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There is no sinew here
No muscle, blood, marrow
Only the rock-hard, the forever remains
Elemental and solid
Death plants a select few, here, in this place, in the dust
these special few
He’s a collector, an admirer.
The things that once were people
are his things now:
The skull of a thinker whose words were never shared
The hands of a musician who never fingered a key
The hips of barren mothers
The sockets of blind visionaries
Death plants them here to see if they’ll grow
If they’ll do something, become something,
anything
But they never do, never have.
Death cuts lives, a thousand-times-a-thousand daily
Most are average
Most are sad
Some are tragic
A few are wonderful
A smaller few are fascinating,
passings that are so mistimed, the bone owner itself
could never understand its own tragedy
The laps of voiceless storytellers
The wrists of joyless chefs
Shoulders of selfish neighbors
Ribs of those who loved to laugh but wouldn’t
Spines of… so many
Death likes spines
Jagged, symmetrical, elegantly curved
The integral core of the human machine
Death runs his hands along his orchard of spines
Untaxed
Uninvested
Bones of so many who never did,
never tried
Death takes comfort in these bones
Knowing he is useful
Knowing he ends the great ones, as well as the waste,
knowing he is fair
Knowing he must only ever be Death, nothing more and nothing less
He is allowed this place, this orchard of bones, because he earned it
and will earn it
Watching the bones, seeing if they might grow
Though they have never have grown
Until
A twitch
Somewhere in the distance,
movement; something new
This place is still, so still, Death likes it that way
But something just moved
Death glides to the spot,
looks low
He kneels, inspects
His fleshless cheek touches the dust
He stares
at a hand
A nondescript hand
A basic human hand
Finger joints held together by…
He did not know
Hand components attached by
He had no idea
Yet the hand is there, planted separately as the rest
But somehow,
somehow assembled into something
Death stared at the hand for minutes,
hours,
days,
decades
Death did not move his cheek from the dust
His minions could manage the work,
this was important.
Because as time passed,
with the smallest whisper of effort,
the hand grew
the tiniest amount
Only visible to Death’s searching gaze
The hand grew:
upward, taller, bolder
Daily it grew
Hourly it grew
Second by second by second,
it became more than it ever had been.
Death sat up,
pleased.
He thought he knew everything about his job,
about the end of human life
But there are things even Death doesn’t know
Death turns his back on the hand, glides away,
“I’ll see you again”
The hand says nothing,
for that is the way of hands
the hand doesn’t speak, it simply does: grows, reaches, wants
Someday it will grasp, or it won’t, but it will never stop
for that is the way of hands
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AUTHOR BIO:
Jonathan Josephson’s published short fiction includes The Pain Critic (Danse Macabre), Jorge Hosts Chanukah (Paragon Press), The Monster is Confused (Zoetic Press/4LPH4NUM3R1C), and Dark Druids and Their Dark Jars (Masque and Spectacle). He is also an award-winning and internationally produced playwright with twenty-four of his plays being published by Concord Theatricals, YouthPLAYS, Smith & Kraus, and others. [jonathanjosephson.com]
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WHY WE CHOSE TO PUBLISH “Tall Grow the Bones”:
We don’t publish poetry. But author Jonthan Josephson’s flash piece “Tall Grow the Bones” is not a poem. It’s prose cast into a poem-like form. Indeed, punctuated and formatted differently, it would be seen clearly as not a poem.
We chose it because it’s a different, interesting, and strong piece of writing that challenges expectations of form. In fact, we didn’t think twice about accepting this because we saw it for what it was, not for what it appeared to be.