What Not To Tell A Skeleton

Chapter 11

Stella

A greenhouse where the glass was aged graphite; again the words “You are my world.” sung from their surface when I laid my hand upon it. Our sacred earth held together each pane of glass. An earth that grew flowers. That allowed the FlickerSpines to resurrect, the ghosts to rest and sight to ride our curses into the future.

Again the words sung. I wanted to sing along. To rejoice with my fingertips that my voice would return and that I would find my arm and that I could build anything with the same ease as I did before I died.

Nothing. I opened the door of this greenhouse; one that could fit as many stars as my mother’s schools fit pianos, and felt that I could be a star, too, if only she really did love me, if only the name Stella held meaning other than when the bees hummed over the hammering of my fingers on bone or when my mother held me after that first perfect play of my favorite song.

Another word as strange and mysterious as my own death.

Bone. Who would make a piano out of bone?

The greenhouse was empty. All worldly things, given back. Only flowers: sleeperwells, weedrepels, ghostbells, futuretells. A plot of earth, empty but for one futuretell that waited for eye to meet with eye.

Upon our rendezvous, the vision that visited me was a couple excited to arrive at home, one darkly skinned and the other albino, smiling and laughing and dancing as if the wrinkles on their faces and gray hairs on their heads weren’t their cells letting them know it’s almost time to be set free.

I heard the reason they hadn’t lost their youth: a baby next to me on the empty plot.

Is this where she sleeps? Where she eats and her father reads the girl stories when her mother isn’t looking, because he couldn’t stand his wife knowing that, for all these years, he didn’t have time for her because he was writing this baby a lifetime of stories for her to sleep to?

Would she hate her? Would she resent her own baby for almost ruining their relationship, or would she forgive him? He didn’t want to risk it.

Still, I saw no crib, no toys, no room with a soft floor for the child to learn to walk and fall without getting hurt.

And the vision ended.

I got to work. I hadn’t yet tried to build with only one arm, but I had to do it for them. I took the first few chunks of a building next to the plot hidden behind another, but realized that was where the books were kept. But she had to know.

This is not a secret to be kept. Chunk after chunk, I built planks of that material and attached them together until I had a frame fit for a princess. The design wasn’t extravagant. Though I knew little flowers couldn’t be imperfect.

I wanted this couple to think of her that way: perfect, impossible that she could do wrong.

I took dirt from that empty plot as a mattress and pillow and a piece of my shirt as a sheet for the baby.

Then I made her toys: dolls, cars if she preferred them, cups for her to drink from, a small oven for her to pretend to make food if the couple had produced a chef.

I didn’t have any of this growing up. She would.

And I heard the couple take steps towards me. A hand on my shoulder. I turned around.

The couple didn’t have lips.