–no, never owned a cat.

Could these graves predate her parents’ ownership of the house? she wondered. But that would be over four decades–well over four decades, more like five. Could the bones have endured under the earth so well for half a century? Wouldn’t they just have become dust, powder, nothing?

     Could someone else have placed them here?

     Who? Why?

     It was true that she remembered little of her childhood but she knew she would remember a bird or a cat. No, her parents would never have allowed pets. And though they had been dead a very long time, their habits had grown within her as firmly and irretrievably as a root system. She had never had a pet, never even considered having one. She lived alone.

     She nailed shut the box of cat bones and, with growing trepidation now, made tentative probes of the earth with her trowel. For minutes she found nothing, and her confidence began to grow that she had come to the end of this strange pet graveyard. There seemed to be nothing else. Her mind turned to her zinnias again. Later, she thought, she would dispose of the two boxes. She would not leave them here, certainly, in her flower bed.

     Then her trowel hit wood a third time.

     She felt herself quivering, though there was no reason to be afraid. She dug carefully around this box, which was considerably larger than the other two. Her hands shook as she scraped away with the trowel and then finally with her hands, scooping out great mounds of dirt.

     This was a much larger box.

     This box was some two feet long, perhaps eighteen inches wide.

     She found herself breathing heavily, almost uncontrollably, as if she were in labor.

     She pried the nails from the top of the box and put the lid carefully aside.

     The contents of this box were the best-preserved of all. No mud or earth, no fungus. The box was lined with what appeared to be cotton bed sheets, folded to fit and stapled to the wood.

     The bones were those of a human infant.

     They were completely intact. There was no hint of flesh on the bones.

As she looked at the bones she noticed that, though they were in perfect condition, they were not clean. Dust covered them, a fine layer of dust, rendering what should have been a pristine whiteness instead a dull brown-gray.

     She sat staring at the bones for a long time, noticing vaguely that dusk was dropping all around her, the sky turning slowly dark.

     At last she resolved to wash the bones.

     She lifted them carefully from the box, realizing with surprise just how small they were. She could carry them easily enough cupped in her palms. The tiny feet and legs were on the bottom, then the arms, the spine, all the bones. The tiny head on top, hardly bigger than the bird’s head of the first box. So small, so unbelievably tiny, so…

     She washed the bones at the backyard spigot as darkness enveloped her. After some time she took off her gloves so that she could feel each bone, feel it against the skin of her fingers, rub it gently clean of the dirt of the world. At some point she knew, or realized, or came to believe that these were the bones of a baby girl.

     She spent a very long time bathing the bones and by the time she was finished it was late.

     At last she stepped through the screen door into the house, bones in her hands.

     She placed the bones on the table and made herself a cup of tea. She sat drinking the tea and staring at the bones for much of the night. The bones were there. They had come from somewhere. And yet she knew it had nothing to do with her because she would remember.

     She took the bones to bed with her. She made no attempt to assemble them in human form; she simply arranged them in a bundle under the sheets and slept that night with her arms cradled around them, pressing them to her belly.

     She took to carrying the bones with her from day to day, concealed in a large knapsack she habitually used. She bundled the bones in a felt bag and placed the bag within the knapsack. Sometimes she would stop in the middle of the street and take the knapsack from her back, reach in, untie the string that held the felt bag closed, and feel the bones with her fingers. Just to reassure herself. Just to let herself know that they were there.

     This went on for years.

     She had long since replaced the bird and the cat in the earth, along with the empty box that had contained the baby girl. She could never dispose of any of it. Neither could she create a flower garden over them: the flowers, in fact, rotted and died, unplanted, forgotten. Eventually she threw away their remains.

     She was rarely seen outside the house anymore. She slept with the bones at night and in the morning she placed them in the felt bag and carried them wherever she went.

     She had little need of money. Her wants were simple enough. She would walk to the grocery store once a week, buy eggs, milk, cheese, fruit. No one knew her. Her neighbors thought her pleasant, eccentric, harmless.

     She would have lived out her life like this except that one day a young man tried to rob her.

     It happened with astonishing suddenness. Footsteps rushed up behind her and there was a tremendous impact as someone grabbed at her knapsack, simultaneously knocking her aside with his shoulder, and she was on the ground before she knew what had occurred. She looked up then, dazed from the blow, to see the young man in his leather jacket and jeans lose his footing and seem to stumble forward, desperately trying to regain his balance, before his legs sprawled clumsily apart and he crashed to the pavement, the contents of the knapsack spilling into the street. People’s heads were turning, arms raising, voices shouting Hey! Stop him! Stop that guy! as he scrambled up and, leaving his stolen goods behind, disappeared between buildings and was gone.

     Faces swam before her, came to her aid. Are you all right, lady? Are you hurt? You okay? She shook her head, stood, tried to smile. She was dizzy for a moment but it passed. She was all right, she told them, she was fine, she was quite all right.

     The people pointed out that her goods were there in the street, that the thief had left them where he had fallen. Let’s help her pick ’em up, she heard a strong male voice say, and she moved slowly into the street where three or four people were collecting her lipstick, her checkbook, her hairbrush, her credit cards, and handing them to her. She did not see, did not see until it was too late, that the felt bag was exposed, had fallen open, that its contents were partly in the middle of the street, and that a little girl was holding up the small skull, cracked now into two separate pieces, holding up the pieces in her two small hands and saying What’s this? What’s this? as the people gathered around the girl and the bag and then looked back toward the woman with their eyes filled with wonder, with terror, and she said, quietly, but loudly enough for them all to hear, she said, No, there’s been a mistake, I would know, she’s someone else, anyone else, she’s not my daughter!