Dusty Bones

A rickety worn shack swayed ominously as a malicious wind tore after it. A fevered cry from the weathered boards fell upon an old man’s ears. He paid it no mind however and continued to stare forlornly out the shattered panes into the ocean’s depths below. An internal battle raged through his mind as a lone candle flickered threateningly. “All alone… everyone’s gone… my fault.” His tattered memory danced across his lips as his ghosts relentlessly tormented him. One peering inside the shack may mistake him as a lone ghost himself, for his pale and frail bones looked skeletonized from his fever crazed state. He stands at this fractured window and stares at the sea, haunted always haunted.

His wife, a bronze figure full of light and the prized joy of his life, lay at the base of that same cliff upon which his home still stands- forever still. Her bones will grace those craggy salt hued rocks for many years to come and our hollowed ghost of a man is to blame. “I did what I had to- she had it coming…” His ramblings start to become more than simple mutterings as if his guilt is rearing its ugly head. He moves to start pacing and from the weathered groves worn into worn paths, it’s safe to surmise this is not the first of his fits. “She fell- no one pushed her. Of course no one saw it happen either. I said what I had to!” His fits clench as his brain falls deeper and deeper into his past as murky as the report on his wife’s death.

“What do you want me to say?” Angry shouting from our poor doomed soul has finally alerted the neighbors who share the cliff overhanging the cold depths below. An image strikes our elder man as surely as any blow. Her face with shiny auburn hair submerged within inky depths, forever cold, forever unseeing. Her smile will never again brighten the world. There is no doubt this husk of a man feels some haughty guilt or remorse over her demise and has been unable to let it go. His home, however beautiful it once might have been, now is reduced to nothing but a rickety shack. One day this shack will join his wife in the deep depths below-our final ghost with it.

Mrs. Fritz from a house over has been roused by all of the shouting and fearing ruffians have taken up residence within that creaky shack, has decided to call the police to investigate. When they get there however, the yelling has ceased. Upon closer inspection, they find the shack empty-except for the kitchen. There, they find the remains of the old widowed husband’s bones. Bones as white as his soul. Marked with dust and age they sit in a wooden chair facing the sea as if waiting for his wife to return to him. A freshly extinguished candle resides next to him, as if to accompany his solitude. The smoke drifts upward in lazy dizzying circles, as if they too drift boundless forevermore.