Weakness of Bones
This is a short short story that I finished last night. Mostly it is an exercise in narrative voice, images and symbolism.
Weakness of Bones
Dan sat in his well built home with so many strangers grouped like clouds. Like clouds they swept through the many rooms and dropped their multiplying drips of “sorry for your loss” and “in a better place” upon his condolence drenched family. It was an emotional flood not unlike any other. Storms of this sort easily issue forth when the backbone of a community dies. Dan’s eyes scanned over the closely crowding groups who spoke in low tones and displayed all means of warmth and consideration, and he felt a sense of impending disaster. It was terribly common for him to feel this way, having recently witnessed a death, although there was no indication that any harm should befall him. Stalking the edges of his mind and pawing at their frozen prey, were all the future woes that surely waited to pounce upon him. Dan contemplated thus, to spite the warmth of being home among so many, of winter, of nakedness, of loss of limb, of financial ruin, of dreams unattained, of love frustrated.
Often someone, supposing he was strongly affected by the near death, would step close to him and unfold a pleasing anecdote concerning the deceased in hopes of easing his mind and reminding him that what has been given over to memory cannot be taken back by death. They proudly gave such sentiments ignoring the certain maxim “time takes all”. The older guests were, of course, the more frequent to approach him. They had more to gain from downplaying loss and insisting that time had bounds it could not cross. But, mainly, they resented seeing one so young who could feign the sadness that takes many years, and many wounds laid one upon another, to accrue. Dan, with the multitude of worries upon his mind, feigned an old soul’s sadness very well; consequently, the elder members congregated around him, regaling him with a concert of stories, each hitting their unique note in the humorous, touching collective anecdote that they fondly remembered to him. Still, Dan only heard as from another room and through a wall. His subconscious drummed his conscious with waking nightmares too percussive to be ignored. His thoughts, therefore, were, for the most part, in rhythm with worry rather than grief. However, it would not be true to say that Dan was unaffected by his loss, and the chorus of retold stories did reach him on some level. Somewhere a son mourned.
He had been shocked to see the liveliness pop out of his father who had been so particularly alive. Though never a trailblazer in any sense, there had been something revolutionary in him. Dan would remember him in his own way, after the heavy clouds of mourners had dispersed from the house, by contemplatively composing the few lines:
His Religion was
With Warm Bread
Beneath White Napkins
Though the old men and women would never read it, he captured something of his father in this one utterance that they had not expressed in their earlier copious attempts. He penned the beauty of the life of his father. His father had seen, lived, and breathed the warmth and sustenance of Christ underneath the veiled lives of others. He had perceived the body under the placid exterior, waiting to be broken anew, life beneath the pall, the marriage of pain to freedom, brokenness to wholeness.
Yet in writing the lines Dan was once again confronted by thoughts of his own doom. What grew to dominate his mind was the smallest of words, the regretful, undeniable “was”. The smallness of that single “was” rumbled somewhere deep inside of him, contending with his own diminished “am”. He felt the past tense crowd in upon him, looking greedily to claim him. Over the next few days he felt the nearness of some unknown death-dealing misfortune. He kept inside his upstairs room but could not feel safe. A myriad of inevitable statements were falling in his mind. “Dan was. Dan had. Dan felt. Dan loved.” Finally, the cold “Dan died” snowed him in for hours, and, smothered, he wrote:
The teeth of time have chewed their last.
I am soon swallowed, and soon past.
But upon writing this couplet, Dan’s weariness reached an unsustainable point. He repeated the lines in his head, and the flippant sound of them broke upon his mind. He repeated the lines again. He inflected different words. He began to laugh at how frivolous and light the weighted words actually sounded. He thought of “London Bridges Falling Down” and “Ring Around the Rosey”. He thought of children singing them for their tunes and escaping their darker meanings, and he began to sing his own two lines. He consciously embraced the mind of a child, a mindset those older mourners would surely have appreciated as being more age appropriate. He smiled to think of how, in thought, a child always “is” and not “will be” and never “was”. He formed a joyful notion of himself as such a child. His “AM” grew tremendously. The joy he felt is hard to express, but it can be understood by anyone who has been shaded by sadness long enough to be blinded by the break of light upon the soul.
A more insightful description of his joy would be provided here had Dan only written something of it. He didn’t. He was in the foment of life, and didn’t want to write a word about it. He felt no need to pin it down. He let it soar from mind to body. In fact, he all but burst forth from his room and began to head down the stairs having not fully formed a notion of what exactly he was headed to do. He was only thinking, “I AM running down the stairs!”, though this thought did not last long. Regretfully, he missed a step somewhere near the top and was later found somewhere near the bottom, his neck broken. Those who knew him never discovered the joy of his final moments. His last couplet, which was discovered the following day, was thought to be the product of his ultimate state of mind. At his funeral the old men and women sadly drizzled among themselves, “He was inconsolable, I don’t doubt that it was suicide. It’s a shame. He would have been a good man like his father.” The fatalistic last couplet was chiseled upon his headstone, and it was never recognized that before Dan died, Dan ran, that a lightning bolt had struck in him, and if not for the weakness of bones, his message would have been life.