MY SKELETON
I took my skeleton out of the closet.
It was sharp and knobby.
The knobbiness formed mountains and craters.
The craters were hollow, empty places.
This scared people.
The mountains were penetrating, jagged peaks.
This angered people.
I decided not to clothe my skeleton-from-the-closet.
There were too many scars.
The scars were peculiar for a skeleton.
They weren’t completely calcified.
They were red and they wept blood.
And people stared.
They were intrigued by my skeleton’s scars.
They wanted to mend them.
They renamed the bones of my skeleton according to their judgment of its scars.
The tibia was no longer the tibia.
The scapula was no longer the scapula.
The sternum was no longer the sternum.
But my skeleton didn’t conform to its new labels.
It didn’t want to stay in a healing cage.
It had known silence, and despised it.
It wanted noise.
So, my skeleton entered a church, pristine and painted.
There was a sacred reverence about my skeleton.
It had sorrow only God knew.
But it didn’t know how to genuflect.
It clattered and clanked and clanged.
My skeleton crashed into a rattling heap, shattering the pious peace of the chapel.
This disturbed people.
People started whispering about my skeleton-from-the-closet.
They didn’t like the stories it told.
The stories didn’t fit into pretty picture books.
They didn’t have happy endings and uplifting words.
They weren’t accompanied by Bible verses or trite prayers.
My skeleton’s stories were real and raw and riotous.
They had knifelike edges, which cut and were bloody.
This appalled people.
So, people dug a deep, dark pit in the graveyard of their church.
They hurled my scandalous skeleton-from-the-closet into the pit and erected a tombstone.
They liked the voiceless solemnity of the graveyard, the headstones.
They could commemorate the dead without hearing their screams.
But they had never been in the dirt, the darkness.
They hadn’t considered the smoldering flame.
The quiet can be quite dangerous when ignited.
My skeleton used to be imprisoned in my closet.
This calmed people.