—ON ANY GIVEN WEDNESDAY, YOU CAN PAINT WITH CHARCOAL

 

Ossuary

She spends mornings looking into empty mirrors, numbering her bones, tinkering with their arrangement. She has no need for skin or anyone’s false prophecy because time is a too-tight tunnel now and she’s been claustrophobic since birth. 

She remembers her mother gleamed once, on prom night, saying, Why, just look at you!

Now, two years on, her mother says, Just look at you, and pushes through a fence of broken smoke, leaving the girl crumpled like a stack of twigs, a kettle drum smoldering in an alley littered with spent needles, all that ripe damage pleading, all those unclaimed skeletons chanting in unison.